Blood of Mehran Review

A grand setting, an unsteady blade

Blood of Mehran wants to be a Persian-mythology answer to Prince of Persia and Assassin's Creed: sweeping sand dunes, bustling bazaars, and sprawling palaces to explore through a mix of stealth, archery, and direct melee combat, wrapped around a story that leans into its historical setting rather than a generic fantasy backdrop. Developed by Permanent Way Game Co. and published by Blowfish Studios, it released on Steam on 7 October 2025 at a full NZ$35.99, and Steam's own news history leaves the date in no real doubt -- a Steam Next Fest demo ran back in October 2024, followed nearly a year later by a September 2025 release-date announcement and the actual launch just under three weeks after that, a genuine, traceable original release rather than a relabelled one.

The review sample -- 41 reviews at the time of writing, 31 of them positive, landing at Mostly Positive -- consistently agrees on where the game succeeds. Atmosphere and setting draw the most unprompted praise: one reviewer writes about being drawn in by "the atmosphere and the architecture of ancient Mesopotamia," and several others independently single out the game's original soundtrack as a highlight, one calling the music "beautiful" and another specifically crediting the developers for pairing "electronic and rock music" with Persian mythology and setting in a way that feels distinctive rather than generic. Story earns similarly consistent, if more qualified, praise -- one detailed review calls the intro "pretty decent," describing it as "cinematic" and well-paced at setting tone, even while that same review goes on to be one of the sample's more critical overall.

That's where the consensus starts to fracture, and it fractures around combat specifically. A cluster of reviewers describe the moment-to-moment fighting as clunky and unsatisfying -- one detailed negative review calls the combat system "hopeless," while a separate reviewer notes bluntly that "the fighting style needs to flow better," wishing explicitly for movement closer to Assassin's Creed's. A German-language review goes further, arguing the marketing comparisons to Assassin's Creed and to action-RPGs generally don't hold up in practice, describing what's actually shipped as "a nicely animated linear hack-and-slash" with limited storytelling depth or character development -- a specific, detailed dissent from reviewers who found more to like in the story. That combat criticism repeatedly pairs with a second, closely related complaint about animation and overall visual fidelity: several reviewers explicitly compare the game to action-adventures from 2010 or earlier rather than to its 2025 peers, with one writing plainly, "if you expect to get a 2025 game, you're not on the right page. This is more like a 2010 game, in terms of animations and combat" -- while still recommending it on the strength of its story and setting.

A separate, more serious cluster of complaints concerns technical performance. Multiple reviewers, writing in several different languages, report real problems at launch: one Korean-language review describes noticeable frame drops and momentary stutter even running an RTX 4080 and Core i7-13700K on mid-range settings with DLSS Performance enabled, while a French-language reviewer reports the game is "bugged to death," describing repeated crashes mid-session across "hundreds" of games in their library accumulated over years, calling it the buggiest they've encountered. A Russian-language reviewer goes further still, describing the shipped game's visuals as noticeably worse than what trailers and store-page screenshots promised -- a specific marketing-versus-reality complaint echoed, in substance, by the English-language reviewers criticising dated animation against a full-price launch. Enemy AI draws its own specific complaint too: one English-language reviewer reports that groups of enemies behave inconsistently in fights, sometimes watching passively while a single foe is killed one-on-one and other times swarming as a full group, explicitly suggesting the behaviour "might be a bug" rather than intentional difficulty tuning.

A smaller but recurring thread concerns how much of an RPG the game actually is. Despite marketing and store-page framing that leans on action-RPG and Assassin's Creed comparisons, a Chinese-language review describes the actual systems as thin -- weapon upgrades, a handful of skills, and a merchant offering only a few functions -- while the German-language review cited above states outright that despite advertising, this "isn't really an RPG" in any meaningful sense. That's a specific, detailed structural critique distinct from the combat and performance complaints, and worth reporting on its own terms rather than folding into general jank criticism.

Set against the wider field of story-driven, historically grounded action-adventures this coverage covers, Blood of Mehran's clearest strength is a setting and soundtrack reviewers keep returning to with real affection, backed by a story several found genuinely worth following. Its clearest weakness is that everything players actually do -- fight, move, and interact with the world's systems -- consistently draws specific, independently corroborated complaints about jank, dated presentation, and real performance instability, at a price that doesn't leave much room for that gap between ambition and execution.

Verdict

Blood of Mehran pairs a genuinely admired Persian-mythology setting and soundtrack with combat, animation, and performance that a consistent slice of its Mostly Positive review sample describes as clunky, dated, and unstable at launch -- criticism sharp enough, and specific enough across multiple independent reviewers and languages, that this review can't recommend it at full price without real reservations. Fans of early-2010s action-adventures who prioritise story and atmosphere over combat polish, and who can tolerate real technical rough edges, are the clearest audience here; everyone else should wait for patches or a discount.