No – Bloodbath Kavkaz Review

The unambiguous price of 228 (this is the number of the law of the Criminal Code of Russia for possession of drugs) rubles per copy makes a deliberately good impression, because from Bloodbath Kavkaz you expect exactly such acidity without any revelations. And at first glance, everything seems fine, it’s hard to spoil the proven mechanics of Hotline Miami. It is only later revealed that the trick with the price tag is perhaps the most subtle joke from the game developers, completely senseless and tasteless. Hehe, two two eight, well, you understand?

The first launch has every chance of being the last. The game opens with a deafening crack, shattering all hopes when you see two thugs on the starting screen. Probably, um, just like that. No, of course, we were warned about the influence of “modern media culture,” but still, we didn’t expect such, excuse me, crudeness. The misadventures are just beginning.

While the wild narrative takes us through the unclear depths of the life of the Caucasian Shamil, similar humorous sketches fly one after another. Here, they poke us in the face with an “FBI” cap, there they mention Maidan, here you can taste the “magical nectar” – and on all levels, apparently for greater effect, pages of the Quran are scattered. Even the “Spice” hotel allows us to take a peek. Funny? Not really for us either.

Bloodbath Kavkaz occupies fertile ground for quality satire, but only cultivates humor of the lowest kind. The scandalous nature of the theme is simply not revealed due to the lack of any logic. Anonymous people, moccasins, shawarma, troll faces, jokes about hiding and rolling – that’s the level here, and we’ll have to accept it until the very end. Maybe you can chuckle once at the abundance of nonsense, but overall, what’s happening resembles a collection of ordinary pictures from the expanses of the Russian Internet, which for some reason they force us to play.

And it must be said, the interactive component of this whole carousel is even less pleasing. The essence, without the slightest bit of hesitation, is ripped off from Hotline Miami, for which we would have praised if not for the quality of execution. There is no possibility to describe how bad everything is without resorting to authorial terminology. It’s simply, if you will, a fail of 1488 percent concentration.

Painful sensations from the process arise long before the first skirmish. Our not very local protagonist, being a person in a body, gets stuck in every – every – element of the decorations. Considering the far from impeccable level design with strange ideas about collision of background objects, the levels themselves turn into a cruel obstacle course. Attempts to get out of it, by the way, are demonstrated by the camera, which works diligently in two modes: “how to zoom in here?” and “how to zoom in even more here?” – in general, it doesn’t demonstrate much.

And then, if you endure, enemies appear. Absolutely identical on the face (apparently, it’s also a joke), the thugs react very slowly to your actions from the side and with titanic efforts find a way out of the square room – which is why they only take you in numbers, and even then not very successfully. The only difficulty is their unpredictable, um, “tactics”. And if you’re still interested, you can also get stuck in the enemies.

The further into the forest, the more irritating the most insignificant assumptions become. It turns out that plot objects have completely magical interaction zones, the distance of Shamil’s kick makes it useless, it’s practically impossible to find specific weapons in a pile, and doors don’t know how to open slightly – in short, everything that beginner developers bury in test projects in Game Maker, while resourceful Dagestan Technology presents it as hardcore and a challenge. They promised, though, that they would fix all the flaws and add all the lost content on the way to release. It’s not very clear now who will need the promised multiplayer along with the sandbox, but let it be.

The unappetizing cherry on top of this product is its design. Let’s not dwell on the pitiful parody of the same Hotline Miami, the sloppy sprites, and the use of standard fonts of unreadable size – but why, why couldn’t they at least make the texts presentable? An avalanche of errors of all sizes and colors destroys the last reason to respect the authors’ work. We all understand that we’re not taking an exam, but those rare and profanity-filled dialogues about “your mom” would look a little better if they underwent a five-minute correction. By the way, this also applies to the game descriptions on Steam. If it’s a hidden joke, then it’s not very good, honestly.

Well, she also freezes uncontrollably for no apparent reason. Whether it’s for laughter or hardcore, it doesn’t matter. 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. There will be enough of them to ruin another race and most likely come up with a more worthy activity for the evening.

We’re all up for making fun of things, but not this time, sorry guys. To create something worthwhile out of such nonsense, talent is needed. Bloodbath Kavkaz didn’t demonstrate it, but it turned out to be a good embodiment of the degradation of humor in Russian social networks.

We are still waiting for a real scandal from Hatred.