Soviet Superscience / Video Games

• In Genshin Impact, the Russia-inspired country Snezhnaya is noted to be the most technologically advanced in Teyvat.
• S.T.A.L.K.E.R. features the Soviet C-Consciousness project, which was an elaborate attempt to manipulate mankind's consciousness to eliminate suffering and wars. Needless to say, the experiment had Gone Horribly Wrong.
  • Within the game, there's the Gauss Rifle (albeit with Western-style furniture), the game's Infinity +1 Sword. Made by Soviet/Russian/Ukrainian scientists, it'll kill just about anything with one or two shots, but it's hellishly heavy, only available very late in the game, and getting ammo for it is difficult (in Shadow of Chernobyl, finding ammo means looting it off dead bodies, in Clear Sky it doesn't appear, and in Call of Pripyat you can buy substandard ammunition from one of the technicians).
  • There are also various psychic devices (most of which serve to either brainwash you or just burn out your higher cognitive functions) in the games, the most famous of which is known as Brain Scorcher. They're developed by the same scientists behind the C-Consciousness project and used as defense devices to prevent anyone finding out the truth behind the project and the Zone.
• The Command & Conquer: Red Alert Series gives those Dirty Communists mind-controlled squids, cloning vats, weaponized Tesla Coils, six-legged amphibious boats with double Tesla coils, armored war bears, huge zeppelins with megaton bombs, nuclear vacuum ICBMs, weapon-stealing tanks, magnetic satellites AND MORE.
  • Don't forget the mancannon-equipped amphibious transports, which also function as AA support. They are quite capable of shooting the aforementioned armored war bears. Talk about Abnormal Ammo...
  • A mention should also be made of the mind-control radio towers that drive the plot of Red Alert 2.
  • This is far less noticeable in the first Red Alert, without expansions, partially because it has far less superscience overall, and partly because the Allies aren't far behind in superscience, their teleporter balancing out a Soviet invincibility generator, leaving only the weaponized Tesla coil to shift the balance in the Soviets' favor (and even then, the Allied GPS system is arguably far enough into the future of the period for it to count as a sort of super-tech). The expansions added a lot more super-science, but on both sides, setting the trend for the future games: the Soviets have Superscience, but only slightly more than the Allies^note Yes, this does mean Red Alert technically fails the "far beyond their Western counterparts" part of this trope's description.
    • One could argue that the Soviets are actually lagging behind technologically — a large amount of the "super-science" is more or less a redux of the prior game's technology — compared to the Allies, who between Red Alert 1 and 2, developed lasers, cloaking devices, and weather control. Red Alert 1 might play it straight, but essentially every game from 2 onwards might just count as a subversion. The Soviet super-tech is just crazier and more memorable than the Allies one.
    • It crosses over with Truth in Television, actually. The Allied tech is more advanced, but far more fragile, while the Soviet technology seems to be crazier, but also far more simple and sturdy. Allies use a highly precise laser, highly-advanced power plants, and a modular Macross Missile Massacre IFV, the Soviets use giant Tesla Coils, nuclear power plants, and a flak halftrack.
  • It should be noted that the Soviets were the first to have advanced cybernetics. They had Volkov and Chitzkoi, a pair of cyborgs who are devastating when micromanaged properly. Unfortunately, the Allies capturing and sabotaging them caused the Soviets to discontinue their cyborg program. Then in Red Alert 2, they got back into cybernetics with the Terror Drone, a small robot which is pure scary for ground forces. The Allies still didn't have any form of cybernetics. Its only until Yuri's Revenge that they finally get the Robot Tank and even then its primitive, as evident by the tank's need of a control center to keep it functional as opposed to the independent Terror Drone (which can eat the Robot Tank inside out easily).
  • Red Alert 3 removes the nuclear aspect (in a game involving Imperial Japan...). Now their huge reactors function with chemical power, and their superweapon is now the Vacuum Imploder, which sucks up units and deals large amounts of damage.
    • Their support powers involve dumping toxic waste, sucking up vehicles into space with a satellite, and dumping old satellites from orbit (and any vehicles sucked up by the aforementioned magnetic satellite).
    • Averted in Uprising, which gives the Soviets another Powered Armor that squirts toxic waste from the Super Reactors that can eat infantry or vehicles, a motorcycle with a mortar sidecar, and a clunky Spider Tank that spits rockets and grenades. Meanwhile, the Allies get floating artillery, freeze-gun equipped Powered Armor, and a gunship firing a miniature version of their superweapon. Justified here as the Allies canonically won the previous war and the Soviets are just scrounging for whatever they can get their hands on, not having the spare resources to invest in anything particularly out there any more.
• Command & Conquer: Generals:
  • While leaning more towards realism than the Red Alert series, it still features this trope with the Chinese faction, with its nuclear reactors, More Dakka and Kill It with Fire policies applied to tanks and aircraft, towers broadcasting propaganda that heals troops, nuclear-powered tanks, nuclear artillery, and twin-barreled tanks so big they can run over lesser tanks, mount gatling guns, the aforementioned propaganda towers, and entire bunkers.
  • The totally-not-Al-Qaeda GLA faction uses old Soviet weapons like SCUD missiles modified to carry anthrax, both from trucks (as artillery) and launch sites that fire a dozen at a time (as their superweapon). The more exotic weaponry involves dune buggies with rocket launcher racks, tractors that spray anthrax, and vehicles that scavenge enemy weaponry to improve their guns.
• Singularity has quite a bit of this. The game's setting is a 1950s Soviet Area 51-like area with quite a bit of super-science, including a weapon that can progress/rewind space-time.
• War Front: Turning Point has the Soviet Union using "canned Siberian weather" Freeze Rays and Freeze Bombs, as well as house-sized tanks with five turrets and building-sized artillery guns. They even steal a German Exoskeleton at one point and jury-rig it with a freeze ray.
• Freedom Force features Nuclear Winter, who is a Soviet spy dunked in his own chemicals. Freedom Force Vs. The Third Reich introduces Red October, who for some unexplained reason is a witch.
• In Destroy All Humans!, the Soviets have a secret moon base and an alliance with aliens.
  • "Alliance" perhaps isn't the right way to put it; it's more like all of the Soviet Union's leaders since the Russian Revolution were actually aliens manipulating them for their own aims.
• DUSK-12 revolves around a top-secret Russian Super-Soldier project, the titular "Dusk-12" mutagenic strain, being researched underneath the (fictional) city of Chernozersk. The player character, Gorin, is one of its results, but unfortunately the strain quickly leaks and mutates the entire population of Chernozersk into deformed, mindless abominations.
• One of the levels in Tomb Raider: Legend is Nikola Tesla's secret laboratory in Kazakhstan.
• In Team Fortress 2, Soviet Sandviches are powerful analgesics.
  • Not to mention the Soviet chocolate and steak.
• Snatcher has the Soviets develop biological weapons, cryogenic sleep, and androids so advanced that the West didn't have an equal even decades later.
• A rare non-Soviet example in Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2; the Russians reverse-engineer an American satellite component, which allows them to launch a massive trans-oceanic invasion of the US Mainland with complete surprise. Subverted in that they don't have tech beyond the Americans, they just cracked the American encryption codes.
• In the 1998 remake of Battlezone, The Space Race between the USA and the Soviet Union was really about the Applied Phlebotinum, featured Hovertanks and was fought over most of the solar system... in The '60s. In keeping with this trope, the Soviets are the first to make the major technological advances, including one that shifts the entire tone of the plot.
• Parodied in the Wii version of Punch-Out!!, where Soda Popinski's Title Defense intro shows Soviet scientists working with all their might to produce... grape soda. Grape soda that makes Soda Popinski strong enough to drag a truck with his teeth.
• Averted in Resistance, where the Russians were never Communists (the 1917 revolution was crushed) and were wiped out by aliens, who did have superscience.
• The Metal Gear series often employs this in the games focused on Big Boss during the Cold War.
  • In Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater, the presence of the infrared and night-vision goggles in 1964 is explained as being due to the Russians being more advanced technologically (your tech support even asks you to return the items to America for reverse engineering). Thanks to Volgin's use of the funds from the Philosophers' Legacy to advance weapons research, he has working prototype Mi-24 helicopters and ground-effect planes years before they showed up in real life, the prototype sneaking suits worn by The Boss and another which Snake can find and wear, guards on Hover Boards (based on a real concept) not to mention the Shagohod in this game.
  • Metal Gear Solid: Peace Walker continues with some minor examples - Professor Galvez, a.k.a KGB agent Vladimir Zadornov has an advanced cybernetic prosthetic hand with a cigarette lighter in the thumb and a Rocket Punch attack. In the introduction cutscene, Snake and Miller marvel at his portable cassette player (the game is set in 1974 and Sony wouldn't release the first Walkman until 1979). Despite Zadornov claiming it was invented by the Soviets, it has "SONY" branding on it.
  • In Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain, Venom Snake is given a similar robotic prosthetic due to losing his left hand at the end of the previous game. One of his early missions in Soviet-occupied Afghanistan sees him rescue the imprisoned Soviet "bionics" engineer who had invented said prosthetics; after doing so, Snake can upgrade the hand to feature bonuses such as sonar detection, a shock attack, and rocket attacks like Zadornov's. The engineer reveals he was also working on Sahelanthropus, a new model of Metal Gear being built by the Soviets in Afghanistan, while the Soviet Red Army also utilise the smaller Walker Gears. However, although Ocelot recognises these as Soviet projects and technology, the truth is they were both developed in secret conjuction with Cipher by Huey Emmerich and for Skull Face's own ends. With Cipher's resources, Skull Face seems to have enough pull with the Soviets to allow American XOF soldiers into their Afghan facilities — the rank-and-file of the Red Army, although aware of this, are otherwise kept in the dark about who they are.
    • The titular Metal Gears that came later in the timeline were all developed based off the theories of a Soviet scientist from Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater — in particular, Huey's and Otacon's Metal Gears were directly derived from Granin's design concepts, while the Metal Gears from the first two MSX games were designed from the ground up by another Russian scientist. In Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty, former Spetsnaz GRU Colonel turned mercenary Sergei Gurlukovich claims the moral high-ground when stealing Metal Gear RAY from the US Marines as "Even the technology which gave birth to these weapons is Russian, developed by us!"
• This trope is Recycled In Space in Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri, which brings in a University of Planet faction, ostensibly just following a For Science! ideology, but actually being thoroughly Russian in terms of flavor. The faction is led by Academician Prokhor Zakharov, "Academician" being a Soviet (and now Russian) title referring to a member of the Academy of Sciences, establishing that the person possessing it is recognized by all state institutions, not just academia, as an authority in their field, similar to the British "Fellow of the Royal Society". The Academy of Science of the USSR set the general framework for dozens of other national academies worldwide, particularly in those Eurasian countries that were part of the Eastern Bloc, leading to the adoption of the title all over the world. The University of Planet is likely an homage to unified academic institutions that have fallen by the wayside since the 1990s when many of them were defunded or dismantled.
• You Are Empty is a weird Soviet-style post-apocalyptic Alternate History story about psi-emitter designed to create a "New Soviet Man", but it has Gone Horribly Wrong, creating insane zombies and killer Pavlov's Dogs.
• Heavy Weapon has the Red Star's forces. You fight regular troops like missile helicopters, tanks, bomber planes, SCUD missiles and ICBM missiles. Then you fight mini satellites with death rays, Humongous Mecha, and even a Cool Airship that SUMMONS METEORS via tractor beams.
• In Call of Duty: Black Ops this is played straight both in the main storyline and partially in the Nazi Zombies mini-game. In the storyline, the Russians are able to weaponize a highly lethal toxin that has been shown to kill men in mere minutes and is not easily dispersed by wind, making it an effective area denial weapon and weapon of mass destruction. Furthermore, they have access to anachronistic weapons that wouldn't be introduced until the '70s or '80s (though the Americans showcase this too), have mastered drug-induced brainwashing so advanced that they can program a man to do anything that they desire (even make Mason and/or Oswald kill John F. Kennedy), and have somehow found a way to create a base on the ocean floor without it being crushed from the sheer pressure it would faced with at such depths. Somewhat averted in the Nazi Zombies storyline, as most of the technological achievements are actually achieved by Group 935, which is an international organization and have more or less equally introduced the same level of technological advancement to the Americans as they have to the Russians. However, the Zombies map "Ascension" still showcases some pretty advanced technology on the Russians' part; they have created flying platforms, genetically enhanced monkeys, the Thunder Gun (a hand-held cannon that fires high-powered waves of compressed air), which contrary to Richtofen's beliefs was not made by Dr. Maxis but rather Dr. Gersh, a Russian scientist, and Dr. Gersh also created a small device which generates a miniature black hole.
• The Secret World has a Magitek version, of the "abandoned experiments" variety in the Transylvania zones. Two of the biggest projects included sending cosmonauts through a dimensional rift, and creating human/vampire hybrids as Super Soldiers. Both projects were officially abandoned, but work continues independently at the time of the game, and both involve advanced technology of other forms. The rift project is kept running by an AI and by the last surviving cosmonaut, Halina Ilyushin, whose desire to explore the cosmos has driven her mad, while the super soldier program was restarted by the vampire queen Mara, the Big Bad of the Transylvania arc, in order to have a supply of workers for the Breach.
• NAM-1975, where the Viet Cong use super tanks, Humongous Mechas, high-tech weaponry such as lasers, et cetera.
• Awesomenauts has Yuri, a 1960s Space Race monkey shot into orbit with a jetpack. Disappearing into a warp field and turning into a radioactive genius, he gets lasers, builds a computer all while playing his Russian musical anthem and chatting with a deep accented voice. The American character? He's a cowboy!
• Homefront: The Revolution has a variant of this. Instead of the USSR, it's North Korea that instead becomes a high-tech powerhouse in The '70s, leading the computer revolution instead of America's Silicon Valley; by 2004, they're already bringing touch-screen smartphones and tablets onto the market. By the 2010s, they're branching out into selling high-tech weapons, which the Americans eagerly buy in order to fight their wars in the Middle East. Of course, all of this technology has a shutdown switch controlled from Pyongyang, and in 2025, with a bankrupt US defaulting on its debts, North Korea hits the off switch on all of that weaponry and gadgetry and launches an invasion.
• Atomic Heart is an Immersive Sim that takes place in a Soviet research base in 1955 where all the experiments have gone on a rampage, the game's aesthetic rooted in the distinct retro-futurist styles of the postwar USSR. In its Alternate History, the Soviets made great advances in robotics, cybernetics, and genetic engineering in the 1930s and '40s that allowed them to win World War II by 1941 and quickly rebuild in the aftermath.
• Atom RPG is a Fallout-like game that takes place in an alternate Soviet Union devastated by a nuclear war that happened in 1986. In this setting, the advanced Soviet technology of the pre-nuclear war world is more advanced than in our history, but it is hidden or dispersed in many abandoned Soviet military bases, abandoned underground bunkers, secret bases and scientific and technological research centers. It is sought after by both the ATOM and the Mycelium, which aim to control and dominate these advanced technologies.
• The Half-Life horror mod Paranoia eventually reveals that there was an attempt at creating a Super-Soldier using viruses, only for the project to go to hell and the first lab (KROT-1) was sealed off; however, the Russian Government continued in the KROT-2 and the current lab, KROT-3), which led to the events of the game after the protagonist stumbles upon the lab when a terrorist attack opens them, only for a signal in the KROT-1 lab to cause the more advanced super soldiers to turn hostile. The sequel continues this, ending with a blatant reference to 28 Days Later.
• In The New Order Last Days Of Europe, Andrei Zhdanov leads an "Ultravisionary Socialist" faction of the Communist Party of Komi that plans to create a technologically advanced Soviet Union that will defeat their fascist and capitalist enemies, unite the Earth, and go on liberate the aliens across the stars and create a Universal Soviet Federation. The Ultravisionaries dedicate significant effort and resources on science, no matter how outlandish they are; laser tanks, human cybernetics, shared consciousness, even telepathy are just some of the projects they can pursue, and they're trying to develop these things in the 1960s. Almost all of their projects fail because Zhdanov only promotes projects that support his ideology, regardless of their actual scientific credibility.
• Zigzagged in Generation Zero. Several of the robot models the player faces are Soviet in origin, including the only true flying enemy. However, these robots are said to have been created in response to the Swedes' own war robot program... a program in turn created out of fears of Soviet aggression. Additionally, given the Turned Against Their Masters nature of the setting, the only practical difference between the two groups of robots is their propensity to attack each other as well as the player.
• Played With in Ring of Red, where both factions of the Cold War have their own Humongous Mecha (AFW) bias: Soviets prefer more advanced Anti-AFW units (Although some internal factions push independently the unsuccessful twin turret-style mecha), Americans prefer the older Spider Tanks to mount huge cannons... And both Japanese factions, backed by Soviet or German-American developers, use mostly older Light and standard units. However, the plot kickstarts when the Communist Japanese faction steals a seemingly more advanced German-Japanese Anti-AFW Super Prototype from the Capitalists, although the stolen Anti-AFW turns out to have been developed by Capitalist defectors in the Communist faction and financed with German backing, which means that the advanced weapon was all along Communist, and that the German developers are secretly selling weapons to both sides... Ironically, this incident is merely a cover-up to the Communist theft of a German-American Loophole Abusing-superweapon.)