The Hong Kong Massacre is a Run-and-Gun game, developed by VRESKI and released for PC and Nintendo Switch on January 22nd, 2019 and on PlayStation 4 on January 29th, 2019.
It is heavily inspired by John Woo movies, with the protagonist being a Hong Kong cop who goes on a Roaring Rampage of Revenge against the Two Headed Dragon triad after they killed his partner. He's been so successful at it that the game opens with him being arrested and interrogated by his higher-ups about all the carnage he's caused. Then, the game flashes back, and lets you create that carnage yourself.
Tropes present in this game:
- The All-Seeing A.I.: Enemies detect you as soon as you enter the room, even if they had their back turned to you at the time.
- All Your Base Are Belong to Us: The final act begins with the bad guys storming the police station where you have been being interrogated to try to take you out. Right before the final showdown, the bar the protagonist was using for downtime gets raided as well, resulting in the Bartender's death at the hands of Anthony Tsang himself.
- Big Bad: Anthony "The Boss" Tsang, a.k.a. The Dragon, leader of the Two Headed Dragon triad and the one who ordered the murder of the protagonist's partner.
- Bottomless Magazines: Averted. Moreover, you can never have more than one magazine's worth of ammo for any weapon, thus forcing you to regularly pick up the guns of fallen enemies. However, you do get to upgrade your weapons' ammo capacity, and if you get the Unlimited Ammo upgrade for the pistols, they become the only weapon that plays this trope straight.
- Bullet Time: The ability to slow time down is one of the game's core features. Its usage is limited by a meter, so you cannot deploy it all the time. However, each kill partially refills it, so you are encouraged to use your slo-mo time to immediately cause maximum carnage.
- Nevertheless, there's an achievement for beating levels without deploying it at all, which pushes the
already-high difficulty even higher.
- Nevertheless, there's an achievement for beating levels without deploying it at all, which pushes the
- Cowboy Cop: Your protagonist, particularly when his partner gets killed and he goes on his Roaring Rampage of Revenge.
- Cut and Paste Environments: A good number of the environmental assets are recycled from building to building. This even goes as far as the paper shogi screens being used as internal walls not only in the mere office buildings, but inexplicably, inside a police station, for essentially no reason but to allow you to shoot and burst through them there as well.
- Dodge the Bullet: You have a dodge move, which changes depending on the context of the situation. The one constant is that you are completely immune to damage while using it. However, your enemies get to perform the exact same dodges, and they are just as immune to damage during them.
- Gameplay Grading: You get a star rating for each of the levels you complete.
- Gotta Kill Them All: There are five major bosses to take down, each of whom you fight at the end of each act, and all of whom are implied to have taken part in the killing of the protagonist's partner: Waise Chow, The Rat; Chang Wong, The Tiger; Kenneth Suk-Wah, The Dog; Leung Cheh, The Serpent; and finally Anthony "The Boss" Tsang, The Dragon.
- Guns Akimbo: Dual pistols are your starter weapon, and are one of the faster weapons you can use. An upgrade allows you to give this treatment to submachine guns too.
- Heavily Armored Mook: The enemies with body armor require two shots instead of one.
- Heroic Bloodshed: The main genre of the game.
- How We Got Here: Much of the game's story has you being interrogated in regards to the one-man war that you've been waging throughout Hong Kong against the Two Headed Dragon triad, with the shootouts that make up this rampage being played out in flashback. Then in the final act, the police station gets raided by the bad guys, and you have to battle the remaining triads in order to reach the Big Bad behind it all and take final vengeance.
- Leap and Fire: Dodging and shooting at the same time produces this effect, and is one of the more stylish ways to dispatch enemies, especially when employed in Bullet Time.
- More Dakka: The rifle already has more ammo in its magazine than any other weapon. Fully upgrading its ammo capacity gives you a whole 100 bullets to play with, which is invaluable, as you won't get to reload it.
- Nintendo Hard: The game is already hard, what with being a One-Hit-Point Wonder against a legion of gun-toting enemies, and will get even harder if you try to go for any of its challenges.
- One-Hit-Point Wonder: Your character always dies in one hit. However, the same applies to most of your enemies, with only bosses and body-armored enemies taking more than one hit to bring low.
- Roaring Rampage of Revenge: Your protagonist is out for vengeance against the Two Headed Dragon triad for murdering his partner, Chan Dung-Yu, after the two of them pulled off a big drug bust against the syndicate in question.
- Rooftop Confrontation: All of the five boss battles take the form of these.
- Shotguns Are Just Better: One of your weapon options. They have the biggest spread, which allows you to blow away multiple enemies in a single blast, but the slowest reload time, which can be important against multiple enemies in the same area.
- Sworn Brothers: Your protagonist, his partner Chan Dung-Yu, and the Bartender were "brothers for life" since that day on the beaches of Sai Kung since they were kids. Chan is killed before the game begins and the Bartender is killed by the Big Bad himself right before the final showdown.
- The Triads and the Tongs: Your main enemies here, in the form of the Two Headed Dragon triad.
- Title Drop: Your character's rampage against the Two Headed Dragon triad makes the news late in the game, with the media calling it the "Hong Kong Massacre."
