Abusing these Game Breakers ought to make these Survival Horror games much less frightening.
Games with subpages:
Other games
- Eternal Darkness:
- The game features a magic system centered around a rock-paper-scissors dynamic, with the magic of each god canceling out one of the other gods but being canceled by the third. The player can discover a magical rune of a fourth god, Mantorok, that is more powerful than all of them. An especially notable effect of the Mantorok rune is the ability to make yourself invisible, essentially rendering all non-boss enemy encounters optional.
- It makes "Enchant Item" poison an enemy if you enchant the weapon you strike them with. Mantorok dispels ALL other magicks (you usually have to counter with the right color)...this can be embarrassing if you forget it dispels your invisibility too. Lastly, it also soups up your shield spell to poison any enemies who attack you. Normal shields just repel attacks without damaging the enemy. Truly a game-breaking rune. The game is hard up to Edwin Lindsay's level (the archaeologist...the rune is found in his level) After that, cake, baby!
- Easily the biggest game breaker of all is the Recover spell. With this spell you can use magik to heal your health and sanity. But since magik is itself regenerated though the simple act of movement, this essentially means this spell grants the player unlimited health and sanity. It makes what would be a challenging game a piece of cake, aside from the fact a couple of enemies can also use it.
- Parasite Eve's Game-Breaker is special in two ways. First, it is not possible to have one in the first playthrough. Second, the game does not actually have a single overpowering gun, but features a "weapon modding" systems to allow players with enough time and patience to craft their own personal Infinity +1 Sword. Tools and Super Tools are single-used items that can transfer Stat Bonuses (+ damage, + capacity) or other features (Critical up, Burst fire, etc) from a weapon to another, destroying the original in the process (in case of Tool). These items (especially Supertools) are rare in the first playthrough, so how powerful the player's gun is depends for the most part on how many weapons (and tools) they manage to find and strip the bonuses from. The second playthrough, however, features a brutal Bonus Dungeon, where players can collect Rare Trading Cards to trade for "Tool Kit" (unlimited Tools) and Supertool Kit (unlimited Supertools), and a ton of new weapons with bigger and better bonuses. After piling up stat bonuses on their favorite weapon, players can then supplement it with devastating features, such as more Critical, Command x2 or Command x 3 (allowing you to take 2 or 3 actions each turn), Burst (hit multiple enemies), etc and especially Cyanide rounds (each bullet has a chance to One-Hit KO) ... Also, the gun can be carried over to subsequent playthrough, and thus can be as powerful as the player is willing to spend time to upgrade it. Players can choose their favorite guns based on Base Damage and Range(Rifle), Aiming Time - Time between shots - Time between turns (Pistol or SMG) and number of feature slots available.
- Parasite Eve 2 has a cleverly disguised game breaker, which may or may not be intentional. The game is generous with one type of ammo: 9mm parabellum. The critical hit mechanism seems to be this: the lower the firing rate, the higher chance you have at a critical hit. For example, if you want more critical hits, use single shot instead of three round burst for the M93R or M4. However, the "most powerful" weapon in the game is the paltry P8, where 70% of all shots are critical hits. So while the M4 will rack up about 30 damage for a 3 round burst, the P8 will be getting in the neighborhood of 10 per shot on a critical hit. Couple the P8 with the Spartan round, you'll be doing 30 damage.
- In the earlier Resident Evil games you could one shot any zombie with the shotgun by using the simple trick of aiming as high as possible and then firing as soon as the zombie was about to lunge. It feels sort of awkward at first and takes a little practice. Once you have the timing down you'll be able to kill the vast majority of the enemies you face and still have piles of shells left over. All the power weapon ammo can be set aside to cheese the bosses and the few stronger enemy types (that would probably represent a much greater threat if ammo was as scarce as it was intended to be). Sadly, this is severely nerfed in the 2002 REmake, where neither the shotgun nor the magnum is guaranteed to behead a zombie in one shot anymore.
- In the Resident Evil Remake for the Nintendo GameCube, using the Grenade Launcher Glitch could give the player unlimited grenade launcher ammo, as all they have to do to get more is repeat the glitch process. This made the entire game ridiculously easy. Well, if you are playing as Jill, that is.
- In Resident Evil – Code: Veronica, the knife. Yes, THE KNIFE. In this game, the knife has the interesting property of detecting multiple hits. This allows you to easily attack anything too slow to put you in a Cycle of Hurting. Even Hunters can be easily taken down this way. This means that you can save your ammo for nastier enemies. It's a piece of cake to beat the game this way with handgun or even shotgun ammo in the triple digits.
- Cryostasis, in its original release, was a tough game, chiefly due to frequent occurrences of That One Boss together with some semi-nerfed weapons, not to mention a non-adjustable difficulty level (example: one boss comes at you with dual, continuous-fire machine guns and more hit points than a medium-sized continent, and all you've likely got is a flare gun, a bolt-action rifle that takes an age of the world to cock and ready between shots, and one sub-machine gun with maybe ten rounds left in it if you've been really careful). When the developers released a patch, among performance increases and the addition of PhysX components, they added a "water cannon," presumably in an effort to rebalance gameplay and also show-off PhysX on the weaponry. This weapon massively breaks the entire game, since it fires continuously without reloading, pins any enemy in place whilst dealing damage and so stops him from firing back, and uses icicles as ammo, which you can find stuck to the walls, floor, ceiling and pretty much everything else in every single area. In short, this patch-applied weapon took a game that was brutally, gruellingly difficult (almost a broken game, in fact, through the sheer difficulty of beating some of its deadly enemies using only slow-firing weapons with a chronic shortage of ammo), and swung it ridiculously far in the other direction, making it almost insultingly easy.
- If you're willing to pony up a measly $4, you can utterly break the original Dead Space by downloading the Advanced Unitology Suit, which is not available in the normal game. The suit itself is heavily reinforced and features 60% damage resistance, which is twice as much as the next most-powerful suits (the Scorpion and Astro Suits, which are DLC releases). It makes the post-game unlockable Military Suit look like a joke, and it comes included with three extra weapons that deal more damage than their original counterparts. It essentially turns the game into a cakewalk, as players will be able to stand around and let Necromorphs whale on them for extended periods of time, rendering the entire "survival" part pretty much trivial... and don't forget, you can access this DLC content right at the beginning of the game. Have fun.
- To a lesser extent, the console-exclusive armours (Obsidian and Elite for PS3 and Xbox 360, respectively) would net you a suit with inventory space equivalent to the end-game suits (though lesser armour protection) for a measly $1.50. What truly made it game-breaking was that they were free for the first few months following release.
- The humble Pulse Rifle can be impressively broken in both Dead Space 1 and 2. Most players ignore it because it requires far more precision to use than the Plasma Cutter, does less damage initially, and is portrayed as nearly useless against Necromorphs in cutscenes. The truth is that once you get used to it, it becomes far and away the most versatile and effective weapon in the game. The lacking damage is overcome by the fully automatic fire rate, and a single burst can still dismember Necromorphs without issue. The huge ammunition capacity (75, compared to 10 shots from the Plasma Cutter) means you won't care if you miss a few shots here and there, and it takes far fewer shots on average to kill a Necromorph than the Necromorph's corpse will drop once dead. Entire hordes can be swiftly turned into mincemeat on even the highest difficulty with just a steady hand and a decently upgraded Pulse Rifle.
- In Dead Space 3, the demo reveals a rather potent game breaker if you fool with the weapon crafting for a bit. Take a large weapon frame, and place on the top a military component, with the tip that allows for fully automatic fire. On the bottom, place the survey charge, with the tip that converts it into a rocket launcher. On the top add-on, place the component that prevents you from being harmed by your explosions, at the bottom add-on the part that improves explosives. Now, in the chips, place 4 +2 attack chips on top. On the bottom, place 4 +2 Clip Size chips. You now have a weapon that has as a primary attack a rapid fire, high clip size attack that does insane damage with high precision, and the bottom can shoot 3 rockets without reloading. Depending one how quickly you can make this in the full game, this may either be a massive game breaker, or an Infinity +1 Sword. Either way, happy hunting.
- The telemetry spike with a tip to change it into a chain gun and a force gun on the bottom is a nearly unbeatable combo. While it lacks the perfect accuracy of a pulse rifle or seeker rifle, its rate of fire means it does more damage in the same amount of time, and unless you are trying for head shots on humans, you don't NEED perfect accuracy, as most distant targets (like boss weak points) are large enough that nearly all shots will hit anyways. The force gun will allow you to knock back any enemy who gets too close, or any group that tries to mob you to death (Feeders, being incredibly weak, will often die from a force blast if it has an elemental add-on effect to it), and you can then open fire with the chain gun. With chips to boost clip size and damage, you can body shot to death most enemies in less than a second, and if you aim for the legs first, then you can accelerate the process, as their bodies will drop into to bullet spray once their legs go out. You can save the rocket launcher for the bosses. In new game plus, with +3 chips available, this weapon can take out entire attacking waves without the need to reload.
- The military engine + precision tip = the Seeker Rifle. A semi-auto sniper rifle in a game that requires you to dismember jittery opponents doesn't seem appealing, but it more than compensates for its slow fire rate and clip in terms of pure, raw damage. The default weapon can kill most enemies in two hits, regardless of dismemberment, and with the later-game damage upgrades, you just need to hit somewhere vaguely on their body to send them ragdolling. Granted, you shoulld probably take another weapon against smaller, swarming enemies, but against any human-sized or larger enemy, this weapon is an OHKO.
- The Shish-Ka-Boom: A telemetry spike default tip combined with a detonator module. The primary attack impales the enemy and knocks him back. Then, trigger the detonator, and BOOM! The enemy is torn apart by the explosion, damaging any enemies unfortunate enough to be nearby. While the detonator has a low clip size, this weapon is highly effective against humanoid enemies, and can often take out both the target and any enemies that were standing behind him when you trigger the blast. Combine with a safety guard and an explosion amplifier, and you have officially redefined the term "Boom-stick".
- The Crush Lens from Fatal Frame II: Crimson Butterfly, which one-shots pretty much every ghost in the game, even on Hard mode.
- On Dead Island, Sam B and blunt weapons. The reason why is simple: all weapons have the Force attribute, which basically determines how much stamina damage is done with a hit. If an enemy runs out of stamina, they fall down. If a downed enemy is hit, force is transformed into damage. Sam B, the blunt weapons specialist, gets huge boosts to blunt weapons force and damage. Here's the breaker, though: blunt weapons break bones when targeted on enemy limbs, and since enemies don't have a crawl animation, a broken leg is an instant kill. Use kicks and attacks to knock an enemy down, then swing once on the leg, and it's an instant kill. While this is less effective on living enemies and any zombie brute level or higher, this skill allows you to easily wipe the floor with walkers and infected, which are far more common, the only drawback being that the high force and long range blunt weapons like the Sledgehammer or the Wrench tend to be really slow and drain a lot of stamina.
- Or if you see or hear them then jump up onto a car. Walkers and infected typically cannot touch you there (typically, a lucky strike or rush might do it) allowing you to crouch with anything the size of a sickle or bigger. Best seen in the Quarantine Zone, doing this causes the infected to completely flip and spawn em masse, leading to some easy kills. Do this at the start by running into a bedroom and then killing off the high powered Infected will lead to you levelling up your extremely bad tempered character at a insane rate.
- Since the game allows Co-Op and characters aren't locked when choosed by another player, having a team of 4 Sam B's is entirely possible
- The unlockable Unlimited Sub Machine Gun in Silent Hill 3. Yes, you read that correctly. You can get Unlimited Sub Machine Gun. Every last regular enemy is helpless before it; the SMG hit-stuns them, and with the unlimited ammo you can rat-a-tat-tat-tat-tat away 'til they drop. Even some BOSSES are made laughable by it.
- In the S.T.A.L.K.E.R. games, the 9x39 millimeter Vintar BC and SA Avalanche. The former is a silenced sniper rifle (the real-life VSS Vintorez) and the latter is a silenced assault rifle. They're mid- to late-game weapons in the first game (although it can be obtained about a third of the way through the game), but in the latter two they can be obtained within an hour of starting a new file. The main difference between the two is slightly better accuracy and damage for the Vintar at the cost of reduced magazine size (10 rounds instead of 20) and increased weight. In Call of Pripyat, the Avalanche can have a scope mounted, making it a roughly equal substitute for the Vintar. Both of them hit like a truck and can one-hit-kill any enemy with a headshot from an absurd distance once you adjust to their use, to the point that a group of bandits around a campfire won't react when one of their buddies suddenly drops dead. The ammo is relatively heavy, but with the amount of damage that it deals out you won't need nearly as much. Both weapons are also equally useful up close, making it simple to use the Vintar as a hellishly powerful battle rifle.
- Another breaker (crossing over with Disc-One Nuke) is the Tunder assault rifle, the fictional counterpart to the OTs-14 Groza. Normally chambered for 9x39 millimeter like the Avalanche and Vintar, a unique version exists that is chambered for the incredibly common 5.45 millimeter (the common AK round you'll see thousands of over the course of a single game) but still does the damage of a 9x39 millimeter, allowing you to hit far above your weight class at that point. It occasionally spawns in the starting vendor's inventory, allowing you to buy it if you scrounge enough cash very early on and set yourself for weapons for the first half of the game. If it doesn't spawn in Sidorovich's inventory, it can be found on a Duty member. If you aren't willing to piss off Duty to get it, just wait for the environment to kill him off and loot his corpse.
- In Blue Stinger, you can purchase a Sumo shirt for Dogs relatively early in the game. When equipped, it changes his melee attack to a sumo slap that is fast enough to hit-stun just about anything that comes close enough, up to and including several minibosses, and he keeps doing it for as long as you hold down the attack button.
- The Wrestling shirt, too. It's near useless if you use it at a standstill, but if you attack while moving, Dogs does a dropkick so powerful it can decapitate zombies in one hit. Not very useful in tight quarters, but there's enough open spaces in this game for this to really shine.
- The Slendrina mask in The Twins disguises you so the enemies won't attack you. You can wear it as long as you want. The only flaws are that it obscures your vision a bit, you can't hold some items or do some things while wearing it (requiring you to take it off and interact with the other things before putting it back on), it obviously won't work if you put it on while they can clearly see you doing so, and it doesn't work on the giant beetle.
