MOTHER: welcome drone_0xff2e01
MOTHER: purge earth --force
MOTHER: set_target main_core
POD: dock space_station_ff0411
Inhuman. Relentless. Unstoppable. You have only one purpose... MURDER.
BUTCHER is a hardcore (in two ways) Abuse-style side-scrolling shooter developed with the involvement of Transhuman Design and Phobia Game Studio (the latter would which later bring us Carrion), released for the PC in 2016, pitting the player in the tiny pixelated shoes of a cyborg drone programmed to annihilate the last remnants of humanity.
The game contains examples of:
- Action Bomb: There are some Ninjas with bombs strapped on them.
- Airborne Mook: There are handful of jetpack-wearing enemies armed with some of the weapons The Drone can use (including chainsaws). Later levels would also introduce troopers armed with sawblades, vultures as well as flying rocket-launcher armed police cars.
- Apocalypse How: The drone's goal is to cause this to Earth.
- A Space Marine Is You: drone_0xff2e01 is sort of this, an evil one at that.
- Bladder of Steel: Invoked. You can pause, but the pause menu is prefaced with this message:Real Men Don't Pause
- Bottomless Magazines: Finite ammo but no reload button.
- Boss-Only Level: The final level is this.
- Cats Are Mean: The jungle levels feature cougars as a fast and formidable but vulnertable enemy type.
- Chainsaw Good: Your melee weapon of choice. There are also jetpack enemies armed with dual chainsaws.
- Chekhov's Volcano: With a world like Volcano Research, you probably expect that it will explode, which it does on the level's final stage.
- Checkpoint Starvation: None of the levels have any mid-level checkpoints. With that said, not many of them are lengthier than few minutes if you'd ever be semi-competent enough at the game.
- Crapsack World: The city episode being named "The Last City" implies not that much of humanity remained at the time of the game's setting.
- It is also shown that something happened to the moon that resulted in being defaced.
- Critical Existence Failure: At 1 HP the drone remains as potent as ever before the next hit would reduce it to gibs.
- Collection Sidequest: A lot of the levels feature at least one or two Skulls to be collected. Obtaining 20 of them and beating the boss unlocks the Impossible difficulty.
- Convection, Schmonvection: The lava is only as lethal in direct contact.
- Destructive Teleportation: Each time you enter the gates, you explode into a bloody pulp before returning to normal on the other side.
- Easy-Mode Mockery: The "casual" difficulty is available as DLC named W.I.M.P.
- Expressive Health Bar: The skull - implied to be drone_0xff2e01's mask - on the upper left of the screen, in the similar vein of Doomguy's face leers left and right, "screams" as it gets hit and gets increasingly destroyed as the player takes damage.
- Fission Mailed: At the end of the game you'd get locked out of the ecape route after causing a core meltdown. By then your mission is already complete anyway.
- Flipping the Bird: The achievement for beating the game is just called "F#@$ You <insert difficulty here on anything above hard>". There's also the ending itself, see Shout-Out below.
- Flunky Boss: The Guardian - the final and only boss of this game - would receive assists from jetpack-wearing enemies. Even though it tends to kill them off with it's own weaponry.
- Genre Throwback: The game's steam store page advertises a brutal carnage in the spirit of Doom and Quake. With the side-scrolling perspective, the game is also easily one to the likes of Abuse.
- Glass Cannon: You get to be armed to the teeth and your basic shotgun can one-shot your typical enemy at even a medium range, but even on the "easiest" difficulty level you can die pretty quickly.
- Gorn: Even with the low resolution pixel art the game manages to pull this off. You can literally paint the surfaces blood red with your chainsaw (and other means).
- Going Critical: drone_0xff2e01 gets to blow up the Earth this way, even when he gets locked out of his escape in the process.
- Harder Than Hard: The difficulties after Hard, naturally. Each of them give you less and less health and the last two (hardest and impossible) disable health and armor pickups.
- Hyperspace Arsenal: drone_0xff2e01 eventually amassess all of the 6 available weapons at once.
- Hub Level: The space station essentially serves as the interactive episode select.
- Idiosyncratic Menu Labels: While the game doesn't reinvent the menu labels, it does spice up the prompt that pops up when you want to (re)start (over) the game in a profile that already has a save file in progress (or deleting the save profile), the choices being titled as:No, I Want To Continue/No, Don't Delete It (cancelation)Yes, Fuck This Shit (confirmation)
- Inertial Impalement: There are plenty of hooks around in the levels the player can kick people onto.
- Interface Screw: The player taking damage briefly adds noise to the screen for a split second.
- Jungle Japes: The Jungle Outpost levels, and to a lesser extent Volcano Research Station.
- Kill It with Fire: A flamethrower is present as a weapon, as well as being able to kick the enemies onto the fire of any sort.
- Last Bastion: The Last City seems to be the main holdover of humanity.
- Lethal Lava Land: Volcano Research Station takes place in a Volcano Lair.
- Level Editor: The game comes with one, complete with Steam Workshop support.
- Ludicrous Gibs: Would be weird for a game like this to not feature them.
- Mini-Mecha: Present as an enemy type.
- A Molten Date with Death: The Ironworks Facility and Volcanic Research Station levels feature plenty of lava pits, the last level of the latter episode even involving rising pools. There's also the Shout-Out below.
- Ninja: Yes, the game has them as an enemy type, charging at drone_0xff2e01 with their swords screaming.
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Nintendo Hard: The game's tagline says it all. - Organic Technology: The Mini-Mecha enemies are arguably this, considering they wail out a lot of screams of agony as they die.
- Piranha Problem: Present in the water pools of the Jungle Outpost levels.
- Quick Melee: The game has a kick button which merely stuns normal-sized enemies unless you'd happen to kick them onto anything lethal.
- Rail Gun: Present as a late player weapon, piercing capabilities when fully charged included. Has an achievement for killing ten enemies with a single shot.
- Red Eyes, Take Warning: drone_0xff2e01 seems to be sporting these (per key artwork like the picture above) and is even represented within the tiny ingame sprite.
- Repetitive Audio Glitch: The Mini-Mecha mooks wail out looped screams before eventually winding down.
- Retraux: The game goes for a zoomed-in, pixelated aesthethic with the player character and the mooks of his size not having much more pixels per sprite than Lemmings.
- Scenery Gorn: The Last City especially looks to be quite in disarray.
- Shout-Out: The ending is one to Terminator 2: Judgment Day, with Flipping the Bird out of a lava in place of a thumbs up.
- The achievement icon for collecting all of the skulls is the Predator mask.
- Smashing Hallway Traps of Doom: Handful of levels feature this.
- Standard FPS Guns: While not exactly a First-Person Shooter, the game does have a number of classics: A chainsaw, shotgun, assault rifle, flame thrower, grenade launcher and a railgun.
- Stuff Blowing Up: Especially happens any time you clear an episode.
- Suicide Attack: One enemy type has a bomb strapped to him that charges towards you.
- Suicidal Overconfidence: Yeah, Ninjas, I'd dare you to charge screaming at heavily armed Cyborg that dons at least a chainsaw if not something even more powerful.
- Taking You with Me: drone_0xff2e01 gets to overload the reactor but ends up getting locked out of his escape, melting in the lava in the process. Earth still gets blown up all the same.
- Terminator Impersonator: The drone shares an obvious similarities to the Terminators of the Terminator franchise. Killer Robot? Check. Glowing Mechanical Eyes? Check. Make reference to Signature Scene from the franchise? Check.
- Unspecified Apocalypse: Something happened that caused civilization on Earth to be ruins, the Moon being defaced, and Earth's core needing the Guardian to protect it in the first place. Whether it was caused by the invading cyborgs from space, humanity itself, or something else entirely is unclear.
- Used Future: To reflect the dying state of humanity and the world, its technology and metal looks worn and used. Even the MOTHER ship that the cyborg comes from is in dire straights, with one part of the ship having water leaking. This aesthetic it shares with its Doom predecessor.
- Video Game Cruelty Potential: In addition to simply shooting and shredding people, you can also kick them onto hooks, lava pits, piranha pools, Saw Spiders etc.
- Villain Protagonist: Picture Doomguy going rogue and you'd get a decent idea.
- Volcano Lair: Volcano Research Station levels takes place in one.
- Ultra Super Death Gore Fest Chainsawer 3000: Fitting title, check. A chainsaw as your starting melee weapon, check.
- You Are Number 6: "drone_0xff2e01" as he's refered to while being contacted from his mothership en route to Earth's space station is the closest we ever have for our "protagonist's" name.
