Brought food: review of Bloodbath Kavkaz. Technical side of the project
The unambiguous price of 228 rubles per copy certainly makes a good impression, because from Bloodbath Kavkaz you expect such causticism without any special revelations. And everything seems to be in order; it’s hard to spoil the proven mechanics of Hotline Miami. It is only later that it turns out that the trick with the price tag is perhaps the subtlest joke from the authors of the game, which is completely stupid and tasteless. Gee-gee, two two eight, do you understand?
The first launch has every chance of becoming the last. The game opens with a deafening crash, with which all hopes are crushed at the sight of two gopniks on the start screen. Probably, uh, just like that. No, of course, we were warned about the influence of “modern media culture”, and yet, excuse me, we did not expect such thickness. The misadventures are just beginning.
While the dashing narrative carries us through the inarticulate wilds of the life of the Caucasian Shamil, such humoresques fly one after another. Here they poke an “FBI” cap in our faces, here they mention the Maidan, here you can sip the “magic nectar” - and throughout all the levels, apparently for greater effect, pages of the Koran are scattered. They even let you look into the Spice Hotel. Funny? We don't really care either.
Bloodbath Kavkaz occupies fertile soil for high-quality satire, but cultivates exclusively low-grade humor on it. The scandalous nature of the topic is not revealed simply due to the lack of any logic. Anonymous, moccasins, shawarma, trollfaces, jokes about shelters and rolls - this is the level here, and you will have to put up with it until the very end. It may be possible to giggle once from the abundance of stupidity, but in general what is happening looks like a set of ordinary pictures from the Runet, which for some reason they are forced to play.
And I must say, the interactive component of this whole carousel is even less pleasing. The essence is, without the slightest bit of embarrassment, ripped off from Hotline Miami, for which we would be happy to praise, if not for the quality of execution. There is no way to describe how bad everything is without resorting to the author's terminology. It's just, for that matter, a failure of 1488 percent concentration.
Painful sensations from the process appear long before the first skirmish. Our not-so-local protagonist, being a man in a body, gets stuck in everyone - in every- element of decoration. Given the less-than-flawless level design, with strange ideas about background object collision, the levels themselves turn into brutal obstacle courses. Attempts to get out of it, by the way, are demonstrated by the camera, carefully working in two modes: “how to zoom out?” and “how else can we distance it?” – in general, she demonstrates almost nothing.
And then, if you are patient, enemies appear. Absolutely identical in appearance (apparently, this is also a joke) thugs react very poorly to your activities on the side and with titanic efforts find a way out of the square room - which is why they take only numbers, and even then they do not succeed very much. The only thing that adds to the difficulties is their unpredictable, um, “tactics.” And if you're still wondering, you can get stuck in enemies too, yes.
The further into the forest, the more irritating the most insignificant assumptions become. It turns out that plot items have very magical interaction zones, the distance of Shamil’s kick makes it useless, it’s almost impossible to pick up a specific weapon in a pile, and doors don’t know how to open slightly - in short, everything that novice developers bury in Game Maker test projects, and savvy Dagestan Technology pass it off as hardcore and challenge. They swore, however, that they would correct all the shortcomings and add all the content lost on the way to release. It’s not very clear now who will need the promised multiplayer coupled with a sandbox, but so be it.
The tasteless cherry on top of this product is its design. Let's not rant for a long time about the pathetic parody of the same Hotline Miami, sloppy sprites and the use of standard fonts of an unreadable size - but why, Why At least the texts couldn’t be brought into decent shape? An avalanche of errors of all sizes and colors destroys the last reason to respect the authors’ work. We understand everything, we are not sitting for an exam, but those rare and swear-filled dialogues about “your mother” would look a little better if they had gone through a five-minute proofreading. By the way, this also applies to the description of the game on Steam. If this is a hidden joke, then so-so, honestly.
Well, she also freezes furiously for no apparent reason. For fun or hardcore, that's all. Even if you have the latest configuration, you can be sure that at the most crucial moment the picture will simply freeze for a second or two. They are quite enough to ruin another race and, most likely, come up with a more worthy activity for the evening.
Making fun of the subtle, difficult problems of society is not an easy task. IN certain moment At first glance, it seemed to me that the developers from the Dagestan Technology studio would really succeed in their brainchild Bloodbath Kavkaz, but alas, this first glance was deceptive. The creators have not even gone beyond the line of primitive jokes, but are trying to sell us jokes that were popular several decades ago.
Our main character a native of Central Asia, his name is Shamil. The action takes place in a hospital in the “forced electrotherapy” department; our hero came to his senses after a car accident. An unknown person appears who is very similar to Vladimir Vigdorovich Putin, gives the task of destroying Jafar, unknown to us, is a crime boss. Of course, Shamil completed the assignment more than successfully, but you have to complete a number of other tasks, since no one will let you go anywhere. This is not an ordinary story.
Game Features
Bloodbath Kavkaz is a surrogate copy of Hotline Miami, only the graphics look like they were made in a standard Paint editor. Even the original name of the game was Hotline Kavkaz, the trick is that the main problem of the game is not that it is a clone, but how the developers made the game. The game was made irresponsibly and hastily, so to speak, they did a disservice to the gaming community, in a word, hacks.
They quickly drew the main character Shamil, who does what he does and doesn’t fit in the door, and the game itself lags wildly. There are no audio dialogues in the game Bloodbath Kavkaz, but they are there, and we see them in text message mode. In the very gameplay to the music of “Caucasus” you can see a variety of non-formal and non-censored dialogue messages with a bunch of spelling and grammatical errors, I wonder if this is intended or the developers are crooked. In this game you will die even more often than in Hotline Miami, not because it is so difficult, but because of problems with the game mechanism.
Gaming gameplay
I know a lot of people were inspired by the first trailer of the game, which simply made them think that the game would be cool, but in fact the game did not receive social significance. The game, of course, brought us into a difficult situation where we see a large accumulation of memes, and everyone loves memes, on the one hand it’s cool, but on the other hand the monotony is quite boring. Dagestan Technology has the impression that this is a breeding ground for memes, they are everywhere: from locations to dialogues, the developers even show us stereotypes, like the main character Shamil eating shawarma or yazhka.
Constantly at the initial levels, we are trying to smuggle in information about how we can stop time. Therefore, during these announcements, in the upper right corner there is a header with the caption “228”, that is, for so many seconds we can stop time. Also here you can find the Spice Hotel with a simple entrance carpet, where a laptop opens to find the password for the doors, I advise you to also take a look at the file “your_mother”. Our hero, in the game, will have the opportunity to run around the Maidan and compete with the blurry shots with the Berkut soldiers.
From the outside you look at the game and see how sad everything is, and the point is not that there is no racist bias here, although the creators are clearly lying. As in jokes, so in business, everything must be done in the actual time, for example, “we pull the jaguar out of the cap 228.” The creators of the game from the company Dagestan Techonology missed the moment when and where it was necessary to knit everything into one whole, only the filling was given to the players. A beautiful wrapper is not yet a tasty candy. Bloodbath Kavkaz doesn't even have a subtext - it's just a collection of jokes and jokes from various social networks.
IN technically Bloodbath Kavkaz is ridiculous and makes no sense, I don’t even know what would have to happen for people to run to the stores and start buying it. Yes, they play it and have their own audience, but nothing more. To be honest, foreigners didn’t understand the game; they understood how to play, but they didn’t understand our jokes.
Conclusion from the game Bloodbath Kavkaz: I never found any advantages in the game, there are a lot of disadvantages. I will say that the developers wanted to gain popularity at the expense of others.
Game release date
The game Bloodbath Kavkaz will be released on PC platforms. The release took place on April 20, 2015, the game developers studio Dagestan Technology.
Bloodbath Kavkaz system requirements
Minimum system requirements Bloodbath Caucasus: Windows 7, Dual Core 2.0 GHz processor, RAM: 2 GB, video card: NVIDIA GeForce 8600, hard disk space: 400 MB.
Detailed video review of the game
It is covered with Arabic script, after which two gopniks from the meme about a sucker appear on the screen. The disclaimer text is replete with spelling errors; a moment later a Lezginka bursts into the room from the speakers. It seems that the wildest game this year will be a domestic development.
Former assassin Shamil Rakhmanov meets with a man in a Putin mask - he asks him to slaughter the entire Moscow gang underground, including its leader Jafar, in one night. Shamil puts on his “228” cap and gets down to business.
Taking the mechanics of Bloodbath Kavkaz apart and impartially evaluating it is a stupid task. Studio Dagestan Technology cloned with a couple of changes. The game focuses on firearms - pipe bits are used only to get to the coveted barrel. The hero does not die from one shot and even reinforces his health with shawarma and Jaguar, which, however, does not make Bloodbath Kavkaz simple - they kill here as often as in Hotline Miami. All this is decorated with the typical joys of artisanal development: the game sometimes freezes, and the hero gets stuck in the door every now and then.
I don't care! Bloodbath Kavkaz works on a different plane: try to talk about it in the usual way, and you will get several thousand signs of droning and tediousness with four points as a rating. Dagestan Technology didn’t even try to do it good game— they, sorry, wanted to have fun.
Oh, and they did it! Bloodbath Kavkaz is a cast of the consciousness of a regular on the public page MDK from VKontakte. The game takes place in Russia, collected from memes. Here Shamil opens the laptop - on it, in addition to the file with the password “1488”, there is a picture “your mother.jpg”. A little further down the corridor, in the toilet, Rashka’s square padded jacket is vomiting. The hero’s abilities depend on his headgear: there are “228” and “AK-47” hats, an FBI cap, a beatard paper bag and other joys. Shamil's enemies are collected from all the templates about southerners at once; when the hero bursts into the room, they yell: “Hey, throw it from a bend, right?” The first boss of the game - Pavel Petel(“I’ve got a detonator on my dick, so you better give in nicely.”) A couple of levels after dealing with him, Bloodbath Kavkaz jumps into Pelevinism; About halfway through, Shamil goes to Kyiv for the Maidan. All this nonsense is fed into the brain in a tight stream without stopping; just when you start to think that it’s time for the game to stop, it dives even deeper into the abyss of trash.
Despite the Russian (Internet) flavor, Bloodbath Kavkaz is also a funny parody of Hotline Miami. The maniac from the Swedish game spoke with roosters and owls - Shamil speaks with a pineapple. “Hotline” “go to car” here sounds like “return to Priora”. The energetic electronic soundtrack is not much inferior to the Western one, except that sometimes a Lezginka wedges itself into the eighties electro (Shamil, meanwhile, mows down another den with a six-barreled machine gun).
Bloodbath Kavkaz knows no limits just like the Internet environment that gave birth to it - and it, in turn, is inspired by what is happening outside the window of almost every Russian. Like all the crazy publics from VKontakte, this game cannot change the surrounding reality, but it manages to laugh at it. Yes, this is a wry parody of Hotline Miami, but if Bloodbath Kavkaz interests you only as a set game mechanic, you seem to have come to the wrong address.
Usually parodies happen either from great love or from mediocrity. In the first case, fans and sympathizers get down to business, who are simply interested and pleased to joke, act out and remake what they sincerely like. Often it turns out to be at least funny, although almost always only for their own fans. But this is in every way better than parodies, which became such only because untalented people worked on them. They didn't really mean to make fun of anything. For them, jokes are a way of protecting themselves from criticism. But in reality, all they want is to make a little money from someone else's fame by doing about the same thing, but faster and cheaper. That is, worse. And then you can always justify yourself by saying that this is a parody, that’s why everything is so bad. Don't take it seriously! Buy!
The authors of Bloodbath Kavkaz are cashing in on the popular hardcore action game Hotline Miami, the second part of which was just released this spring. It's possible that no one would ever have known about the clone's existence if the developers hadn't published the game on Greenlight, the Steam store's selection service where users vote on which games they do or don't want to see available for sale. Today the screening is done carelessly. The store now carries not only casual and retro games, but also any funny trash that made its way only because the very fact of its appearance in the store seemed funny to many people. Bloodbath Kavkaz is a user joke that has gone too far. The Russian-language press, of course, was only happy with such a curious story and only advertised the game for free, writing a bunch of news. This is a simple success story.
Undeserved success. At first glance, the clone still looks good. The developers more or less accurately captured the essence of the original Hotline Miami picture, which in turn was inspired by the movie “Drive” with Ryan Gosling. Night, neon, striped bright rugs and pixelation - all this is there, but drawn at random, without any sense of beauty. They almost got it right with the music too - pumping electronic music, and this is almost the only thing we can praise the game for. True, this is not synthpop, it doesn’t give off the spirit of the 80s. Maybe the developers didn’t find a suitable composer, or maybe they just don’t understand the genres. Electronics are so electronic, what the hell is the difference?
But for some reason, the developers put a bunch of filters on the picture, which makes it seem like you’re looking at the monitor through an old and dirty gas mask. The camera is also always shaking. In this regard, Hotline Miami was more careful. Sometimes it’s difficult to concentrate, because everything is swimming before your eyes. Plus, the camera is very close, the characters are on half the screen, and the resolution cannot be changed in any way, so you are essentially moving around the map blindly. The sight, which in Miami allowed for a good look at the location, is missing. That is, the player in addition turned out to be short-sighted.
In Hotline Miami you have to die often, and in order to pass the level, you need to at least think tactically, you need to plan from the very beginning where you will go, where you will freeze, who you will kill, at what moment and with what weapon. In Bloodbath Kavkaz you can forget about this. There is no balance. You die just as easily, but it’s impossible to calculate moves and rely on timing at the same time.
But the developers put something into the game that was not in the original. For example, time dilation. It helps you dodge bullets. True, even then it’s difficult to hit someone yourself. In addition, it looks disgusting: everything on the screen is smeared and turns into a dirty mess.
The authors also added destructibility. After all, Russian people love more explosions and destruction. That’s why in Bloodbath Kavkaz something is constantly exploding, the image is stormy, doors are flying into splinters. Sometimes it looks impressive, but in most cases it just gets in the way. What's actually happening on the screen? Where to run, who to shoot, where?
Otherwise it plays like a very bad, crooked version of Hotline Miami. There are also stupid enemies here who run along predetermined routes. Only they fall into hysterics much more often. Then they begin to rush through rooms and corridors even faster, instead of running towards the player. They often run into some kind of door, after which they forget what they wanted. However, from time to time I myself want to curse level designers with the last words. It’s a shame to die because you couldn’t get somewhere or stumbled somewhere.
It’s even more offensive to die due to inconvenient controls. For some reason, the authors changed the well-thought-out layout of Hotline Miami and forbade changing it. As a result, throwing weapons is extremely inconvenient. In the original, this often saved one from death, but here, on the contrary, it greatly increases the risk of dying. In addition, you cannot instantly change one weapon to another. In order to get rid of an empty machine gun and pick up a pistol, you must first throw away the machine gun and only then, empty-handed, approach the pistol and pick it up. That is, it can lie in front of the player great amount weapons (this is usually the case), but he may not have time to pick up anything. While he wastes precious seconds on stupid game design decisions, he will be riddled with bullets. But you can eat shawarma and drink yaga, yeah.
What is the parody if, like the game Bloodbath Kavkaz, it is a shameless and bad clone? In the script, in the setting. The action takes place in Moscow, and the main character is the bearded but bald mokrushnik Shamil Rakhmanov. One day, an unknown person, very similar to Putin, shows up at his home and persuades him to kill the head of the local Caucasian syndicate, who has become too revered.
There are a lot of dialogues. But they cannot be taken seriously. This is a terrible, delusional, impudent, illiterate graphomania, written by alcoholics. Flat and bad jokes, rotten memes (for example, about Nyash-myash and Anonymous), cliches are accompanied by creepy pictures distorted in Photoshop. Some lines are voiced into a home microphone with all the ensuing consequences. The texts themselves are replete with spelling and punctuation errors, not to mention typos. There is a lot of mat here that is inserted just like that. To be cooler. But in the end it causes even more disgust.
