Red Alliance is a 2018 Indie First-Person Shooter by 2ndUp Studios (consisting of game dev Roman Agapov, who apparently taught himself to code solely to make this game, and a few supporting devs) made on the Unity engine. It is heavily inspired by First Person Shooters of the mid-2000's, such as Half-Life 2, F.E.A.R., Doom³, or Far Cry. Many people who have played it describe it as Indie Russian Half Life 2.
The game takes place in an unnamed Eastern European city which has recently fallen under hostile occupation by a new government which is using the pretext of an unspecified and likely nonexistent disease to entrap the populace in a state of martial law. Most pressingly, foreign mercenaries (referred to as Oppressor Units) hired by government-backed Mad Scientist Dr. Grey are cracking down on the civilian population and kidnapping them to provide test subjects for Grey's insane experiments. A resistance group called the Red Alliance has risen up to oppose Dr. Grey and his mercs.
Red Alliance provides examples of:
- Creator Provincialism: The Red Alliance seem to be Russian or at least Eastern European and mostly use local weaponry, while the mercs have names like Mark and Paul and use NATO weaponry.
- Crowbar Combatant: A crowbar appears as an easter egg alternate weapon to replace your baton in a hidden area in one of the later levels. It even has the Half-Life lambda symbol next to it.
- Enemy Mine: One of the mercs, Paul, helps you and Stanko out towards the end of the game, stating that Dr. Grey has gone insane and is using his own men in his experiments. Grey still has plenty of Mercs that fight on his behalf, however.
- Gas Mask Mooks: The mercs/Oppressor Units all wear black gas masks with glowing red goggles.
- Hand Cannon: The Desert Eagle kills mercs in 2 torso shots or 1 headshots, but uses rare .50 ammo which is typically only found by exploring out of the way areas of the environment.
- Heavily Armored Mook: Heavy Oppressor Units wield heavy battle rifles and wear heavy armor that lets them withstand considerably more damage than regular Oppressor Units, at the cost of reduced speed. It takes about 7 torso shots with the Desert Eagle to kill one, compared to just 2 shots for a regular enemy. They can even survive a direct hit from the RPG-7 rocket launcher. There are about a dozen or so of them throughout the game.
- Homage: The game is clearly one to Half-Life 2, with similar environments, UI, and gameplay and the Big Bad and his men being clear Expies of Dr. Breen and the Combine Overwatch.
- Kill It with Fire: The unique Firefly shotgun sets enemies on fire.
- Large Ham: Dr. Grey chews the scenery in a spectacularly over-the-top manner when you confront him in the game's final levels.
- Laser Sight: Enemy snipers are given away by the red laser sight they aim at you with.
- Limited Loadout: You're limited to 1 melee weapon, 1 pistol, 1 primary weapon, 1 specialist weapon (a shotgun or sniper rifle), 1 heavy weapon, and grenades. There are 13 different weapon types (25 counting unique variants), so you'll have to swap out different guns depending on your needs.
- New Game Plus: After beating the game, you can start a new game in "Vortex Mode". This is a playthrough on Hard mode with a baton and an infinite ammo Vortex railgun. The railgun is insanely powerful, but has a big delay between shots, and you cannot use any other weapon. You also have to beat the game in a single go, and dying causes you to have to start all over again.
- Shotguns Are Just Better: Zig-zagged. The shotgun is pretty average and often requires 2 shots if you aim at center mass at anything past melee range, but a headshot from it kills enemies instantly even at longer range, whereas it takes about 3 pistol headshots or a handful of assault rifle headshots to kill a regular enemy.
- Short-Range Shotgun: The shotgun has a pretty typical spread pattern and effective range for an FPS. However, it kills enemies instantly if a single pellet hits their head, so if you aim your shots well it actually can be used from a reasonably long range (though you still can't snipe with it).
- Start of Darkness: The loading screens indicate that, after his wife and unborn child died, Dr. Grey dedicated his life to bringing as much pain and misery to the human race as possible.
- Technically-Living Zombie: The later half of the game has you fighting crazed mutants, which are the result of Dr. Grey's mind control experiments frying the brains of his test subjects.
- Video Game Cruelty Potential: Of all the game's friendly NPCs, only the most plot-critical are unkillable. You're free to murder everyone else if the mood strikes you. There's even an achievement for killing all killable bystanders and resistance members.
- Viewers Are Geniuses: Gaining access to some of the game's secret rooms involves solving complex high-level math problems.
