Project Downfall is a 2022 highly stylized First-Person Shooter by MGP Studios and Solid9 Studios, inspired by the John Wick and Hotline Miami series, as well as the films Falling Down and Hardcore Henry. Taking place in the year 2049, you take control of a nameless protagonist who has suffered a massive brain injury. In addition to ruining his short-term memory, it has also apparently eliminated his inhibitions. One day, after a subway commute home from work goes wrong, he's forced to slaughter a number of Russian mobsters and a couple of corrupt cops. Now freed from the laws of society, he keeps a pretense of being a normal office worker while moonlighting as the "Crimson Reaper", a vigilante who's brave (and/or insane) enough to go up against the crime lords who control the city of Crimson Tide.
Released on Steam Early Access on March 15th, 2019, the game had its full release on December 1st, 2022 with ports for Nintendo Switch, Xbox One and Series X/S released in February 2, 2024.
This game contains examples of:
- Absurdly Spacious Sewer: The sewers in Empire of Dirt are gigantic, so much so that there's an entire secret society of sewer-dwellers living down there. Obviously, they don't take too kindly to you barging into their turf at first.
- All Just a Dream: This happens in five of the endings. In four endings, after the attack on Titanprog, the entire game (or at least the portion of it after you wake up in the hospital) turns out to be you re-experiencing the last week of your life in an Omnicare virtual reality pod, so they can learn the details of what happened to you (and replicate it for profit) before your execution for mass murder. There's also one ending in which the entire game turns out to be you playtesting the video game Project Downfall for the developers.
- Amnesiac Hero: the protagonist cannot remember much of his past due to brain damage received from a mysterious "incident" before the start of the game.
- Anti-Hero: In the more heroic routes. You are unquestionably ruthless, but the people love you because you alone finally did something about the terrible state of the city, even if your methods ended up being... extreme.
- Anyone Can Die: Depending on your actions throughout the game, people will live or die (either by your or someone else's hand). This can happen to every NPC you meet, even to your own girlfriend.
- Bad Guy Bar: Rectum Club and Luco's Club in Warsaw are normal dancing venues for regular citizens, but they also serve as fronts for the Svoloch Family. Obviously, when the protagonist shows up in each of those places, they don't welcome him with open arms.
- Bag of Spilling: You lose all your weapons every time you move between levels, even if all you're doing is going through a door into the next room. The game explains this as a consequence of your short-term memory impairment from your head injury.
- The Berserker: The more brutal the kill and the more riskier the maneuver, the more points you get.
- BFG: The BMFG-2600, a massive cannon that fires a huge spread of explosive shells, essentially deleting everything in front of you. Only available in the Uncover the Truth / Ending I/J route, it's carried by Alfred #1 and one of the DE-902s. Thankfully, Alfred accidentally kills himself with the splash damage without a fight, but the DE-902 is an absolute menace with this weapon. After the first time you collect it, it will become available at the local gun store in Azur Plaza.
- Bittersweet Ending: The easiest endings you can get in the game mostly end up as these. You really have to put some time and effort if you are to finish the game with a happier ending (or a sadder one). There's also no Golden Ending, even the couple of endings in which the Crimson Reaper comes out in decent shape are given no special significance over the others.
- Black-and-Grey Morality: Crimson Tide's underworld is filled with the scum of the earth: Russian mobsters, drug dealers, pimps, neo-Nazis, killers, corrupt police officers, sadist psychopaths and more. The protagonist, however, is not a saint either, abusing prescription drugs, neglecting his girlfriend and the few friends he has, brutally killing both criminals and innocent people unlucky enough to be caught in the crossfire (and sometimes not even that if you choose to leave no witnesses), among other things.
- Bloodstained Glass Windows: The level "Man of Faith" has you ambushing a Mafia leader and his lieutenants in the middle of a private church service.
- Bondage Is Bad: Enemies in Rectum's last section and inside a club in The Old Capital are all wearing BDSM outfits and accessories.
- Boom, Headshot!: On most enemies it is an instant kill, with a resulting shower of gore.
- Boss-Arena Idiocy: When facing the two DE-902's sent by the Kyoncha in the level Fugitive, there will be a couple of pillars that can provide cover from one of the unit's BMFG-2600. Between shots, it will take a moment to recharge, giving you ample time to return fire until you put it down. Upon death, the unit will drop the BMFG-2600, which you absolutely need to take out the remaining one.
- Bullet Time: Use of any of the prescriptions causes this, with different variations based on which prescription was used.
- Chainsaw Good: You can't use one, but the enemies wielding them are among the absolute toughest in the game, capable of an easy One-Hit Kill with very very good melee range.
- Checkpoint Starvation: Being based on Hotline Miami, this is to be expected. Especially annoying if you're playing a relatively long level. Did you get killed by a goon who got a lucky shot on you when you were close to the exit? Too bad, you're going back to the beginning. Good luck! Also, if you quit out of the game in the middle of a mission, you have to do the entire mission all over again.
- Cop Killer: Crimson Tide's police department will be the primary enemies in many stages, serving either as bodyguards for the Svolochs or as a blockade to stop you from escaping.
- Covert Group with Mundane Front: Lucky's Casino in the level Less Than Zero is owned by the Svoloch Family and it's the place where they stash their money. It's one of the protagonist's targets when he starts going after them.
- Crapsack World: Crimson Tide is hideously violent, though most of it is covered up as best as possible by the authorities. Massacres with double digit body counts closing subway stations is apparently a daily occurrence, and criminals have de facto control over entire districts and subway lines. Mega-Corps control everything else, the cops are corrupt, and no one is even pretending they're doing anything about it.
- Cyberpunk: Neon, megacorps, mandated prescriptions, thugs, yakuza, cyborgs...
- Cyberpunk with a Chance of Rain: Even when the sky is clear, the ground always is wet and spotted with puddles from recent rain.
- Determinator: The protagonist. He can get shot, beaten, left behind by the few people he cares for, get lobotomized or even go insane from constantly consuming prescription pills, and yet, he will always keep pursuing those responsible and will keep coming back until he gets the job done
- Dirty Cop: Most cops in Crimson Tide are on the take and work alongside the Svoloch Family, providing services like protection and even destroying evidence. The protagonist runs into a few deals between the Svolochs and the police throughout the game, and he promptly shuts those meetings down with the aid of some lead.
- Disposable Woman: The protagonist's girlfriend never really gets much character development, and her only goal is to indicate if the protagonist is taking too many pills or acting erratically throughout the game. You can force her to leave you by trashing the apartment or indirectly cause her death by following a certain route
- Downer Ending: Considering that there are twelve different endings in the game, there certainly were going to be a few with not-so happy results: your girlfriend dies, you are arrested and convicted as a mass murderer, your efforts to clean the city are in vain and you're instead recruited as an enforcer and hitman for one of the crime families, everyone in your life walks out on you and after a stand-off with the police, you are surrounded and ripped to shreds by police gunfire, etc
- Dressed All in Rubber: You'll comes across enemies wearing gimp suits and BDSM related outfits in several stages
- Drought Level of Doom: Many of the bonus or hidden levels, accessed only through certain routes and requiring the player to complete several tasks, are incredibly difficult, forcing you to go through a very lengthy stage filled to the brim with enemies wielding high-power caliber and even some with armor, requiring many shots from a powerful weapon to be put down. Big Trouble in Little Tokyo and Ascent are two good examples.
- Dual Boss: The majority of boss fights involve you fighting a pair of exceptionally tough enemies, typically with one armed with a melee weapon and one armed with a heavy ranged weapon like a minigun or cannon, often with a bunch of regular goons thrown into the mix as well. Just about the only notable boss encounter that isn't a Dual Boss is the Svoloch's super-enforcer at the end of "Less Than Zero".
- Earn Your Bad Ending: You have to jump through a lot of hoops if you wanna get an especially bad ending. Some of these include going through a certain route, killing a certain NPC at a specific time, talking to a certain NPC at a specific time, taking a specific amount of pills, the works.
- "Everybody Dies" Ending: You can choose to kill every NPC you come across during your playthrough, which leads to the protagonist, now free of witnesses or competition that can stop him, becoming the most ruthless crime boss ever seen in Crimson Tide.
- Expy: The main character is an anglicized Russian expatriate living a mundane life in the West until one bad day sets him off on a one-man rampage against the entire criminal underworld, just like John Wick. The main character even looks like John Wick, just with a slightly longer beard.
- Facial Horror: The game's life bar is the protagonist's face slowly peeling off and getting progressively more disfigured. It's possible to survive long enough to see the bones beneath the flesh.
- Fat Bastard: Many times you'll face enemies that not only are fat, but also tower over the player and can make short work of you if they get close.
- For Want Of A Nail: At the end of the game, if you take the "insanity" ending path, you'll encounter a hallucination of your friend Ali who notes that if you had just stayed at the capsule hotel instead of taking the Pink Line back home, none of this craziness would have ever happened.
- Game Within a Game: You can purchase and/or find video games scattered throughout different levels and stores. Some you can get from a specific route and event you need to trigger, other times it'll be as easy as going to the store and buying it with in-game currency. Most video games you obtain are nods to other First-Person Shooter games like Blood and Duke Nukem 3D, or even movies like The Matrix. There's also a simple 8-bit Endless Running Game that can be played in the prologue, both on your subway car and on an arcade machine in the subway.
- Going Postal: If you continue to go to work despite going insane from overuse of pills, eventually you'll show up one day to find the place is suddenly a dark corridor of offices occupied by murderous animal people, whom you slaughter on your way out. It's implied you just shot up your workplace while tripping balls, because the police show up at your apartment to arrest you immediately afterwards.
- Gonk: Everyone in this game except for the protagonist's girlfriend is drawn in an exaggerated, unflattering way.
- Gorn: Despite the relatively simple and stylized graphics, the gore is heavily detailed. Your health bar is watching the face peel off your crazed protagonist, and enemies burst into blood and organs.
- Groin Attack: While a headshot can take out an enemy instantly, the same applies when shooting at their testicles. You even get a bonus for "Nut Shots". Also, kicking an enemy in their tender parts will stun them for a few seconds, allowing you to finish them or get some distance from them
- Guide Dang It!: Exactly what does and doesn't affect the ending isn't very clear, and many actions which do change the game world and can even give you an entirely different set of levels don't actually affect the ending by themselves, but only in a specific combination. For the most part, the different paths you can take through the game don't affect the endingnote , and how many pills you take, who you kill, and how you treat your girlfriend or best friend don't either, unless you go extremely overboard in pills and/or killing. In general, the ending is decided by a) whether or not you take enough pills to go completely crazy, b) whether or not you maintain your day job (which you can't even do if you go "The Package" route instead of finishing the first level normally), c) whether or not you kill all witnesses (NPCs who appear in combat sections) and/or all crime lords, d) whether or not you see your psychiatrist regularly if you've been taking too many pills, and e) you get special variants of the bad ending if you kill the first NPC you meet (who is your best friend) or if you take enough pills to hallucinate your girlfriend cheating on you in the Neo Nazi prostitute traphouse and kill the hallucination. In fact most of the endings are so obscure that according to the game's leaderboards, only a couple dozen people in the entire world have ever gotten any ending other than the default Ending H.
- Guns Akimbo: If you manage to grab a gun in mid-air while equipped with that same kind of gun (pistol or uzi), you'll be able to dual-wield, allowing the player to shoot faster and for longer periods of time. If you toss the weapon at an enemy, you'll go back to wielding a single gun.
- Hand Cannon: One weapon you can find lying here and there is a Magnum revolver. It will decimate anything it touches in a single shot and it's relatively fast to reload. The downside is that it's not very common and you're not usually allowed to carry over weapons from one section to another.
- Head Swap: Every single enemy group (sans a few original enemies from each faction) use the same two sprites for their fat and slim enemies, changing the color of their clothing and their heads to match their theme. As an example, the fat Svoloch Mob members have the same sprite that the heavy Kyoncha operatives use, with the obvious difference. being the color and details of the sprite itself.
- Heroic Mime: Aside from grunts and screams (be it when attacking, getting hurt or dying), the protagonist doesn't have a single line of dialogue throughout the whole game, which is somewhat jarring considering people can interpret his intentions and desires despite the fact he doesn't speak at all.
- Inescapable Ambush: Happens a few times during the game, most notably in the levels Small Time and Grounded: in the former, you'll be trapped in a small area filled with Svoloch mobsters armed with high-powered weapons and a Giant Mook wielding a chainsaw, while in the latter you'll be trapped in a large area filled with police officers with pin-point accuracy
- Injured Player Character Stage: If you take a certain route throughout the game, the protagonist will be severely injured by a bomb and will be taken to the hospital. The stage that follows this (called Trauma) has the protagonist escape from the hospital and making his way back home. During this stage, you'll have to face-off against elite mercenaries while your head is bandaged and you experience hallucinations that will affect your sight, forcing you to run or hide from your attackers until your vision goes back to normal. The same thing happens in the level "Brain Freeze", which happens in an entirely different route in which the cops find you as a sole survivor of one of your massacres and take you to the hospital without realizing you're the culprit.
- Interface Screw: Depending on the path you take, and depending on how many pills you take, your brain will start insulting and berating the player for consuming too much. All of this is accompanied by the screen glitching up and the sound starting to go nuts. Same thing happens when playing the stage Brain Freeze, as at this point, the protagonist has consumed too much and been through a lot of crap
- Jigsaw Puzzle Plot: It was designed to be one. Due to the occasional Translation Trainwreck, it is probably even more obtuse than intended, which is saying something.
- Kaizo Trap: When you kill the last enemy on a level, the music will stop with a record screeching sound to let you know the level is safe. However, sometimes the game will have one last enemy at the exit to surprise you. This happens in "Shortcut", "Passing Through", "Benefactors", and "I'll Be Back".
- Katanas Are Just Better: The samurai sword works like every other melee weapon in the game, but it has the highest durability, it's on par with the knife in terms of speed and can kill most enemies in only one swing.
- Kill Streak: Killing a bunch of enemies in a short period of time and without taking damage can greatly boost your score and allows you to fill your Rage Meter, so you can keep laying waste to the poor devils you have on your sights.
- Leave No Witnesses: A hallucinatory man in a cartoon bear costume urges you to leave no witnesses to your rampages, not even a friendly bystander who gives you a few hints and wishes you luck in your fight. You can either kill all witnesses, or ignore the bear and kill it whenever it gets in your way.
- The Legions of Hell: Depending on the route you take (and also depending on how many pills you take throughout your journey), normal human enemies and regular cannon fodder will start morphing into more disturbing creatures, like mutants, zombies and, of course, demons (complete with hoofs, horns and the ability to hurl fireballs ).
- Lethal Joke Item: You can find a pencil in some stages. It's not very durable and looks useless at first... Until you decide to throw that little tube of graphite and it instakills whoever it hits, just like the regular knife would.
- A Lighter Shade of Black: Even in the most evil routes, your revenge quest comes off as borderline heroic compared to the human trash you're hunting down.
- Limit Break: After chaining a few combos together in a short period of time, you can get the ability to go on a sort of "Fury Mode" where you'll be able to perform a super kick and go on Bullet Time for a short period of time, similar to taking one pill.
- Locked Door: Several doors require a keycard in order to open them. These key cards can only be found in obscure sections of different levels and the doors they open usually open a new path or lead to a piece of the game's lore.
- Ludicrous Gibs: A point-blank shotgun blast will completely disembowel an enemy, same with a kick from a certain angle. The Vulcan gatling-gun will have the same effect on an enemy. Also, hitting an enemy on the head with a lead pipe or the samurai sword will have the same effect as blowing up a watermelon with fireworks.
- Made of Plasticine: Seems like every enemy (including yourself) can be killed and maimed in very messy ways without much effort. Hell, you can disembowel an enemy with a single kick to the gut.
- The Mafiya: One of the main enemy forces.
- MegaCorp: The company that the protagonist works for, Omnicare, is both a pharmaceutical and technology producing company, which controls many aspects in Crimson Tide. They are rivaled by another company with a similar product, called Titan Prog.
- Mind Screw: The more pills you take during your playthrough, the more messed up the protagonist's perception of the world will be. There will come a point where enemies will completely shift from normal humans to things such as monsters, demons and zombies.
- More Dakka: The chaingun is an exceedingly rare drop, but is among the most effective guns in the game, absolutely mulching anything in your sights.
- Multiple Endings: The game has 12 endings, although several are variations on the same outcome. Also, there are 3 different endgame ending paths; the default one (Ending H, Ending C, and Ending G) Confront the remaining crime lords at the mansion in "Small Time", the "insanity" one (Ending A, Ending B, Ending F, Ending K, Ending L) Go to "The Interview" with Titanprog while insane from overuse of pills instead of going to "Small Time", and the "truth" path (Ending I and Ending J) go to war with Kyoncha until they ambush you in "The Setup", leading to a final confrontation with Omnicare.
- Ending H: The default ending, which you get if you haven't fulfilled every necessary requirement to get one of the other endings. With the police closing in on you, you try to escape the city on the advice of Alfred/your mysterious benefactor, only to find the airport is swarming with cops. Escaping into the sewers, you kill your way through the sewer-dwellers until you reach a throne room where you become their king. You hide underground while the Crimson Reaper becomes a living legend in the city above.
- Ending A: Obtained through unknown requirements by going to "The Interview" with Titanprog while insane instead of going to "Small Time" to confront the remaining crime lords. You'll hallucinate and massacre the Titanprog building, just like Omnicare planned all along, and after being captured by the police you'll escape from the hospital and spiral down into insanity. Everything after the Titanprog attack turns out to be a session in a virtual reality pod, in which you've been re-living the last week of your life so Omnicare can learn what happened to you and exploit it for profit. You're executed for mass murder, denying you did anything wrong.
- Ending B: Obtained by going insane by overusing pills but not killing all witnesses, defying the Teddy Bear. Similar to ending A, but the last level ends with a hallucination of the protagonist shooting themselves in the head, seeming to imply their head injury was a suicide attempt (possibly over a dead wife from prior to the events of the game). You confess to your crimes and are executed for mass murder.
- Ending C: Obtained by sparing all crime lords (you also seem to need to meet Svoloch head honcho Igor Brozniew, who is very hard to find). The Svoloch mob recruits you by claiming they know the location of the man who killed your wife. They use you as a hitman, exploiting your short-term memory loss by telling you each time the target is the person who killed your wife.
- Ending D: Obtained by clearing out Cloudbreak subway station ("Call of Duty") and going back to work regularly. After the high rise level ("Rising High" or "Ethnic Cleansing", depending on your choice in "Fill Er' Up"), Ali will invite you out to lunch. At the restaurant, the Svoloch will approach you and bring you to a meeting with the Kyoncha PMC. You're recruited by the Kyoncha, who exploit your short-term memory loss to convince you to be one of their operatives.
- Ending E: Obtained by going back to work regularly despite going insane from pills, and not seeking treatment. After going to work a couple times, the next time you go to work you'll start hallucinating being attacked by the animal costume people, causing you to shoot up the place. When you get home the police will capture you outside your apartment. You'll be executed for mass murder, and Omnicare will download the last 2 weeks of your life from your brain and use it as the basis of a new video game.
- Ending F: Obtained via going insane by pills, then killing the hallucination of your girlfriend cheating on you in "Rising High" and "Providence"/"Gutter Rat". For the rest of the game you'll hallucinate your girlfriend having a massive shotgun wound in her head. After escaping the hospital after the Titanprog attack, you can enter a flesh-covered passageway where you'll fight a "boss fight" against your girlfriend whose head has become a massive brain. When you snap out of it, you're back in your apartment and your girlfriend is dead for real, her head blown clean off. The game turns out to be a session in a virtual reality pod, used by Omnicare to learn what happened to you over the past week. You confess to your crimes and are executed for mass murder.
- Ending G: Obtained by killing all witnesses as well as all the major crime lords, as well as Alfred, and going to the Svoloch mansion in "Small Time". Having shown your utter ruthlessness, and with no one left to oppose you, you become Crimson Tide's undisputed criminal kingpin.
- Ending I: Endings I and J are probably the most obscure and the most difficult to obtain, as they require you to stay off the pills and find several hidden missions, but give you a completely different endgame route compared to the default or insanity routes. Obtained by dilligently going back to work regularly and getting a promotion, then free-roaming to Cloudbreak Station which starts a series of several levels in which you uncover the Omnicare conspiracy and battle the Kyoncha PMC. Kyoncha get back at you by strapping a bomb onto your girlfriend while she's out shopping, killing her and putting you in the hospital. At the end you'll climb the Omnicare HQ and confront the leader of Omnicare, learn that Alfred was his right-hand man, and kill them both. You plug yourself into the Omnicare mainframe, turning everyone with an Omnicare chip in their brain into a violence psycho like yourself. This tragedy creates distrust of chip technology, thwarting Omnicare's plot to use the chip to control the population, and creates enough chaos for the Novorussian Federation to take over Crimson Tide city.
- Ending J: A variation of Ending I. Probably the closest the game has to a Golden Ending, as it is the longest route and also the only ending that gives you a special achievement. Same as Ending I, except at Omnicare HQ you turn around and try to escape the city after confronting the Omnicare leader, instead of going to the mainframe. After defeating a pair of DE-902 robots, you escape and leak the full details of the Omnicare conspiracy to the public, igniting an anti-megacorp revolution which you will ultimately lead.
- Ending K: Obtained by going insane from pills and killing everyone, then going to the Titanprog interview. After attacking Titanprog and despite being captured by the police and put in a pod to learn what happened to you, you'll descend into the depths of your insane mind, battling anthropomorphic animals and literal demons, completely disassociating from reality and locked into a endless battle for the rest of your life.
- Ending L: Obtained by obeying the Teddy Bear and killing everyone, not seeking treatment, then killing the Teddy Bear and all bystanders at the very end of the "insanity" path when he congratulates you on getting so far. This triggers a "joke" ending in which the game appears to crash, and when you return to the main menu you turn out to be a playtester for the Early Access game Project Downfall.
- Mushroom Samba: Whenever you start a new game, you can choose to head to the subway and go to work... or lick a hallucinogenic toad you find sitting on top of a garbage can. Doing the latter will take you to a new level where you fight pig-headed police officers and triad members with a katana in various streets with eye-hurting colors
- Non-Standard Game Over: Ending D and Ending E feel like this, as they essentially cut the game short at around the 50%-60% mark. In Ending D you're recruited by the Kyoncha about halfway through the game (After "Rising High"/"Ethnic Cleansing") if you go to lunch with your friend, and in Ending E you shoot up your workplace while tripping balls and are arrested by the cops if you try to go to work after going insane from excessive pill usage.
- One-Hit Kill: Headshots, nutshots, superkicks, point-blank shotgun blasts, throwing knives and explosions are just some of the few ways you can one-shot an enemy. The game has the stylistic and realistic approach of not being able to take as much punishment as you can in other video games. The same principle applies to both the protagonist and his foes. Speaking of which, getting hit by a melee weapon (or an up-close melee attack from a strong enemy), shot by a sniper from afar, a point-blank shotgun blast or even a lucky shot from a goon with a regular pistol can take you out instantly if you're not paying attention.
- One-Hit-Point Wonder: Whenever shotguns, precision rifles, and melee weapons (sans the knife) are involved, both the protagonist and the enemies become this. Averted by the protagonist if he takes a specific pill that can give a bit more resilience and the enemies that tower over the rest of the thugs and the player alike (who are often bosses that can take much more punishment).
- One-Man Army: The protagonist can easily take on hordes of mobsters, gangbangers, corrupt cops and even trained mercenaries all by himself
- Opening the Sandbox: The game actually has a pretty impressive-sized open world, but you can only fully access it towards the end of the game, as areas start out closed and only gradually open up as the week progresses. Unless you're taking certain special ending routes, you're also never required to go to the open world and may not even notice it if you're just playing through the normal missions normally.
- Optional Boss: Many bosses are hidden behind certain routes, meaning it's not possible to fight all of them in a single playthrough.
- Outcast Refuge: Crimson Tide's sewers are home to the sewer-dwellers, a secret society composed of gas-mask sporting thugs, who hide from the Kyoncha and the Mega-Corps in the hopes of someone deciding to stand up to their oppression and start a revolution. That's when the protagonist comes in.
- Palette Swap: Enemies in a faction may have various sprites colored differently to represent their difficulty level.
- The Patient Has Left the Building: In the levels Trauma and Brain Freeze, the protagonist (who's injured and extremely hooked up on pills at this point) has to fight his way out of a hospital patrolled by the Kyoncha unit.
- Point of No Return: Taking the mission "Small Time" marks the point at which you can no longer go back to your apartment or roam the city.
- Post-Climax Confrontation: Both Ending C and Ending D have a unique special level that takes place after the credits, showing your first job as either a Svoloch enforcer or Kyoncha operative. If working for the Svoloch, their first job for you is killing Alfred.
- Professional Killer: The protagonist is ambushed by a group of these at Queen's Mall in the level The Setup, when he's trying to meet up with his girlfriend. Complete with fast reflexes, sporting suits and night-vision goggles and armed with heavy weaponry.
- Red Baron: Your actions gain you the nickname "Crimson Reaper." Though "Crimson" comes from the name of the city, it definitely still sounds cool.
- Red Light District: The Pleasure Dome and the Blowhard Club are both found in this area. The protagonist's brain will berate him for going to one of this places, asking why would he go there despite the fact he has a girlfriend.
- Roaring Rampage of Revenge: The protagonist will go in a few of these for a variety of reasons: Seeking revenge for being ambushed while getting gas, hunting down the people who killed his girlfriend, depending on the route taken and getting payback for the people behind the distribution of the pills and the chip he can implant on his brain to keep track on him, uncovering an entire conspiracy involving Omnicare
- Run or Die:
- The area before the level Providence has a small section with enemies that will either warn the protagonist not to keep going forward and to turn around or a group of enemies giving him permission to pass through. In either case, once the player walks past them, a sniper will start shooting from a nearby balcony. You don't have a weapon with which to return fire and his shots will kill you instantly on impact. Your only choice is to run towards the escalator on the other side.
- The secret level "Last Resort" likewise has you fighting throuh a gauntlet of armored Kyoncha enforcers and Svoloch mobsters, while being shot at by a sniper that's too far away for you to return fire at.
- Screaming Warrior: The protagonist. Filling up the rage meter allows you to unleash a primal battle cry and go berserk.
- Scoring Points: The main point behind getting combos and finishing stages as quickly as you can is to get enough points to appear in the online Leaderboards of the game.
- Secret Level: The game has many levels which are either hidden alternate levels to the main questline levels, or hidden levels found in the free-roaming open world not tied to the main story at all. There's also the collectible video game levels that you can find around the game world and play on your apartment console.
- Sensory Abuse: The incredibly flashy colors, the high ammount of brightness and the loud sound effects can make for an overwhelming combination. There's also the fact that the character bobs his head when walking, sprinting or taking damage. Combine all of that and you have a nice recipee for a headache.
- Short-Range Shotgun: Shotguns have average range, but you can kill enemies at longer range by stunning them first with a thrown object. The blaster shotgun (blunderbuss) and triple threat (sawed-off triple barrel shotgun), however, are only effective at point blank range.
- Shotguns Are Just Better: Regardless of the type of shotgun picked up, they are, next to the precision rifle and the revolver, the strongest normal weapon you can get your hands on. Special mention goes to the Howler, which can kill an enemy in one hit (or as much as five in the case of a stronger enemy) and has an incredibly large ammo capacity.
- Shout-Out: Be it pop culture, other video games and shows, the game is chock-full of references:
- You can find an image of a certain sun-obsessed knight from Dark Souls in a hidden room in Azur Plaza.
- Most enemies being bald, russian and wearing white clothes is clearly a reference to Hotline Miami. Also, you can find Richard's face in a few magazines found in various stores.
- There are posters for a movie called The Governator. Speaking of which, there's a subway station called Tech-noir and a level called I'll Be Back, where you attack a police station looking for a witness.
- Several missions have names referencing movies and games alike: Call of Duty, Big Trouble in Little Tokyo, I'll Be Back, Boyz from tha Hood, etc.
- A certain character says he heard the protagonist was pretty good at painting houses.
- You can find video games and magazines that read PSX or have references to other first-person shooters, such as Postal 2, DUSK, Ion Fury, etc.
- For all those people who are fan of The Matrix, there's a few nods here and there: there are posters and video games promoting a movie called Uno, who's very similar to Neo (interestingly, both names are ways to say "one" in different languages), the video game you can obtain has the eponymous character face-off against a group of heavily armed security guards in a hallway (like in the first Matrix movie) and there are posters saying "Winners don't use drugs... with the exception of government approved", and who's shown saying this? Non other than Agent Smith himself.
- The final section of the level Rectum takes place in a sex dungeon filled with murdering psychos and has a man wearing a pig mask and wielding a chainsaw as a final boss, similar to another game.
- The protagonist's face is extremely similar to that of John Wick, at least when it's not getting mutilated. Funnily enough, a girl in the subway will tell you that a man killed a few people with a pencil. The video store owner even says that the protagonist "looks like the guy who plays Uno", Uno being an Expy of Neo from The Matrix, another character played by Keanu Reeves.
- The manager of a video store will give you a video game if you get rid of an uninvited guest in the store's bathroom. The uninvited guest in question? A giant anthropomorphic turtle named Leo.
- Likewise, the melee enemies in the lobby of the building in Boyz B Boyz are Bebop from TMNT.
- When entering a certain area, a yakuza punk will tell you to go home and watch Matlock.
- In one of the game's several climaxes, a man tells the protagonist that the police has sent out a robot named DE-902 to hunt him down. If you unscramble the letters and numbers you get ED-209.
- Outside your apartment, whenever you start a new game, you can find a hallucinogenic toad, reminiscent of another similar toad.
- When grabbing another gun in mid-air, not only will you be able to dual-wield, but you'll also get a bonus called Mr. Woo.
- In the tutorial mission, your brain will tell you that this is serious business, and "this ain't Doom", and will promptly tell you to be careful, as you can't take much punishment.
- Aside from being an obvious nod to the Duke Nukem franchise, the Game Within a Game Chaingun Harry, features aliens that look very similar to the xenomorphs from Alien.
- There's a certain stage where you can find the battered corpse of Axel Stone.
- A certain NPC will tell you, before charging into a subway filled with mobsters, to "kick ass an' chew bubble gum".
- There are some signs that read "Tritari". Both the name and its logo are obvious nods to Atari.
- In the level Rising High, you can run into a prostitute who will tell you that she can love you long time.
- You can find adds and posters that read "Burger Slave" and "Burger Queen". Sounds familiar?
- The video game console you can find on your apartment looks very similar to the SNES.
- When leaving Omnicare, you can find a small counter with a microwave next to a soda machine. If you interact with the microwave, you can heat whatever's inside it and make it explode, similar to what a certain scientist can do in another video game.
- The handful of Heavily Armored Mook Kyoncha "Elite Guard" protecting the Omnicare Board Member have white Cyber Cyclops helmets that are clearly those of the Combine Elite from Half-Life 2.
- Sinister Subway: One line, the "Pink Line" is pretty much unofficially claimed by criminals, who will threaten or attack any normal citizen who dares to ride it. Your first (playable) act as a vigilante is to ride it, an act that inevitably ends with you killing more or less the entire train in self defense.
- Split Personality: When the protagonist suffers from blackouts after consuming too many pills, he becomes the Crimson Reaper, a serial killer who targets prominent crime figures, like mob bosses, lieutenants, corrupt cops and politicians. The protagonist can appreciate the Crimson Reaper's work by checking the local news in between missions, which will detail the targeted group and the area where the crime occurred (more often than not being a previously beaten mission).
- Sprint Meter: The game uses (to most players dismay) a stamina meter that controls your actions when empty handed, as well as the evasive maneuvers you can employ in combat. Sprinting will slowly deplete stamina, while offensive actions such as punching will lower it much quicker. Kicking will deplete it almost completely and sliding uses a moderate amount. After your stamina meter drains, you'll be forced to wait until it fills up again if you want to keep attacking with your fists. This makes it harder to fight more than one enemy at once, requiring to use a melee weapon or a gun to keep you from getting pounded into oblivion.
- Super-Soldier:
- When all else fails and the police become unable to control the Crimson Reaper, they send a couple of cybernetic super soldiers to put him down for good.
- The Svoloch's top enforcer, confronted on the roof of the Casino level "Less Than Zero", is no slouch either. He's a 15 foot giant wielding a machete, with a pair of shoulder-mounted rocket launchers that he fires with increasing frequency as his health gets lower. Dude is nearly as tough as the DE-902s mentioned above.
- Super-Strength: After consuming a pill, the protagonist can perform a super kick, which allows to instantly kill any enemy it hits and can even knock down big objects like trash containers, steel doors and metal barrels, which can also be used to kill enemies with.
- This Is Reality: The protagonist's brain will tell you this in the tutorial level, pointing out that you can't take too much punishment and that the same applies to your enemies.
- Those Wacky Nazis: The Cranston Clan is a faction you face in the game comprised entirely of neo-Nazis, complete with shaved heads and swastikas
- Throw-Away Guns: If the player runs out of ammo for a weapon and doesn't find another weapon to refill it, this happens. It can actually be used to your advantage, as thrown weapons can stun enemies for a short period of time, allowing you to get closer for a follow-up attack or get some distance to find another weapon.
- Trial-and-Error Gameplay: Since you only die in a few hits and enemies can be unexpectedly fast at times, expect to replay a section no less than three or four times. Later sections become much more tight in terms of difficulty, which can lead to unfair deaths. You really need to memorize enemy positions or else you'll become Swiss cheese in no time.
- Truce Zone: Crimson Tide is Europe's first and only independent "free city", situated on the border between the old and declining European Union and the rising power of the Novorussian Federation, which encompasses all former Soviet territories including Poland, Lithuania, and Ukraine. The protagonist and his girlfriend are NRF expats, but the protagonist still seems to carry his NRF ideology with him as he feels it's his socialist duty to give back to the community for the prosperity he's been privileged with... by spending his nights after work viciously murdering the city's criminal population.
- Unusable Enemy Equipment: While most enemy weapons are usable by the player, you can't use the machetes, broken bottles, or chainsaws that enemies sometimes wield. This can make some levels in which enemies primarily carry machetes into a Drought Level of Doom.
- Unwitting Pawn: Omnicare were counting on the protagonist going insane from overuse of pills, so they could send him on an "interview" with Titanprog knowing he'd have a psychotic episode and massacre the building, dealing massive damage to their corporate competitor using a deniable scapegoat. After capturing him, they probe his brain to replicate his experiences in order to create more psycho-on-demand assassins. If you ignore the Titanprog interview and finish off the Svoloch instead, Alfred (who is secretly Omnicare's agent) will just send you to be ambushed by the cops at the airport, and Omnicare will try again with someone else. Only by going to war with Kyoncha and ultimately confronting Omnicare can the protagonist bring justice to the corporation for using him.
- Urban Hellscape: Crimson Tide is littered with trash at almost every turn, criminals and thugs are everywhere at all times, most cops are on the take and the few that aren't are systematically kept behind a desk (implied by a few characters) and the few areas safe from the rampant crime wave are controlled by elite mercenaries who will shoot on sight at anyone who steps out of line. Not to mention, there's also the serial killer known as the Crimson Reaper, lurking about and hunting down criminals, which means that in this cesspool of a city, not even criminals are safe!
- Variable Mix: Each stage has its own piece of music. When the player is exploring the area, the music keeps at a normal tempo, indicating it's all safe for now, but when engaging an enemy or several, the music starts pumping and gets a lot more action-packed. The same happens when taking a pill. After the threat is eliminated, the music will go back to its regular calm tempo. Whenever you take out the last enemy in a stage, the soundtrack for that stage will stop and will instead play a slow, ominous song, similar to what happens in Hotline Miami whenever you beat a stage.
- Video Game Caring Potential: If you manage to stay off the pills (or at least not consume many of them) throughout the game, the protagonist's girlfriend will be more understanding and caring to him. You can even buy her flowers at the local shop, despite it serving no other purpose other than to make her happy.
- Video Game Cruelty Potential: If you wish to do so, you can not only kill the enemies in the mission you're in, but you can also waste the harmless NPCs that can be found in said missions, be it simple bystanders, civilians going to the club or friendly NPCs you can talk to. Nobody's out of reach in this game.
- Video Game Cruelty Punishment: Killing civilians or any non-violent NPC will lower your score by a thousand points. If you get too reckless and start killing people in areas where there aren't any enemies around (like Azur Plaza or the Crimson Underground subway system), the game will take notice of your behavior and will promptly start sending-in police officers to hunt you down. If the police fail to contain you, then the game will have no choice but to send the Kyoncha unit to take you down. These enemies will never stop coming until you're dead, forcing you to restart the level.
- Villainous Breakdown: When the protagonist decides to tackle the Svoloch family head-on and comes face to face with Pavlovich Jr., the son of the boss himself, he starts insulting and taunting the protagonist, but quickly changes his mind and starts apologizing and begging him not to kill him. His fate is left on the player's hands.
- Villainous Fashion Sense: Most baddies dress in over-the-top flashy outfits, from the neon-purple clad eastern bikers, to the Svoloch Family's high-ranking members and their old-timey mobster outfits (complete with double breasted coats and pocket watches).
- Vomit Discretion Shot: Consuming too many pills during your playthrough will cause the protagonist to start puking all over the apartment off-camera, leaving puddles in many places and also letting garbage pile up, showcasing his deteriorating mental health.
- Wretched Hive: Crimson Tide definitely qualifies. Criminals run entire neighborhoods, police are often (though not always) corrupt, human trafficking and drug abuse are rampant, and the law abiding citizens live lives micromanaged by employers when they aren't busy being oppressed by the criminals. It's such a hopeless place that your bloody revenge quest becomes a source of inspiration regardless of what path you take, simply because it’s anything other than the status quo.
- Xtreme Kool Letterz: There's a level you can go into if you follow a certain route, and it's called Boyz B Boyz (formerly known as Boyz from tha Hood). As one would expect, the enemies in this level are gangbangers.
- You Kill It, You Bought It: In Ending G, if you kill all witnesses to your crimes and all the major criminal leaders, you end up becoming the city's undisputed crime lord. In Ending H, the most common ending which you get if you don't go out of your way to overdose on pills, kill NPCs, or get promoted at work you end up becoming the king of the sewer-dwellers after killing your way through their ranks, ruling an "Empire of Dirt" while you become a living legend in the city above.
- You're Insane!: Do enough bad things throughout your gameplay (like consuming too many pills, destroying the TV at your apartment, breaking the windows) and both your girlfriend and your psychiatrist will tell you this before walking out on you.
