Video Game / Russian Overkill

In Soviet Russia, gun fires YOU!!

"There is no end to the overkill; as long as the world expands, there is still room for flames."

—The One, Who Seeks Pride

Russian Overkill is an absurdly over-the-top gameplay mod for Doom created by ZDoom forum user PillowBlaster, heading a modding team comprising several members (PillowBlaster included) who would subsequently make the other equally over-the-top and highly acclaimed Doom gameplay mods Guncaster and Trailblazer. This mod replaces the standard weapon and item spawns with an impressive variety of Purposely Overpowered weapons and items that will tear through, or help you to tear through, any monsters you face like tissue paper, while at the same time supplementing Doom's UI text elements with a vodka-infused overdose of Glorious Mother Russia.

Rather unusually for a Doom mod, Russian Overkill features three playable classes, each with their own unique characteristics, special skills, and starting weapon:

1. Cyborg: A World War II veteran named Yuri Dubienko, who was resurrected with cybernetic technology. Has a built-in Rocket Jump, powerful punch attacks and incredible Fartillery. His starting weapon is a flare gun that fires burning sticky flares.
2. Commando: A former Spetsnaz member named Alosha Pavlovic, whose "melee" is an array of ''functional'' finger guns. He is also equipped with a regenerating ammo satchel and a pistol that he can hurl like a grenade.
3. Treesagent: An unnamed Bare-Fisted Monk who mows down the armies of Hell with his special martial arts, and uses a revolver that can fire heat-seeking missiles out of its cylinder.

Besides the playable characters and replacement of weapons and items, Russian Overkill also removes the health cap and replaces armor with shields, which also has no cap and protects the player from all incoming damage until fully depleted.

Although Russian Overkill was considered finished in 2013, the mod remained in semi-active development until April 2023, with each new update bringing it up to date with the latest ZDoom release at the time, and generally making the mod as a whole feel smoother. As of version 3.0, Russian Overkill also includes the following two components that were initially released as separate add-ons for the mod:

• Reinforcements from Moldova: Adds two extra weapons to each weapon slot (except slot 2), as well as the Hindenburg Two hypernuke item. These are now part of the base mod.
• Class Patch: Separates the various weapon spawns so each weapon is unique to one of the playable characters. This is reworked to be a toggle in the mod's in-game options menu.

While primarily designed to be run in ZDoom or any variant of it, on top of a Doom IWAD, Russian Overkill also features basic compatibility with Heretic IWADs.

Russian Overkill can be downloaded here.

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Real Soviet tropes!

• Abnormal Ammo: Some weapons use spent shell casings as ammunition.
• Aerith and Bob: Prior to version 3.0, the three player characters were known in-game as Yuri, Alosha, and Marty. Subsequently, each character is named by their class (Cyborg, Commando, and Treesagent).
• Attack Drone: The Ramjet can shoot itself, becoming a player-guided sniping drone that you can use to scout the level and shoot at enemies off-screen; it is possible to clear out all the enemies in a level without your character leaving the starting area. With version 3.0, the Ramjet can also remotely activate doors and switches, making it even more capable of clearing out entire levels while your character idles in a safe spot.
• Autobots, Rock Out!:
  • The Berserker Pack comes with its own leitmotif to accompany the sight of you punching demons into walls.
  • One of the powerup replacements is the Extremesphere. Combining invulnerability with increased strength, speed, jump height, and weapon firing rate, it's also accompanied by 3 Inches of Blood overlaid with incessant screaming.
• Awesome, but Impractical: Some of the weapons are portable nuke launchers and black hole generators that can just as easily kill you as they do the enemy.
• Batter Up!: Just because baseball is the American pastime doesn't mean that Russians can't have a little fun with it. The Excalibat is a baseball bat with a Faceless Eye that is forged from stone and empowered with magical dust that came from Excalibur, which has the ability to fire off ghastly baseball projectiles or slam gigantic corporeal boulders into the faces of enemies.
• Beehive Barrier: The Antonov's alternate fire summons an expanding plasma shield made of hexagons which not only deflects demon projectiles, but demons themselves as well.
• BFG:
  • Can be said about every single gun that isn't a mere Hand Cannon. Some of the largest guns in the mod have a first-person sprite that fills the height of most modern screens.
  • The Hindenburg Two beacon is used as a target for a cannon that launches a Zeppelin-sized bomb. 41,460 mm caliber, to be specific. Imagine how big a cannon has to be to launch that thing...invoked^note The largest cannon ever fired, the Tsar Cannon, has a caliber of 890 mm, over 46 times smaller than the Hindenburg Two's.
• Bottomless Magazines: The Commando's third starting weapon is a regenerating satchel that can be dropped, then picked up, to replenish ammo. Combine this with the fact that weapons like the Union can use casings to generate health, and the Commando is fully self-sufficient.
• Chainsaw Good: One of the Commando's combos summons a rocket-propelled chainsaw that bounces from enemy to enemy.
• Death from Above: The Obliterator's tertiary fire drops a beacon that summons three A-10 Thunderbolt IIs to carpet-bomb and pepper everything in the vicinity with their Avenger cannons for about 5 seconds.
• Disc-One Nuke: Taken about as literally as possible with the Gopnik, which not only shoots disk-shaped mines and has a nuke mode, but is a Rocket Launcher replacement. The very same Rocket Launcher that can be acquired in Doom 2's Entryway.
• Distracted by the Sexy: Shurricane's secondary launches a slow-moving probe that, upon hitting something or being remotely triggered, displays a holographic imp stripper. Nearby demons will turn on each other when exposed to it, and if the infighting doesn't kill them off, the probe's built-in flame sprinkler will.
• Epic Flail: One of the chainsaw replacements is the Porzygun. Aside from the standard fire, hitting a wall with it will spray off chunks of lethal shrapnel. The secondary fire allows you to telekinetically pull a far-away enemy to whack them in the face. And the third fire mode has you spin round and round without a care in the world.
• Exactly What It Says on the Tin: The title of this mod sums it up nicely—using the biggest, baddest, most Russian weapons ever conceived to kill absolutely everything several thousand times over.
• Fartillery:
  • The Cyborg's melee alt-fire has him charge up a mechanically-boosted fart that will suffocate nearby demons, as well as propel him into the air.
  • One of the Gopnik's alternate fire modes launches fart bombs. The smell is apparently so offensive that all demons caught in the blast will attempt to end each others' suffering.
• Finger Gun: The Commando's "shooter fists" consists of him firing bullets by miming the action of firing a gun.
• Freeze-Frame Bonus: Hidden in the last frames of Chton's impact smoke is an ominous skull coming out of the inferno.
• Friendly Fireproof: Certain weapons that utilize explosive munitions curiously won't damage you if they hit the target at point-blank range, such as the Ullapool Caber, which Russian engineering has improved to the point of negating literally every one of its downsides.
• Game-Breaking Bug:
  • In versions of Russian Overkill prior to 3.0, the effects of the Pantokrator's secondary fire would occasionally crash the game.
  • The sheer amount of damage you can do to yourself from the splash damage of certain weapons, such as the Vindicator, while on "Communism powerful force" difficulty, can very rarely cause the game to throw up an exception, requiring you to restart from your last save. You'll thank yourself for leaving autosave enabled.
• Gatling Good: The slot 4 weapons are all different varieties of minigun, the only exceptions being the Union (an assault rifle) and the Antonov (a miniature anti-aircraft autocannon).
• Glorious Mother Russia: From the weapons and characters, to the menu labels and the intermission and story screens in map packs that use the default Doom screens, this trope is apparent in every second of gameplay.
• Good Old Fisticuffs: The Cyborg and Treesagent's melee attacks, with the latter being more pronounced due to his melee being entirely focused on physically beating people with his limbs.
• Guest Fighter: The Agent, from the YouTube web series TREES, appears as one of the playable characters, named "Treesagent", with his weaponry of choice and martial arts "prowess" also originating from that series.
• Guns Akimbo:
  • The yellow junk pickup allows the player to dual-wield two of their starting weapon.
  • The MP40 and Leviathan can be dual-wielded once the player finds a second one.
  • The Quadvolgue's alt-fire exaggerates this, summoning three extra shotguns and apparently giving the player an extra pair of arms to hold them all.
• Hand Blast:
  • The Commando's "melee" has him seemingly miming various gun-firing motions, which kills monsters. However, he is actually firing invisible physical weapons—they even eject casings!
  • The Powercube allows the player to fire a stream of electricity from their hand. Alt-fire launches a storm of multi-colored bolts while a rave remix of "Chacarron Macarron" plays in the background.
• Hand Cannon: All three player classes have powerful revolvers as their starting weapon. They all have hard-hitting primary fires and secondary fires that are useful for eliminating groups of low-level enemies.
• Healing Shiv: The Union and Antonov can expend bullet casings to heal the player. The Union instantly heals the player whenever its secondary fire is used, while the Antonov drops a health pickup.
• Hidden in Plain Sight: There is an additional difficulty level below "Drunk Simulator", named "License to Kill", but it appears as a blank in-game on older versions of GZDoom due to it apparently being represented by a picture rather than normal text.
• Hindenburg Incendiary Principle: Weaponized with the appropriately-named Hindenburg Two beacon. Hands down the biggest and most powerful explosion Russian Overkill has to offer, and that's saying a lot.
• Horrifying the Horror: The Screamer Sphere causes monsters to run away from you while it's active. The Berserker Pack lets you roar to scare them away as well.
• Hulking Out: Rather than create a berserk powerup, Russian Overkill gives you a portable Berserker Pack as a melee weapon. Selecting it will transform your character into a Tank with a Megaton Punch, an intimidating roar, and an included music player button.
• I Know Kung-Faux: The Treesagent's melee attack, Tree-Kwon-Do, is Rapid-Fire Fisticuffs in essence, complete with its own set of Signature Moves revolving around punching and kicking the snot out of everything in front of him.
• Improvised Weapon: The Commando's Ammo Satchel can be thrown with enough force to kill enemies. It can also be remotely detonated.
• Ink-Suit Actor: Carlos Sanchez, who plays the Agent in TREES, provided the voice samples and some of the weapon assets used for the Treesagent. The design of the Treesagent's sprite is also based heavily on the attire worn by the Agent in TREES II.
• Kill Sat: Not content with just one, Russian Overkill provides many different varieties, from the Chton's meteor beacon, to the more conventional Planet Cracker.
• Large Ham: The arsenal itself. What sets Russian Overkill apart from other overpowered weapons mods is the response that shooting any of the weapons have. The sounds are extremely loud, punchy, and wonderfully satisfying.
• Life Drain: The Union has the ability to fire rounds which restore health equal to the damage dealt.
• Macross Missile Massacre: Not surprisingly, some weapons have the capability to launch rapid-fire explosive death:
  • The alt-fire of the Treesagent's Silver Hornet unleashes all the bullets in the cylinder as micro-missiles that Robotech in a straight path.
  • Deathhead is a standout example, with its primary fire being a shotgun blast of mini-nukes.
  • The Shitstorm device will spray a veritable torrent of rockets once activated.
  • A standard part of the Warpocalypse's attack set.
• Megaton Punch:
  • The Cyborg's Real Soviet Iron Fist does more single-hit damage than the Commando's Commando Gunfist or the Treesagent's Tree-Kwon-Do. He can also throw the Falcon Punch as a keypress sequence.
  • One of the Treesagent's melee attacks has him punch so hard, it creates a (fake) XP-style Blue Screen of Death that momentarily fills the entire screen while most enemies in his field of view get splattered by the punch.
  • The Berserker Pack allows you to punch hard enough to kill anything weaker than a Baron of Hell in one hit. On top of that, the punch creates a shockwave that damages any enemy that happens to be close to the target.
• Mother Russia Makes You Strong:
  • By using the Vodka item, the player will No-Sell any apocalyptic damage from their own weapons, ranging from the Splash Damage of a nuke to an event horizon. To a lesser extent, the player can also theoretically tank a ridiculous amount of damage without the Vodka thanks to uncapped health and shields.
  • The "Communism powerful force" difficulty sets any damage taken by the player to 0x, which automatically makes them invincible, while disproportionately multiplying the amount of ammo gained from pickups, essentially ensuring they never run out of ammo for any weapon. Not a bad deal for choosing a line of text that praises the power of socialism.
• Names to Run Away from Really Fast: We have the Deathhead, the Planet Cracker, the Obliterator, and the Insta-Funeral, among other equally ridiculous names. The player probably should follow that trope's advice: using these weapons can and will kill you as well as everything you're aiming at.
  Deathhead: "I could aim, but with this thing, I don't have to."
• No Name Given: Previously named "Marty Kirra" in the mod's forum release post, the Treesagent's name was retconned sometime after the release of version 3.0c.
• One Bullet Clips: While this trope is irrelevant for most weapons since they don't need reloading, the Quadvolgue averts it—reloading it causes you lose whatever shells are left in the "magazine" along with the spent shell(s).
• One-Hit-Point Wonder: "License to Kill" difficulty, which sets all monster health to 0.00001x their standard amounts and increases damage taken by 90,000x, functionally making everyone this.
• Plasma Cannon: Comes in many different flavors of energy, from Enpro-Ion to Vearetelium.
• Precision F-Strike: Upon picking up the Gorynch, essentially a 2400-RPM minigun, the game will mention it is known as "The Fucker", due to the fact that firing it will fuck up the skeleton of anybody who is not Russian on both ends of the weapon—the business end because of More Dakka; the holding end because of the recoil from a barrel spinning at the same speed as a jet engine.
• Purposely Overpowered: A zigzagged example. While you can and will plow through everything on the "Communism powerful force" and "Vodka Overdose" difficulties, the other difficulty levels multiply the health of all enemies to provide a challenge.
• Random Drop: The Commando's "Concrete Donkey" key-press sequence may sometimes drop a "Concrete Stalin" nuke instead of the donkey, complete with the State Anthem of the Soviet Union blaring for the duration of the explosion.
• Rapid-Fire Fisticuffs: One of the Treesagent's melee combos unleashes the terrifying Hokuto Hyakuretsu Ken, rending his victims to mincemeat in a matter of seconds. He also has a less extreme (and easier to execute) bicycle kick combo where he repeatedly kicks everything in front of him with both feet.
• Rare Random Drop:
  • Very occasionally, an Ammo Satchel pickup dropped by the Commando may be an "ultimate satchel", which not only contains a refill for each ammo type, but also has all weapon upgrades, a small amount of each usable item, one each of the strongest health and shield pickups, and both the Envirosphere and Salvationsphere powerups, making the player temporarily immune to all damage.
  • The MP40 is a machine gun that may sometimes drop from destroying barrels, but is unobtainable otherwise. It can be dual-wielded if the player is lucky enough to find a second MP40, allowing them to go full Blazkowicz on everything.
• Recoil Boost: The shotguns pack quite the punch, sending the firer flying back. Taken to its logical extreme with the Quadvolgue, whose four barrels provide recoil so strong it makes the Force-a-Nature cry: it's telling when its tertiary fire is an option to suppress this feature. And this is without the quad-wield alternative fire.
• Recursive Ammo:
  • This is the concept behind Matryoshka, a chaingun which shoots...chainguns.
  • The Obliterator rapid-fires carpet-bombing jet planes from its many barrels.
  • The Pantokrator alt-fires a gigantic shell that bounces around for 20 seconds, spewing shells in all directions while playing 1812 Overture.
• Reference Overdosed: The game gleefully rips sounds and sprites from many different other games, and even channels inspiration from sources as obscure as Space Battleship Yamato. Version 3.0 adds a console command toggle that adds even more memes.
• Revolvers Are Just Better: The three comrades' starting pistols are all some form of revolver.
  • The Commando's revolver, the Bernie Screamer, fires reasonably powerful bullets. Alt-fire consists of throwing the gun (which screams after it is thrown), which then explodes while a new gun materializes in your hand.
  • The Cyborg's revolver, the Matchstick, fires flares. Alt-fire launches a sticky flare that continuously damages an enemy until they die.
  • The Treesagent's revolver, the Silver Hornet, fires explosive bullets. Alt-fire swings the cylinder out and fires the entire chamber of bullets as a small Macross Missile Massacre.
• Roboteching: Power Overwhelming's quaternary fire toggles Homing Boolets mode, causing its normal bullets to home in on enemies, Matryoshka's secondary fire shoots seeking missiles, the Shurricane and Yamato's primary fire will home in on the closest enemy, with the former tracking the player's crosshair if they cannot find one, and the projectiles spewed by both the primary and secondary fire of the Vindicator will track any nearby enemy.
• Rocket Jump: Explosions galore, capable of sending you into the sky as easily as they can pound you into the ground. This is the mechanism that powers the Yamato's level-skipping Quantum Jump.
• Sawed-Off Shotgun: The Leviathan is a sawed-off triple-barreled shotgun that the player fires with one hand. The secondary fire aims down the sights, and the player moves faster when zoomed in.
• Serial Escalation: The game goes from powerful pistols that can one-shot light demons, to rapid-fire tank cannons, to energy weapons that can level entire cities.
• Short-Range Shotgun: Averted; all of the shotguns have excellent range and accuracy. The Leviathan and Violator even have a zoom function that allows you to spread the pain even further.
• Shotguns Are Just Better: What's better than just a regular-old shotgun? How about one that fires the contents of ten rounds of buckshot at once? What's better than that? A chain-fed double-barrelled auto-shotty. What's better than a double-barrelled shotgun? One with four barrels. And what's better than that? Four of them.
• Skull for a Head: The Matryoshka's secondary fire shoots missiles that have skulls on their front. Apparently, they are Revenant skulls, judging by the sound they make when launched, and due to the fact that they're called agitatinginvoked missiles.
• Some Dexterity Required: Each of the three classes have a set of keypress sequences, ending with Button 1 or 2, that gives them a variety of attacks. Thankfully, the sequences can be revealed by holding down Button 3, and with version 3.0, alternate keypresses are highlighted in a different colour, making the sequences easier to pull off than they were previously.
• Spontaneous Weapon Creation: The Commando carries a special prototype device, called the Commando Gunfist, that allows him to shoot various guns just by mimicking the gestures needed to fire them. He can also summon various oddities, including Improbable Weapons such as a CRT monitor, a telephone pole, and the concrete donkey from Worms, just by moving in a specific set of directions and Giving Someone the Pointer Finger.
• Spread Shot: The three weapon amplifiers (Stalin, Trotsky, and Lenin) transform their respective weapons' (Deathhead, Planet Cracker, and Borsch) secondary fire into a shotgun variant. The individual projectiles are reduced in no way compared to their normal counterparts; there's simply more of them.
• Square-Cube Law: The Ammo Pack runs on a downplayed version of this trope and a subversion of Bottomless Magazines when its corresponding "cheat" modifier is active—each Ammo Pack picked up will double the current maximum ammo the player can carry, so picking up just two Ammo Packs would quadruple the player's starting maximum ammo. This also means that, when playing Doom II with Russian Overkill enabled, the player is unlikely to ever run out of ammunition after Dead Simple unless they deliberately try.
• Starter Gear Staying Power: Unlike the default Doom pistol, which becomes obsolete the second the player gets their hands on another weapon, the starting weapons for all three classes are all powerful revolvers that remain viable throughout the game, even if they are still weak compared to the rest of the mod's arsenal.
• Stealth Pun: The Colonel Pillzkanone rapidly shoots bouncing, exploding pills. A "Pill-o-Blaster", if you will.
• Sticky Bomb: The Commando's ammo satchels stick to any surface, including enemies, and can be remotely detonated by pressing the tertiary fire key.
  • The secondary fire of the Steamroller launches a remotely-detonated mine that sticks to any surface.
• Stuff Blowing Up: Prepare to make everything explode.
• Super Mode: The Forksphere powerup allows your character to channel the power of an angry deity of pitchforks, granting you invulnerability, Flight, and the power to spear everything in sight.
• Tank Goodness: The Pushka (Russian for cannon) is a man-portable tank gun. If that's not enough Tank Goodness for you, an item allows you to summon the Warpocalypse Tank to level the battlefield with overwhelming firepower.
• Throwing Your Gun at the Enemy: Parodied with the Commando's Bernie Screamer, which can be thrown at enemies like a grenade and explodes just as spectacularly. This is actually the gun's secondary fire and not usually done out of desperation; in fact, the action itself costs ammunition, implying that the thrown guns are fully loaded to begin with, and a new Screaming Bernie instantly materializes in your hand.
• There Is No Kill Like Overkill: This is half of this mod's entire spirit, the other half being pure vodka.
• Unrealistic Black Hole: The Borsch can launch three different varieties of black hole: one which travels along the ground and crushes everything it comes across, one which opens up into a colossal vortex that eventually explodes after vacuuming everything nearby and an amplified version of the previous which functions much the same, except that the initial projectile explodes into six different cyclones. Since when have Russian Overkill cared about physics?
• Vodka Drunkenski: Drink the water of life to grant your character various buffs. Some weapons also were apparently designed under heavy influence.
• Wave-Motion Gun: For giant Energy Weapons that wipe out all life within line of sight, look no further than the Planet Cracker.
• You Nuke 'Em: The Gopnik's nuclear explosion mode, the Deathhead weapon and the Quick-Nuke consumable. Because let's face it, this game wouldn't be complete without a nuclear option.