Death from Above

Luckily, Sonic's Fire Shield will protect him.^note Tails is in for a fun time, though.

"Justice rains from above!"

— Pharah when casting her "Barrage" Ultimate, Overwatch

Sometimes, it's just simply the most expedient solution to your problem. After all, why stomp around on the ground, wading through hordes of enemies just for the hell of it? Whether it's (un)holy smiting, meteor showers, nuclear weapons, bricks from bi-planes, ordinary ordnance, or good old napalm, there's lots of ways to rain Death From Above on those below. There's something about Death raining down from the sky that is almost Biblical; it's fear and awe inspiring because there is nothing the target can do to avoid this airborne doom but "duck and cover". It is at once a powerful and impersonal way to threaten or actually kill someone, hence a great way to establish a villain's power and threat as being on a planetary scale; on the flip side it also makes the airborne cavalry come to save the hero look angelic and omnipotent in comparison to the efforts of the heroes.

Listed below are a few ways to rain this holy judgment:

• Airborne Artillery's attacks outrange all Anti-Air weaponry in the game.
• Anvil on Head, when an anvil falls on your head.
• Beak Attack, when nasty birds dive on you beak first.
• The Bolt of Divine Retribution usually comes in such a form.
• Bombardier Mook, which specializes in dropping things down on top of you.
• Colony Drop, for the space age equivalent of dropping a house on a witch.
• Cool Plane, for raining bombs and missiles of all kinds down on your foes.
• Deadly Droplets: Droplets of various substances that hurt upon contact.
• Death by Looking Up for when the victim sees the object crushing them from above moments before they're pulped.
• Drop Pod, almost always.
• Drop Ship, for rapidly transporting hordes of The Cavalry.
• Flaming Meteor, when you really want the sky to fall on someone.
• Flying Firepower, for the ability to propel oneself and rain death at a convenient distance.
• Giant Flyer, because siccing dragons and/or giant birds on those who would oppose you is just too awesome not to do.
  • Kidnapping Bird of Prey, any example of the above attacking people and carrying them away, presumably to kill and devour them.
  • Terror-dactyl, monstrous and usually highly inaccurate pterosaurs attacking people from above.
• Goomba Stomp, apply feet directly to head.
  • Giant Foot of Stomping: when said foot is unusually large.
  • Ground Pound, a more powerful variant.
  • Sword Plant, the same but with a weapon.
• Gunship Rescue, where armed aircraft rain heaps of mass destruction upon ground-bound enemies.
• It's Raining Men, for when The Cavalry simply falls from the sky.
• Kill Sat: A satellite armed with a powerful anti-ground weapon.
• Macross Missile Massacre, dozens of missiles.
• Meteor-Summoning Attack, for when attacks summon multiple meteor-like objects on enemies.
• Napalm, for the smell of it in the morning.
• Nuke 'em, when mutually assured destruction is no big deal.
• Orbital Bombardment when a spaceship rains death upon a planet.
• Piano Drop, when a piano falls on your head from a window.
• Planet Killers are the extreme form of Death From Above.
• Rain of Arrows, for the medieval version of carpet bombing. Add in some Arrows on Fire for extra fun.
• Rocks Fall, Everyone Dies, for the basic Game Master's tool (not coincidentally).
• Save Sat: A satellite crashing down has a beneficial/defensive effect.
• Sword of Damocles: Certain varieties and the trope namer.

Occasionally leads to Riding the Bomb. For a more personal version of this trope see Vertical Kidnapping. Compare Save Sat, when a satellite crashing down has a beneficial/defensive effect like killing the villains.

Examples:

Animation

• The Space Fleet team led by Kapitan Bomba rarely uses weapons other than guns and grenades, but on few occasion they got issued a mortar with several different types of ammunition.

Anime & Manga

• 86 EIGHTY-SIX:
  • The Legion makes abundant use of the Skorpion artillery unit, equipped with either a 155mm howitzer or a multi-missile launcher.
  • The Republic of San Magnolia has numerous interception cannons right outside and on the Grand Mur fortifications, but their general attitude over the war meant they wouldn't use them to support the Eighty-Six they force to fight, much to Lena's chagrin when she's repeatedly denied authorization to do just that. Lena eventually hacks control of the Interception cannons to great effect.
  • Averted with aircrafts and missiles: the human nations can't use their aircrafts and long-range missiles due the Legion's Eintagsfliege swarms having the nasty habit of flying in the intake vents of any non-Legion flier and wrecking their engines and the ability to jam the guidance of any long-range missile, while the Legion was designed with a hard-coded ban on combat aircrafts and long-range missiles they can't overcome even after turning rogue. Hence their development of the Morpho with its 800mm-caliber railgun that can hit at hundreds of kilometers away.
• AKIRA:
  • In the manga at least, there is an orbital laser called Pink Floyd, which the good-ish guys hacked to put the trigger on a hand-held GPS.
    Random Mook: What? Was that supposed to do something?
  • In the AKIRA film, The Colonel orders SOL (Solar Orbital Laser) to attempt to target Tetsuo, a boy who has attained powerful but uncontrollable psychic powers.
• Itona Horibe of Assassination Classroom attacks Koro-sensei from above via Combat Tentacles. It's rather hard to tell how he's keeping himself off the ground.
• Digimon Starmon/SuperStarmon have the "Meteor Shower/Squall" attack.
• Servant Caster from Fate/stay night is rather fond of this, especially in the sequel Fate/hollow ataraxia. Being able to create Frickin' Laser Beams with a single word (whereas the regular magus would need 30 seconds and a small ritual), and capable of flight, she Beam Spams her enemies who have almost no chance of fighting back.
• Golden Kamuy: Wolverines in Karafuto climb to trees so they can jump down on preys and attack their spine.
• The Colony Drop and related forms are absolutely adored by the Gundam franchise. To wit:
  • The original Mobile Suit Gundam's backstory includes an attempted colony drop on Brazil that was derailed to Australia. Gundam 0083 gives us a decent peek of the ensuing crater bay carved from the 50-mile radius around what used to be Sydney.
  • Char's Counterattack more or less revolves around Char doing this and even begins with a preliminary meteor drop on Tibet.
  • Operation Meteor of Gundam Wing infamy was drafted as a plan to drop an asteroid on Earth, then seize control with the Gundams as the populace runs around in terror. Of course, we wind up seeing what happens when the Gundams jump the gun and their pilots' humanity interferes, but Dekim Barton decides to double back and try it right in Endless Waltz.
  • After War Gundam X starts with the Space Revolutionary Army devastating the Earth with mass colony drops. The series proper takes place After the End with everyone who's left scrambling to control the titular Gundam, whose Satellite Cannon was designed to shoot the things down.
  • The second season of Gundam 00 has the Memento Mori orbital cannon and its replacement, used to level entire cities, but most destructively to fire at an orbital elevator. Though the elevator (intentionally) survives, it automatically purges its outer shell to keep itself and the rest of the orbital ring from collapsing, and the stratosphere-and-below pieces on course to crater cities in Central Africa with tens of millions of people. This triggers a massive Enemy Mine scramble by the battling forces around its base to obliterate the fragments and save the cities, with repercussions for later meetings of the combatants and the force that fired the cannon.
  • Gundam SEED Destiny features an attempt to drop a destroyed colony on Earth. Despite the efforts of both the Federation and ZAFT, who together actually manage to take out the majority of the thing, enough damage is caused to re-ignite a second Bloody Valentine War.
  • Even SD Gundam Force gets in on the action towards the end of its first half, when Chief Haro conducts the largest-scale Bright Slap homage ever by dropping the hand-shaped Blanc Base on the Dark Axis's Big Zam.
  • In Mobile Suit Gundam: The 08th MS Team, the entire point of the Apsalus Project is to produce a weapon that can destroy the Federation's headquarters at Jaburo even through the layers of rock and earth protecting it. This is done by strapping a superhigh-powered beam cannon to a mobile armor designed to "bounce" high into the atmosphere and bombard Jaburo like a Kill Sat.
• HeartCatch Pretty Cure!: HEARTCATCH ORCHESTRA! Despite its name, the true nature of the attack is to summon a giant pink haired woman who punches her enemies from above with a PowerFist!
• In Heaven's Lost Property, Ikaros uses a cork-minigun in a shoot-out competition to get rid of a lot of participants. All whilst flying.
• JoJo's Bizarre Adventure:
  • JoJo's Bizarre Adventure: Stone Ocean features Viviano Westwood's Stand, Planet Waves. When active, Planet Waves pulls Meteorites towards Westwood, burning them away before they make contact with him. Ones flying towards other people though will not do so. Now imagine that power being active during a fist-fight...
  • Dio Brando's (in)famous steamroller attack, featured near the end of JoJo's Bizarre Adventure: Stardust Crusaders. ROADA ROLLER DA!!!
  • Jodio, the main character of JoJo's Bizarre Adventure: The JOJOLands, possesses the Stand November Rain, which can create rain. Jodio can alter the droplets behavior so that they affect different objects in different ways. The most common use: crushing the target flat or piercing it with the droplets' sheer weight.
• All of the Kings in K have a Sword of Damocles that hangs above their head and serves as an indicator of their powers. When these swords fall, however, they destroy a lot more than just the one King - miles of land turned into a crater, entire Clans killed, plus tons of civilians, the topography of the country forever altered, due to a King losing control and overextending his power.
• In Mazinger Z, Jenova M9 was a Robeast could shoot an enemy down several miles away. It tried to shoot Kouji Kabuto down from the atmosphere, where neither him nor Mazinger-Z could reach it. And in the sequel, Great Mazinger, Great Marshall of Hell fabricated a massive lens of ice orbited around Earth and worked like a Kill Sat by focusing sunrays in one single point and blasting it with a massive, hot-melting heat ray. It appeared only in one of the manga continuities, though.
• Mekakucity Actors: The fate suffered by Hiyori in episode 4 via many iron poles. The worst part is that this isn't the first (or last) time either.
• Hiigari must stop the Rocks Fall, Everyone Dies version in Psycho Staff.
• Hostile aliens destroy Earth's bases through showers of meteors in Space Carrier Blue Noah.
• In Valvrave the Liberator, the heroes do battle with Dorssia's crown jewel of planetary air combat-the Ideal Blume. L-Elf knows that its meant to spam relatively light machine gun fire down on land emplacements with weak upper armor, so when he selects a team to destroy it, he picks (among others) the Valvrave with the best shielding to defy this Trope. He even mentions that top-notch mecha like the Valvraves make that kind of airship obsolete.
• YuYu Hakusho: Averted with Hiei. He saves the team by pulling a switch to stop a falling ceiling from crushing them (again, this trope averted). When a giant boulder comes from the sky he actually moves out of the way in time. Although in Lanipator's Abridged version of the show he does get crushed, but still doesn't die.

Comic Books

• Kingdom Come: The Cavalry version of Big Damn Heroes coming from above can be seen in the second issue, in which it is dubbed a "Force from on high." Also subverted, as the superheroes involved do not kill anybody.
• Nextwave: Widdle cuddly bears... of death! Then subverted by Aaron Stack. "Fear my robot head."
• The skyfurnaces in Christian Gossett's The Red Star, mile-long, heavily armored airships armed with Warkasters (military sorceresses). Each kaster is suspended in a special chamber that allows her to project herself temporarily as a concentrated beam of heat. The effect is pretty terrifying.
• In Sonic the Hedgehog (Archie Comics), Dr. Robotnik assembled a fleet of airships and bombed Knothole into a crater, forcing the cast to relocate.
• Supergirl:
  • Red Daughter of Krypton: Bleez asks one of her teammates to use their flagship's enormous laser cannon to blast her and her brainwashed friend from space.
  • In Many Happy Returns, Supergirl's telescopic vision warned her that a meteorite was about to collide with Earth, which would kill all living beings. She wanted to solve the situation by pushing Earth out of the way, but Linda assured her that the Justice League would deal with it.
  • Subverted in Bizarrogirl. Dr. Light blasts Bizarrogirl from the upper atmosphere with a massive blast of light, but it’s intended to depower instead of obliterating.
  • In The Killers of Krypton: As battling Empress Gandelo, Supergirl flies high up above her and then unleashes her eye beams. Gandelo's body endures Kara's attack, but her heat vision mows down to ashes the island where Gandelo is standing on.
  • Supergirl's Three Super Girl-Friends: Right when she is finishing her Legioin Of Super Heroes admittance trial, Kara is almost squashed by a falling massive Kryptonite meteor.
  • In Supergirl Special, Kara's nightmare ends with Kara looking up and seeing a shower of meteors raining down on Argo City.
• Superman:
  • Superman vs. the Amazing Spider-Man: After taking over a Kill Sat, Lex Luthor sent a high-intensity laser probe into the Earth's atmosphere, scrambling the weather, threatening with completely unbalancing the entire Earth's ecology, and almost creating a hurricane which would engulf the planet.
  • The Krypton Chronicles reveals that Kryptonians deployed this kind of weapon during their last pre-unification War: the city of Kandor tried to end the conflict by dropping mountain-sized flaming disintegrating fireballs on the city of Erkol, which retaliated by launching an robot-aircraft armed with a massive sun-powered beam which turned Kryptonopolis into a blackened hole within minutes.
    "The robot-craft as powered by the Sun — and used sunlight as its weapon... Swiftly, its beam swept across Kryptonopolis, leaving blackened devastation in its wake... When its mission was finished, nothing was left standing in Kryptonopolis... and no one was left living!"
  • The Super-Revenge of Lex Luthor: A pirate gang are gunning Superman down when one missile drops on them and smashes their vessel into half. Said missile was sent by Lex Luthor, who didn't appreciate their attempt to steal him from the "pleasure" of killing Superman personally.

Fan Works

• A Feddie Story consistently shows the best weapon the Federation has against Zeon and their Zakus is aircraft. In particular, they are almost defenseless against high-performance heavy fighters or tactical bombers with heavy guided weapons; the only thing the Zakus can do is try to hide.
• In Frostbitten Flower, Celia's husband Jack was killed by a freak accident where a tree fell on him as he was building their baby's nursery.
• Guys Being Dudes: On a smaller scale, the Abandoned Playground Spark and Arlo have their picnic at almost falls down on Arlo after losing what stability remained to a Shaymin's Seed Flare.
• In Hellsister Trilogy, Satan Girl's planned method to kill the whole Daxamite race entailed a shower of lead across the surface of planet Daxam to poison the whole population.
  But, somehow, she'd have to do something about both planets. Daxam would be easy. A shower of leaden hail across its surface, and the dead would litter the ground in heaps beyond Hitler's and Stalin's dreams.
• HERZ: The American army built a bunch of satellites fitted with positronic cannons as a weapon against the Evangelions.
• Happens a few times in It Gets Worse, thanks to Taylor's power, though only half of them are actually lethal.
  • Kaiser and Hookwolf are both hit by a one-ton mass of ice after attempting to use Taylor as a hostage, they survive but are arrested.
  • Coil is nearly hit by nine anvils (and actually hit in several alternate timelines), which scares him into turning himself in.
  • Jack Slash is killed by a falling piano, which came from the same art exhibit as the anvils, after trying to use Taylor as a hostage.
  • Animos of the Teeth is killed by a flying manhole cover.
• The Night Unfurls: Combined with Playing with Fire, Olga can do this via an arcane artillery strike.
• In No More Heroes 3: Alternate Struggles, part of Black Night Direction's fighting style involves hovering high in the air and "abducting random crap and letting gravity take its course" which includes scorpions, cars, and unlucky civilians.
• Scootertrix the Abridged:
  • Equestria has a fleet of Earth Pony built zeppelins and the as of yet, unseen Pegasus cloud fortresses, who unite to bombard Sombra's zombie army, after the three way war begins in episode 18.
  • Also, Celestia used the zeppelins to bomb movie theaters, showing Kevin Bacons (who is one of her five arch enemies) movie. Makes Just as Much Sense in Context.
• Vow of Nudity: In one story, Haara falls into a pit and finds herself fighting a pair of large flaming serpents that would burn her if she tried to attack them. She wins by maneuvering them into position so an ally can crush them with falling boulders.

Films — Animation

• Ice Age: Dawn of the Dinosaurs: A flock of deadly pterosaurs follow and fly above the main characaters before they dive down closer to attack, with some attempting to try snatch the mammals up with their feet.
• Not strictly Death From Above, but in DreamWorks Animation's The Prince of Egypt the fiery hail is gloriously rendered as a serious, sky-lighting event.

Films — Live-Action

• 300:
  Persian: Our arrows will blot out the sun!
  Stelios: Then we will fight in the shade.
  • Later, it actually happens, and the Spartans have a "you just had to say it, didn't you?" moment while they all huddle under their shields and laugh.
• As Ripley states in Aliens, "I say we take off and nuke the site from orbit. It's the only way to be sure."
• Invoked in a grand display of helicopters and napalm bombing during Apocalypse Now. For perspective, Lt. Colonel Kilgore of the Air Cavalry division is somewhat reluctant to assist Captain Willard in his mission but when he hears that there is a good beach nearby occupied by the enemy that would just so happen to go Willard's way he decides to lead his men into battle in a formation of helicopters. As the helicopters close in on the Vietcong he plays "Ride of the Valkyries" to intimidate them and then they rain fiery death down upon them and as the helicopters land to let the men down onto the ground one of the helicopters humorously has "Death From Above" stamped on its nose. The battle goes well enough but Kilgore gets frustrated, that the enemy are being so persistent as he would just like to go ahead and surf the beach already, and decides to call in a massive napalm strike to end the battle. When all is said and done Kilgore temporarily forgets about the surfing and in the ecstasy of the moment notes how much he loves to watch explosions like that famously saying, "I love the smell of napalm in the morning (...) It smells like victory."
• Armageddon (1998) and Deep Impact both revolved around meteor impacts.
• Avatar:
  • Narrator Jake describes himself as this after he bonds with his Ikran. His feelings of lethality last up until he is attacked by Death From Above in the form of a predatory Great Leonopteryx almost five times as big.
  • The Na'vi word for the above apex predator, "Toruk", means "Last Shadow".
  • In the battle at the end, Jake and his Toruk lead the Na'vi flyers in a diving ambush on the RDA's gunships. Their bows, shown to lack the power to penetrate the gunship canopies when fired up from the ground, are much more effective with the force of a diving Ikran behind them.
• Avengers: Endgame has a Thanos being crushed by Scarlet Witch's powers ordering his mothership to start a bombardment even if his own forces will be hurt. It works in getting him released. But then some time later, the Death from Above is killed from Above as Captain Marvel arrives from space by smashing through and singlehandedly destroying said flagship.
• In The Blob (1988), Paul is killed at the hospital when the eponymous Blob drops onto him from the ceiling above.
• An unusual take on the trope occurs in The Boondock Saints. The Mafiya soldier is about to execute one of the protagonists when a toilet drops on his head.
• Das Boot: German U-Boot crewmen dread explosive depth charges the most.
• Danger Close: The Battle of Long Tan:
  • The New Zealand artillery decided the battle, and there's plenty of slow-mo shots of the shells coming down, as well as the absolute devastation the artillery wreaked on the attacking North Vietnamese.
  • There's also a scene where the U.S. Air Force shows up to drop napalm on the Viet Cong, a staple of Vietnam War movies. Almost averted as the Aussies are pinned down so badly that they are unable to throw smoke, and the smoke grenade they do throw is a dud, so the Americans have to change course and head for their next assignment. Smith has to give them a rough estimate of the enemy's location for the Americans to drop the napalm.
• Die Hard
  • Die Hard: John McClane kills the two Mooks manning the rocket launcher by dropping a packet of C4 plastic explosive, a computer, and an office chair down an elevator shaft from about 30 stories up.
  • Die Hard 2: John jumps out from an Air-Vent Passageway above a henchman when he's about to execute a civilian; the henchman catches the falling grate leaving him unable to defend himself before John shoots him multiple times.
• In Dracula Untold, Vlad invokes this when he drops his bat army right on top of the Ottomans.
• Ernest Goes to Camp: Takes the form of snapping turtles with parachutes. And these snapping turtles have a taste for human noses. Ernest even says, "Death from above!" Their descent is set to "Ride of the Valkyries," no less!
• The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies begins with Smaug raining fire over Lake City, destroying it and killing most of its inhabitants. When Bard finally manages to kill him by spearing his heart, he literally turn into this trope, as he falls over what was left of the city.
• Witnessed from afar in Lawrence of Arabia.
  Ali: God pity the men under those guns.
  Lawrence: They're Turks.
  Ali: Even so, God pity them.
• MonsterVerse:
  • The male MUTO in Godzilla (2014) employs a hit and run strategy using its wings, and dive-bombs the boat carrying the nuclear bomb the military intended to use to kill him, the female and Godzilla.
  • The spin-off graphic novel Skull Island: The Birth of Kong recycles the Vinestrangler — a creature that was cut from Kong: Skull Island, hanging from trees and using its Combat Tentacles to ambush and devour unsuspecting prey that wanders below it — as a Monarch creature profile.
• As part of things getting downright biblical in The Mummy, it literally starts raining fire from above as the Mummy gains power, setting people in the streets on fire and destroying a minaret.
• Red Dawn (1984). After the Soviet army and even Spetznaz commandos prove ineffective in wiping out the American guerrillas, the Reds bait a trap with some supplies that 'accidentally' fell off a truck, then send in three Hind gunships.
• The Rock has an example of one side of the protagonists doing this to another due to Poor Communication Kills: The VX gas threat was neutralised so late and the signal indicating the all-clear took so long to transmit to the bombers sent to destroy the Alcatraz facilities (holding the terrorists and the VX gas) that by the time it gets through, one missile has already been launched.
• The eponymous threat of Sharknado forces people to dodge falling sharks. At one point, the Hollywood sign also becomes a dangerous projectile. Sharknado 2: The Second One uses this trope to come up with what may be the first shark movie fatality caused by a whale shark.
• In The Skydivers, Suzy and Frank are gunned down from the air.
• In Starship Troopers, carpet bombing a planet is shown to be much more effective than simply dropping the Mobile Infantry on the ground and letting them shoot it out. This phrase is also on the tattoo that Rico, Ace, Dizzy and Kitten get before the Battle of Big K.
• The penultimate scene of Starship Troopers 3: Marauder has the Marauder team dropping from the night sky (first appearing as a halo of lights around Holly's head) in answer to Holly and Lola's prayers. After they're rescued a Q-Bomb is then used to destroy the entire planet.
• Star Trek (2009): The Narada uses a giant laser to drill to the middle of a planet, then drops in red matter to create a black hole in its core.
• Star Wars:
  • The various Star Destroyer-type vessels are equipped for orbital bombardment; the Expanded Universe says they were designed around the task, which is part of why they so heavily outgunned everything else in space at the time and had such an advantage against other vessels designed for starship combat. Being more discretionary, it wasn't really in the Rebel Alliance nor New Republics playbook even when they captured Star Destroyers, but in the novel Rebel Dream, they decide to exploit the fact that the enemy never faced the Galactic Empire. A Super Star Destroyer uses this tactic while defending — by using ground troops to force the enemy into specific locations on the planet below, where they could safely be blown to bits. Repeatedly.
  • And of course there's the Death Star, designed specifically to blow up a planet.
  • The Republic Attack Cruisers/Venator-class Star Destroyers from the prequel featured similar systems, but they had a unique drawback: because of the placement of their weapons, they were great for orbital bombardment, but crap for ship-to-ship combat. This was fixed with the later Star Destroyers.
  • Star Wars: The Clone Wars adds conventional artillery used by the clonetroopers, devastating enough that half a dozen wiped out an army.
• In the beginning of Suspiria (1977), after the first victim is killed, she falls through the stained glass skylight, several pieces of which end up impaling her roommate who's standing below.
• In Transformers: Revenge of The Fallen, the Decepticons attack the Earth by crash landing in different parts of the world, and then demand that Sam Witwicky surrender to them or they will destroy the world.
• Without Warning (1994) contains the Colony Drop variety as launched by an unseen alien presence.

Literature

• In 2312, most of the bases around the solar system have advanced systems to detect and protect them from meteor strikes. But they can't see the "pebble mob" - lots of tiny rocks launched independently with exact precision from millions of miles away, to land on the same spot at the same time.
• Age of Fire: This is how Wistala finishes off Gobold Fangbreaker. When she sees him and his Praetorian Guard fleeing from the siege of his fortress on boat, she grabs a fallen longpoon (an artillery projectile that's basically a giant harpoon with a ball-and-chain on one end), carries it as far into the air as she can, and then drops it on the boat. Gobold is presumably either crushed or drowned in the process.
• Anathem has Rodding. Very simple. Drop a large dense rod from orbit at hypersonic speeds into a dormant volcano. Boom. Repeat.
• And Then There Were None: Blore is killed when a marble clock is dropped on his head.
• Animorphs:
  • On a number of occasions, the Animorphs have a plan that involves having one of them (usually Cassie) fly as high as possible, then turn into a whale over water.
  • In the second-last book, Visser One kills the Auxiliary Animorphs and some of General Doubleday's troops by shooting the Pool ship's Dracon cannon from orbit.
  • Tobias whenever he's feeling hungry. Or in battle. TSEEEEEER!
• In The Big One, Nazi Germany gets the Quintessential Death from Above when it is wiped off the map by a rain of 232 atomic bombs dropped by B-36 bombers. The operation described actually used a real American warplan (AWDP-1) as its basis making this Truth in Television. The idea was to destroy German warmaking potential. It turned out doing that that meant destroying everything that went with it. And that meant everything.
• The Chronicles of Narnia: In The Horse and His Boy, the main villain, having somehow found himself at a higher elevation than his enemies, declares "The bolt of Tash falls from above!" leaping upon his enemies... and getting caught on a hook halfway down to dangle helplessly for the rest of the battle. As if that wasn't bad enough, the villain — having not learned his lesson — repeats the above line again during a rant against the heroes, prompting one of them to rub it in by asking, "Does it ever get caught on a hook halfway?" Apparently, yes, it does.
• Codex Alera: Since flying warriors (Knights Aeris) are pretty much standard in any army, this is very common, but Tavi's idea for how to use his vast numbers of mediocre Knights (most of whom can't fly properly) against an army in the third book really takes the cake: he has them scale up a telescope spell, and has Max use the giant lens to turn the sunlight into a freaking Death Ray.
• Conqueror: In Bones of the Hills, when Jochi and Jebe are being pursued by Khalifa, Jochi sarcastically suggests dropping boulders on the Arabs. Jebe thinks that's a great idea. And it works.
• In The Dark Side of the Sun by Terry Pratchett it's orbital bombardment with eggs:
  flying bot: Crackdown in this area is forecast in ten minutes. Don your protective clothing or seek chthonic safety.
  flying bot: Crackdown! Crackdown! Beware of the eggs!
• Death from the Skies by Phil Plait, a mostly non-fiction book about all the ways the universe could kill us.
• In Mercedes Lackey's Dragon Jousters series, Jousters ride dragons and Air Joust each other, when there are Jousters on each side of the war. When Jousters either don't find their enemy counterparts or manage to drive off or kill them, they turn on the ground armies, swooping down to have their dragons snatch up a commander, carry him high into the air... and drop him on his own forces. This is said to be highly demoralizing. One of the good Jousters, Ari, has a Heroic BSoD when the group of Jousters he was with, having some spare time, does this to the civilians in an enemy village, even joking about painting a target next time for more sport.
• The Dresden Files:
  • Used to unnerving yet hilarious effect in Blood Rites, where a frozen turkey falling from a commercial airliner kills a vampire in a "freak accident" caused by a malicious curse. The 'done' button popping out is a nice touch.
  • This happens offscreen earlier in the book when Harry is told that an early victim of the curse was hit by a runaway car... while waterskiing.
  • In Death Masks, Ebenezar McCoy killed a vampire who had challenged his former apprentice, Harry Dresden, to a duel (and had cheated). He did this by pulling a soviet-era satellite from orbit and making it crash onto the vampire's compound, killing the vampire and most of his retinue (sadly it also killed the humans they fed from).
• The final attack by the Voitusotar in The Lion Returns they launch a solar flare-based death ray that they could direct to hit whatever they want. The only people it ever hits are voitu because Curtis Macurdy shorts out the spell.
• In Footfall, the alien invaders have two versions of this. First, they use space-based lasers and the 'Rods from God' described below to destroy Earth's military forces and insurgents; later, after Kansas is nuked to defeat their first invasion they land the eponymous 'Foot' (an asteroid) in the Indian Ocean to try to force Earth's surrender (it doesn't work).
• The Ganymede Takeover (by Philip K. Dick and Robert Nelson) has The Shaft, a miniature psychotropic autonomic dart fired from a satellite, used to kill (on an individual basis) a vast number of key technicians and leaders during the alien invasion.
• The Holy Land: The Western Galactic Empire uses Psioray bombardment. Capable of wide-area bombardment, accurate to within one-tenth of a percent of the range fired, can be tuned to only affect specific groups of beings (even more specifically than species), and reduces the targets to less than an inch in height, while leaving, for instance, local birds, lizards, and predatory insects the same size.
• Legacy of the Aldenata:
  • The Posleen invasion was lead off by kinetic weapon strikes on planetary defense centers and various pyramid structures around the world (due to a resemblance to similar structures set up by the Posleen, who consider them important).
  • In Hell's Faire, the heroes and the entire population of Earth, are totally screwed until the fleet unexpectedly returns and uses kinetic bombardment to destroy every important target on the ground.
  • O'Neal's team finds out what it's like to be on the receiving end of it, in The Eye of the Storm (free sneak preview available here, containing the scene in question in Chapter Four).
• Lensman: As might be expected, the Lensmen get into this particular Arms Race. If you're lucky, they're just tossing bombs at you. If you get them really mad, they target you with a couple of planets moving at several times c towards each other, with their target in the middle. It's called the "nutcracker", and the results are described as the creation of a new, temporary star.
• The Leonard Regime: Bomber planes rain down destruction during the final battle.
• The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress: A lunar colony uses metal-sheathed multiton rocks tossed at Earth — a highly effective and cheap weapon — which can strike any point on Earth with the energy of a tactical nuclear strike.
• The Night's Dawn Trilogy: In The Reality Dysfunction, a special forces team floating down a river through enemy territory get some sudden and unexpected support when 5,000 precision-guided kinetic energy harpoons fired from a spaceship slam into the banks on either side. The harpoons are falling so fast no-one hears them until after they land. Then they really hear them.
• Used repeatedly in "No Need for a Core?", generally by dropping a specific raid boss on the target(s)
• Percy Jackson and the Olympians:
  • Zeus's Master Lightning Bolt is essentially a magical nuke that Zeus uses to wipe out particularly bothersome problems.
    "A two-foot long cylinder of high-grade celestial bronze, capped on both ends with god-level explosives." "The bolt that sheered the top off Mount Etna and hurled Kronos from his throne; the master bolt, which packs enough power to make mortal hydrogen bombs look like firecrackers."
  • Chiron to Percy in The Lightning Thief.
• Priscilla Hutchins: The Omega Clouds are gigantic, mysterious artifacts which travel through the galaxy, coming in waves about 8,000 years apart. They investigate planets they pass, and rain down electrical death from the skies on any civilization foolish enough to use right angles in their architecture.
• Riftwar Cycle: In the Darkwar Trilogy, an epic-level demon is going through a portal connecting from the Dasati dimension to the world of Kelewan. Pug's answer? Evacuate the world and drop the moon on top of the portal. He did it a couple of decades before, by firebombing the flagship of an invading fleet. His fireball bounced back, however.
• Seveneves: The "Hard Rain" consists of a 5,000 year long bombardment of Earth by pieces of the mysteriously exploded Moon sterilizing the surface of the Earth.
• Similarly, Shatterpoint had DOKAWs, De-Orbiting Kinetic Anti-emplacement Weapons, described as 200-ton metal rods with thrusters on them. They were lethal, if somewhat less than accurate.
• Sky Masters: A Chinese destroyer was about to nuke the city of Davao, the Americans neutralized it by dropping a satellite right on top of it.
• The Starchild Trilogy: In Rogue Star, the sun reaches out a tendril of plasma for a precision strike on Cliff Hawk's underground laboratory, where he's researching rogue stars. The results are unfortunate for the lab and the people inside it, but no more than annoying for the newly born baby star.
• Starship Troopers acknowledges that if you just want to kill stuff that lives on the surface, nuking it from orbit is usually much more effective. Two problems with this: the Bugs don't live on the surface, and while the Skinnies do, the humans are hoping to turn them into allies/trading partners in the future and don't want to completely wipe them out.
• The Tenets of Futilism: The final chapter ends with the protagonist and her family dying after months of hiding out on Alcatraz Island. Their cause of death? Missile fire from a predator drone sent by the American government.
• The War Against the Chtorr. In an interesting inversion, a group of renegades attempting to booby-trap a helicopter landing field are exposed to a counter-ambush when an orbiting solar mirror is suddenly turned on the area.
• Warrior Cats:
  • Firestar had a tree fall on him.
  • Word of God mentions that Firestar's father Jake died when he was sitting on a fence and a meteor hit him. This, however, was stated jokingly.
• Wing Commander: In Fleet Action, multiple Terran Confederation planets are bombarded from orbit by a massive Kilrathi fleet the humans are unable to stop, using antimatter warheads and dirty nukes specifically employed to sterilize worlds.
• The Winter War: Russian artillery bombardments and harassing airplanes are present more often than not.
• Young Wizards: This is mentioned to have happened in the history of Wellakh. Their sun is somewhat unstable and flared, burning half the planet to a featureless plain and killing anyone who was there at the time, along with a good number of their wizards in the effort to stop it.

Live-Action TV

• The 100: In season 4, we find out that the Grounders have bestowed the name "Skairipa" on Octavia for her budding reputation as an assassin. In their language, this translates as: "death from above."
• Alien Worlds (2020): The skygrazers' predators hunt by floating until they're above their prey and rapidly emptying their gas bladders, dropping like bladed stones onto their unsuspecting targets.
• Babylon 5:
  • At the end of the second season, the Centauri use mass drivers to bombard the homeworld of their long-time enemies the Narns. In Season 3, the effects are shown — including altered climate due to atmospheric dust.
  • Also almost the fate of Earth, at the end of Clarke's presidency of the Earth Alliance.
  • Later on, the Narn, with the help of the Drazi, proceed to Centauri Prime to return the favor, though they at least restrain themselves to only using conventional heavy weapons (causing untold thousands of deaths, as opposed to the Centauri's attack on Narn being essentially a WMD attack severe enough that even the Vorlons gave them a What the Hell, Hero? response.
  • The Expanded Universe provides information on the ground forces, revealing that Earth Alliance, Narn, Centauri, Orieni and Minbari all have some form of artillery (ranging from Earth infantry mortars to the Minbari gravitic howitzers that fire Antimatter shells) and aircrafts capable of attacking ground targets (ranging from the Minbari repurposed starfighters to Earth's strategic bombers). By no mere coincidence, these are by far the strongest ground forces in the setting.
• Battlestar Galactica (2003) begins with the nuclear annihilation of humanity by the Cylons. And toward the beginning of Season 3 when liberating New Caprica, Adama decides to attack by jumping the Galactica into the atmosphere and launching its fighters and shuttles from there, jumping back out just before hitting the dirt.
• In the opening of the TV spy movie Blue Ice, Michael Caine is attending the funeral of a friend killed by a chunk of ice that fell off an aircraft.
• The Brittas Empire: Gordon Brittas died in one episode when he was crushed by a water tank which had been crashing through the building.
• An episode of CSI had a victim who died when a raptor dropped a turtle shell onto his bald head as he was meditating in the desert.
• CSI: NY: One of the three cases in "Tri-Borough" involves a construction worker is found dead outside a port-a-potty. Fecal residue found in the injury — a hole in his head — is justified early on as contamination from the scene. Turns out, he was the victim of a very, very unlucky (and timely) defrosting of "blue ice" that fell from a leaky airplane stall.
• In the pilot episode of Dead Like Me, a toilet seat drops onto the main character from orbit, killing her instantly.
• Game of Thrones universe:
  • Game of Thrones:
    • The Night's Watch takes full advantage of their position atop the Wall to rain arrows, flaming barrels, and even a huge scythe down on anyone who tries to storm the Wall.
    • Whenever the dragons of Daenerys show up, viewers can count on people being roasted from above. For a specific example, Drogon drops out of the sky in Daenerys' darkest hour (surrounded by Sons of the Harpy at the Great Games) and immediately starts laying waste to her enemies. Especially evident in Season 7 when Drogon absolutely obliterates the Lannister/Tarly army, showcasing just how terrifying and destructive a mature dragon would be when used in combat.
  • House of the Dragon: The dragons Caraxes and Seasmoke have both been used in the War of the Stepstones to roast the forces of the Crabfeeder.
• The Good Place: Chidi Anagonye died when an air conditioning unit fell on him as he was standing outside his apartment trying to decide where to get lunch.
• In Kamen Rider Decade, about two-thirds of the way through the series, Kaitou takes to firing his Attack Ride - Blast upwards, causing it to rain down on a small area and hit several opponents at once.
• The usual outcome of the Lexx visiting a planet.
• Masters of the Air is a war miniseries about bomber pilots of the 8th US Air Force, the kind that brought much destruction upon Germany.
• This is how the Thunder Ultrazord from Mighty Morphin' Power Rangers' second season defeats enemies: Falling on them.
• In Power Rangers RPM, this is how Venjix is ultimately defeated, with Gem and Gemma shooting out the supports of the overhanging Command Center, causing the entire structure to fall right on top of Venjix's robotic form.
• Robot Wars had the drop zone, where an immobilized robot would be placed on a spot on the arena floor and something would be dropped from the ceiling (including a television, an oven, bowling balls, and one of the Video Games dropped a grand piano!)
• Sons of Guns had an episode where the crew rigged a machine gun to be door-mounted on a helicopter. The episode ended with them shooting it at a junked car on the ground, which exploded when it was hit.
• Stargate Atlantis has a scene when the Atlantis team wipe out the Asurans with a new naquadah-enhanced bomb. Subverted, at least in terms of effectiveness, when the Asurans rebuild as if nothing happened, make MORE shipyards, and attack Atlantis in revenge.
• Star Trek has shown cases of orbital bombardment a few times, and discussed the possibility a few times more. "A Piece of the Action" had non-lethal orbital bombardment (a precision phaser blast from the Enterprise set on stun).
• The storms featured in Storm Chasers frequently drop tornadoes, lightning, and hail big enough to smash an unprotected human skull on anyone unlucky enough to be in their path.
• The Twilight Zone (1959): In "On Thursday We Leave for Home", the V9-Gamma survivors are forced to take shelter from a meteor storm in a large cavern after the funeral of the woman who committed suicide. The rescue ship Galaxy 6 arrives as soon as the storm is over.
• The Twilight Zone (1985):
  • In "The Cold Equations", Group One's base on Woden was damaged by a meteor storm and its supply of the serum for kala fever was destroyed. Captain Thomas Barton's Emergency Dispatch Ship is on a mission to replenish their supply when Marilyn Lee Cross stows away.
  • In "Crazy as a Soup Sandwich", the demon Volkerps kills the medium Cassandra Fishbein with a bolt of lightning after she contacts him for Nino Lancaster.
• The Unit never shows the plane, just a missile coming out of nowhere like the fist of an angry god. On one occasion the boys joked about it a little.
  Jonas: Does the State Department know [that you traded a terrorist for me]?
  Bob: No. But the Air Force does.

Music

• Marduk's album Panzer Division Marduk has tanks, bombs and death as its theme. The song "Baptism By Fire" has the lines:
  Death from above — the hellfire will soon be unleashed
  Death rips the sky — domination gives praise to the beast
  Death from above — explosions is tearing your soul
  Death rips the sky — the bombing is reaching its goal
  Death from above — death or glory, there is no way back
  Death rips the sky — attack, attack, attack!
• Dance-punk band Death From Above 1979. And by extension, CSS's song "Let's Make Love and Listen to Death from Above"
• Jets'n'Guns features the titular tune in its OST.
• Regina Spektor has the sweetest song "The Sword and the Pen", which has the lines:
  What if the sword kills the pen
  what if God kills the man
  and if He does it with love
  well then it's death from above
  and death from above is still death
• Sabaton's song "Firestorm", being about the Allies' strategic bombing campaign of World War II, is all about this trope.
  Burn burn
  rage of the heavens
  burn burn
  death from above
  die die
  merciless killing
  burn burn
  death from above
• "Death from Above" by Turbonegro.
  Flyin' in on the wings of destruction
  with freedom in our eyes
  it's the death from above
  and everybody dies
• Metallica: The lyrics of "For Whom the Bell Tolls" allude to a scene described in the book of the same name, in which several soldiers die by an airstrike after taking defensive positions on a hill.

Pinballs

• Gottlieb's Gladiators shows a shower of fireballs dropping out of the sky and onto the game's virtual reality landscape.
• Bally's Wizard! depicts the bombers from Captain Walker's bombing run.
• This is a recurring theme of the "Ruiner" table of Ruiner Pinball. In addition to a bomber and two Nose Art gals dropping bombs, the right side of the table has a family anxiously looking skyward as more bombs fall down.

Roleplay

• Destroy the Godmodder has had multiple uses of this on all scales, from as small as an airstrike, to the UNSC Preston Cole doing orbital bombardments, and it doesn't even stop at having the entire solar system thrown at the godmodder. Probably one of the most notable examples would be ninjatwist's meteor strike that completely obliterated the PG side in one shot.

Tabletop Games

• Beast: The Primordial: An Ugallu's true form is usually some kind of flying monster — as befitting the Family that represents the fear that something from the sky is stalking you and could snatch you up at any moment.
• Dungeons & Dragons:
  • Numerous spells such as Flame Pillar, Flame Strike, Meteor Shower, Storm of Vengeance, Hail Storm, and Call Lightning. It's more common amongst Divine Spellcasters, because Gods enjoy this kind of smiting.
  • There's a frequently devised tactic relying on summoning and creation spells. Create a large rock five feet above your target's head and they die easily enough, or summon a horse over them, or whatever.
    • As of at least 3.0 Edition, if not earlier, the rules for such spells explicitly do not allow this, as they specify that summoned creatures/items have to appear on the ground. However, there are still a few ways to accomplish something similar — the Earthquake spell can cause a cave-in if cast in an underground cavern, while enemies can be buried alive by using Transmute Rock to Mud or Transmute Rock to Lava on a cave's ceiling.
    • The spell Cometfall exists explicitly to do the summon rock trick as an actual attack spell.
    • Dimension Door (4th level teleport, self + about 200lbs) + Feather Fall (2nd level, "take no falling damage"). Choose your rock. Touch it. Dimension Door. Drop the rock. The Forgotten Realms setting allows Fey'ri (half-succubus elf) characters to do this at level one, with an innate ability and wings.
  • There is a Tiger Claw technique in the Tome of Battle named Death from Above. You jump over your enemy, attack for massive damage, and then dismount anywhere next to the enemy.
• Battletech: "Death From Above" is a maneuver in which a jump- or flight-capable combat mech aims to land directly atop an opponent, with its plasma-based jumpjets firing. This maneuver is generally one of desperation because it stands a good chance of dumping both attacker and attacked on the ground where they will be easy targets for whoever wanders by or gets up first, but its effects are often devastating since mechs mount their cockpit in the head. Some larger mechs are specifically designed to carry it out such as the 90-ton Highlander, leading to the term "Highlander burial" for a light mech getting landed on by an assault-class. Given their firepower and bomb capacity, the larger fighters (aerospace or otherwise) of the setting can also qualify with regard to ground forces if used in the game. (Though the rules give the targets a fair chance of dropping even the biggest fighter out of the sky with a single hit.) The ultimate example, though, at least before the Jihad era brought nukes back onto the battlefield, may be orbital bombardment like the infamous destruction of the city of Edo on the planet Turtle Bay by Clan Smoke Jaguar.
• Netrunner has a powerful card named Death From Above with a telling bit of flavor text: "They drop rocks; I commandeer battlesats." Needless to say, there's also a card with the meaningful name I Got A Rock that will under the right circumstances hit the Runner with enough 'meat damage' to flatline him or her about three times over...
• Shadowrun: the MegaCorps maintain Thor systems (see Real Life below). Rumor has it that the Corporate Court will only permit a corporation to drop a Thor shot on a target with an Omega Order sanction. The last time they were openly used was during the offensive against Winternight immediately before Crash 2.0. One was also deployed specifically to kill Art Dankwalther, who had been using his bequest from Dunkelzahn's will to attack Novatech.
• Even space-combat game Starfleet Battles has a few in the Marines supplement for planetary combat. You can use Transporter Artillery (teleport a load of anti-personnel and anti-vehicular bombs over the enemy), or, should transporters not be feasible, load the bombs into a missile casing and have a fighter drop it as a cluster bomb. Then there's the fighters that can make strafing runs, and the dedicated ground-attack shuttles...
• Warhammer:
  • Warhammer Fantasy gives us the spells Comet of Casandora, Forked Lightning and Uranon's Thunderbolt. Pretty much Exactly What It Says on the Tin.
  • Previous editions also had a particularly impressive exploit based around this trope: anything which went from "Flying High" to ground level without going through the intermediate steps did an impressive number of high strength wounds to itself and whatever it *ahem* "landed" on. This was bad enough with Gryphons, Dragons and Giant Eagles and so forth, but some creatures (like Greater Daemons) were immune to non-magical damage (including falling damage)...
• Warhammer 40,000
  • Many Imperial vessels are capable of Exterminatus — an extreme version of Death From Above, which leaves absolutely nothing living on a planet it hits.
  • 40k also includes each and every type of Death From Above listed—even hails of arrows on feudal worlds.
  • They even have multiple ways to perform Exterminatus, from virus-bombing (which destroys all unprotected organic material on a planet) to cyclonic torpedoes (which shatter the planet's crust) or if used in the two-stage variant hitting the core for an Earth-Shattering Kaboom.
    • Colony Drop is disfavored, because the ships in orbit guarding the slowly moving asteroid or moon spend months doing nothing but waste fuel and rations when some ammo expenditure to kill anyone on the surface ends up coming cheaper and taking less time.
  • In the game, the army most relying on this is the Imperial Guard. They are normal humans... With lot of artillery.
• The Witcher: Game of Imagination has a simple rule of thumb regarding monsters - If it flies, your character is a good candidate for its dinner.

Toys

• Transformers: A favoured tactic of Swoop, of the Dinobots, who likes to drop TNT on his enemies while scaring the crap out of them in his pterodactyl mode.

Video Games

• Ace Combat: Many missions are ground attack missions, and you usually can pick how to rain death the enemy. Comes in flavors of multi-targeting missiles, fuel-air explosive bombs (just picture a very small nuke explosion), anti-ship missiles, fire-and-forget bomblet dispensers, more bombs of other sizes, bomblet dropping, and rocket spam. That's not counting the death ray of a machine gun the A-10A has. Did I mention even a fighter can use many of these? It's not just multiroles or attackers anymore.
  • In Ace Combat 5: The Unsung War, there's also the Kill Sat variant. The "Ark Bird" is a white huge manned aircraft that flies in the upper atmosphere layers, and is armed with a laser weapon that can shoot down and destroy everything in a large radius. Ace Combat 3 gets you to use one. The Kill Sat in that iteration will kill anything in one hit, unless when you're indoors (yes, you get to go indoors every once in a while).
  • Ace Combat: Assault Horizon:
    • The game ups the ante using the ASM, or Air Strike Mode. Attackers and Multirole-type planes can perform ASM to basically rain death with their special weapons, that gets a much faster reload and hence a literal rain of bombs can occur. This can also happen in multiplayer with many players ASMing the enemy base all at once.
    • Bomber planes does this in ASM, raining loads of dumb bombs a lot at once, or switching to lock-on capable Guided Precision Bombs. The Bomber is also available in Multiplayer, but with the limitation of only being selectable when the friendly base is below 30%, has no defenses aside from flares, and cannot attack unless a proper ASM point has been established, making it Awesome, but Impractical.
• Achaea: The Bard class has an ability named Death From Above, which allows them to jump from the trees directly onto a target to deliver significant damage. (they even scream out "Death From Above!" when they do it).
• Act of War, being a Real-Time Strategy game set 20 Minutes into the Future, brings loads and loads of opportunities to unleash death upon your enemies from above, bonus points since the mechanics and visuals have a sense of realism which is reinforced with Real Life units like B-2 and the Tu-160 bombers, just to give two examples, oh, and if you want the game has no population limits for building them or Tactical Weapons.
• In The Adventures of Lomax, there are enemies in the first world who fly in balloons and throw bombs at you.
• In Airfix Dogfighter, it would be the secondary weapons meant for destroying earth-bound vehicles and buildings. Also, the planes in general.
• Angry Birds 2:
  • The Golden Duck spell rains golden ducks on the towers to pop pigs and possibly topple towers.
  • In keeping with her falcon-like appearance, the new bird Silver divebombs her target.
• Armored Core:
  • Very common in arena fights against the heavies near the first rank. Most players have more trouble getting to the dude at rank 1 than beating him. The grenade happy psycho ex-con in AC2 destroyed many a PS2 controller.
  • Permaflight has been a viable tactic since the very first game; what flavor of death being rained down varies from good ol' rifles, grenades, MMM-style barrages, and even some snipers take to the air and pelt you with precision sniper rounds. This all was thought to end with Armored Core V's heavy reliance on buildings to even achieve height at all, but as it turns out, some ACs are just better at staying afloat and rain death upon the poor sods below. Except when the one below is a tank AC that is ready to rain bullets up...
• Assassin's Creed:
  • Assassin's Creed II: Ezio learns how to assassinate from above partway through.
  • Assassin's Creed: Brotherhood: You can signal your recruits, who are always watching from the rooftops, invisible until you call them, to obliterate rather huge enemy groups by a Rain of Arrows.
• Battlefield:
  • Battlefield 2: "Cartillery", air-dropped ground vehicles that crush anything they lands on. Also done supply crates.
  • Battlefield 2142: One of the most dangerous scenarios is a fully-loaded Air Transport. Though less menacing than planetside drops (since there are at most two transports available per side), there is more than enough destruction aboard in the form of two vehicle-mounted cannons for infantry, engineers with anti-vehicle weapons and mines, as well as two engineers designated as mid-flight repairmen (who can easily repair most damage). Only a concerted attack by the enemy (or an extremely lucky kamikaze transport pilot) can hope to stop the assault.
• Battle Zone 1998 has the Howitzer mobile turret for the Americans and the Dirty Communists, which can rain death from over a kilometer away. The sequel with its asymmetrical units has the ISDF Bomber — the most expensive unit — in the game which can One-Hit Kill anything bar the Recycler via the "Daywrecker" bomb and flies above the engagement height of most units. The Scions get the Archer, which functions like the Howitzers in the original game but with the addition of being able to fly before anchoring down.
  Bomber: Roger that sir, coordinates LOCKED, orders received... Bombs are away, good day sir!
• Binky Show: If you hear Binky giggle, it means that a flaming cart is about to fall from the sky.
• Bionic Commando: Spencer has a ground pound named after this trope. It can only be executed by jumping from great heights.
• BioShock:
  • BioShock 2: In the opening sequence, your character jumps off a balcony, right foot first. Did I forget to mention that an enemy's head is directly below your right foot when you do it? If you're curious, 500 pounds of force on someone's head via a diving boot tends to end a conflict.
  • In BioShock Infinite, the player has a nightmare vision of Manhattan under attack by the sky city of Columbia, emerging from moonlit clouds to rain fire on its streets. Later, the dream turns out to be a premonition of a Bad Future timeline in which a brainwashed Elizabeth assumes power over the city and uses it and her vast trans-dimensional powers to conquer the world (and possibly the Multiverse).
• Brain Dead 13: In the main entryway scene, Fritz will jump from the top and land on top of Lance, killing him and making a grave. This is easily avoided.
• Call of Duty:
  • Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare has a level called Death From Above in which you provide close air support from an AC-130U gunship. For the uneducated, the AC-130U has a left-side-mounted 25mm GAU-12 Equalizer, one 40 mm L/60 Bofors cannon and one 105 mm M102 howitzer. The Bofors was usually used as an AA gun, and the M102 is usually used in an indirect-fire artillery role. Using it as a direct-fire weapon from the side of a large cargo plane was something of a stroke of genius. Check The Other Wiki for more.
    • You can also call in airstrikes and gunships during missions like "Safehouse" and "Heat," or during multiplayer if you can kill enough people without dying yourself.
    • Sequel Escalation gives Modern Warfare 2's multiplayer sentry guns that drop for you to place, a missile from a Predator drone for you to control as it falls, a targeted air strike, a Harrier airstrike followed by a fourth Harrier that loiters in the area, launching missiles and firing its Vulcan, a Cobra or Hind (depending on which side) helicopter to fly around the battlefield attacking enemies, a heavily armored (two missiles to kill instead of one) Sikorsky MH-53 Pave Low to fly around attacking enemies even more effectively, a B2 Spirit bomber which delivers an airstrike that the enemy cannot see coming, an AH-64 Apache with you in the gunner seat, an AC-130 gunship with you again at the guns, and if you can get a 25 kill streak... you can launch a tactical nuke which kills everyone and ends in game in your favor. For balance reasons, you may only use up to 3 unique killstreaks per match. You may also call in care packages for you in Modern Warfare 2 for help which don't kill anyone alone — unless the crate falls on someone.
    • The Care Package or the Emergency Airdrop (four Care Packages in one go) however may randomly contain any of those killstreak rewards, meaning you can get Death from Above in your Death from Above. Yo Dawg.
  • Call of Duty: Black Ops adds such killstreaks as calling in a Huey and firing a minigun mounted at its side door, or call in an Apache or Hind gunship with you at the controls.
  • Call of Duty: Black Ops II ups the ante with the Hunter Killer Drone, a reimagining of Modern Warfare 2's controllable missile with the Hellstorm Missile, a coordinated triple airstrike, a quadrotor drone, an invisible chopper, A chopper that follows you, the good old Warthog providing strafing explosive airstrikes, a Lodestar dropping missiles, and a swarm of Hunter Killers.
• Castlevania: Circle of the Moon: Slimes start out on the ceiling and drop down when the player character is almost directly below them, trying to deal Collision Damage.
• Chrono Trigger:
  • The Big Bad destroys the future by burrowing from the ground and then pelting the globe with its spines. While fighting it, it also does something similar with a move called "Destruction rains from the heavens!"
  • When Lavos first falls from space during the prehistoric age it is also certain death for the Reptites and dinosaurs, as its fall causes an ice age, and thus their extinction.
• City of Heroes: Before the development patch that changed the mechanics of the archetype, a common method of garnering a high amount of damage very quickly for a Blaster was to gain altitude (either through a flight-based power or by ascending a skyscraper) and to drop to the ground below, near the enemy. The original Blaster design included an advantage wherein more damage would be dealt by suffering damage, and since the game doesn't let you die from falling damage directly, you were assured to ring off at least one good blast before you inevitably were torn to pieces.
• Clonk: "Meteor Strike" is one of the most expensive spells. It can be modified to drop liquid granite or monster eggs.
• Command & Conquer:
  • Command & Conquer: Red Alert 2: The Harrier, who sometimes says "death from above" when ordering it to attack something.
  • In Command & Conquer: Red Alert 3, the Soviets can drop orbital debris ranging from satellites to space stations on their enemies, along with any vehicles they picked up with their magnetic satellites.
  • Nod's nukes. And chemical missiles. Or the Scrin's Overlord's Wrath and the Rift Generator. Command & Conquer sure likes their superweapons. Bonus point for Specter in Kane's Wrath for being a stealth artillery that quote this trope word-to-word.
  • Command & Conquer: Generals: The three factions often use this trope: scuds / nuke / Ion cannon, paratroopers drops, huge bombs dropped from bombers, artillery shells, planes and helicopters (missiles, machine guns, napalm)... Requires superpowers or standard units, depending of which you want. In the Zero Hour expansion, there's especially a US subfaction which sticks deeply to this trope : an US general specialized in air forces. He also uses the phrase "death from above" as a taunt.
• Company of Heroes: The paratroopers have this as a battlecry. They can also use the more direct version of this trope with the ability to call in strafing runs and bombing runs from P-47s. Meanwhile, the Panzer Elite Luftwaffe tactics can order Henschel Hs-129s to patrol a point, wiping out whole fleets of Allied vehicles with their 75mm cannon, and the Brits can call in gliders full of Commandos. And let's not even get started with the artillery...
• In Conqueror's Blade, players on attacking teams can call for their army's trebuchets to launch barrages of huge explosive fireballs at any point on the map - the medieval equivalent of airstrikes or (more literally) artillery barrages.
• In Dark Devotion, the late game boss Elinor can jump high into the air and come crashing down on the player's head seconds later, spearpoint first.
• Dawn of War:
  • The Space Marines special unit, the Assault Marines, have this phrase as a battlecry. The same faction also uses drop pods in a planetary assault. The commander unit can call in an Orbital Bombardment as well.
  • In Dawn of War 2, the Assault Marines actually do damage in the single-player by dropping down — in the multiplayer, they knock infantry down.
• Deadfall Adventures: The supernatural bosses like to use this sort of attack, in addition to summoning Mooks. A glowing circle will appear beneath you and slowly grow in size, accompanied by an ominous rumbling. Stay on or near the circle for too long and noisy, fiery death shall be visited upon you.
• Naturally, Death from Above is pretty much entirely about this, with the player using a drone to drop grenades on Russian troops.
• Demolition Racer has this: when a car lands on top of another car, the bottom car is immediately destroyed, resulting in the Death from above bonus, which gives you substantially more points than any other attack. It's also the hardest move to perform and only a handful of tracks give you the opportunity to perform a high enough jump to crash on top of your opponents.
• If your device's administrator has disabled access to the Google Chrome Dinosaur Game, the dinosaur will instead appear with the same wide-eyed expression as when you get a Game Over while meteors fall in the background.
• Disgaea: Hour of Darkness:
  • Laharl's ultimate attack,Meteor Impact is exactly what it sounds like
  • Generic Star spells, especially at mid- and high-levels, fall under this, too. In Disgaea 2, other characters had variations — Sword users, Spear users, Adell, Rozalyn...
• In Double Dragon Neon, one of the late-game enemies, the levitating sorcerer Bao Boshi, has one of his most devastating attacks named after this trope.
• Drakengard: The Big Bad proves herself able when she launches fireballs that explode with the force of a nuclear blast against the recently victorious army of the protagonist.
• DT3 has many enemies that call death from above, but the Thunderbird's rain of fire is perhaps the clearest example.
• Dune II. The Harkonnen can launch a Death Hand missile from their palace(s). It can devastate an enemy complex.
• Dynasty Warriors: In the later games, jumping into a group of enemies from a high enough elevation (usually on horseback) results in an 'Ambush' situation, where the enemies are temporarily terrified (causing them to attack rarely, while also reducing their defense.)
• The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim:
  • The Big Bad, Alduin, has a unique Dragon Shout which only he can perform. The effects are telling: the sky turns darker, a vortex of clouds appears in the sky, and meteors start falling down. This is so effective that, in a Fan Vid, 100 archers can easily kill three Elder Dragons, but all of them are annihilated by this move alone by Alduin.
  • The Dragonborn can call forth a thunderstorm with similar "cloud vortex in the sky" effect. The main difference is the fact that the effect's cooldown takes ages, while Alduin can cast his version back-to-back.
• EndWar: Once you reach DEFCON 1 you can deploy a WMD, which for the JSF and EFEC means calling in either a kinetic strike or a frickin laser beam from either faction's Kill Sat.
• EVE Online Fan Vid Day of Darkness II features Gallente Sentry Drones performing an orbital bombardment. Also, Admiral Tovil-Toba performs a Colony Drop with his multi-kilometer spaceship. EVE players can also provide orbital fire support to their allies playing Dust 514.
• EXTRAPOWER: Dark Force's planetary conquest involves mass orbital bombardment. This happens to Earth's major cities in Attack of Dark Force, with Dark Force willing to use an even bigger, concentrated blast to reduce Earth into dust. In EXTRAPOWER: Star Resistance, you get to witness a city-wiping strike happen in real time.
• Fallout, despite the fact that it's literally taking place in a world that had been in love with nukes, has very few instances of this. Specifically coming to mind are the Kill Sat facilities you can commandeer in Fallout 3 (Broken Steel's first mission is titled "Death From Above", and Liberty Prime is destroyed this way during that quest) and Fallout: New Vegas. Vegas also has the Boomers, a formerly-Vault-dwelling tribe that ended up taking over an air force base loaded with artillery cannons. If you befriend them and complete their quests, they not only help out in the Assault on Hoover Dam with their cannon, but with a fully restored B-29 Superfortress, against a bunch of guys in leather armor with machetes. In Fallout 4, this is the Minutemen's faction power, giving you the ability to call down artillery strikes and shell raider and super mutant camps into dust, and it's this ability which allows the Minutemen to inflict a Curb-Stomp Battle on the Brotherhood of Steel in the Grand Finale as their Cool Airship gets blown out of the sky and their squads of power armour-equipped Elite Mooks get torn to pieces from miles away.
• Final Fantasy:
  • The Dragoon class from throughout the series qualifies, since their main ability is just to jump up into the air and crash down into enemies with their spears.
  • The recurring Comet and Meteor spells certainly count.
  • After having become the incarnation of magic, Big Bad, Monster Clown and nihilistic whack-o Kefka Palazzo from Final Fantasy VI picked up the nice little hobby of annihilating any- and everything he didn't like with the "Light of Judgement," a massive, magical beam from the skies.
  • Sephiroth in Final Fantasy VII. Both in his scheme to obliterate the world with Meteor and infamously popping out of nowhere at the end of Disc 1 to personally deliver Death from Above to Aeris.
    • There's also the Bahamut ZERO summon spell, wherein the eponymous dragon blasts the user's unfortunate adversaries from orbit.
    • As well as one of Cid's Limit Breaks: he calls in an airstrike from the Highwind.
  • Final Fantasy IX might be #1 for most Death from Above scenes in one game. There's Odin who Zantetsukens an entire city into ash, the Invincible which nukes Alexandria and Alexander simultaneously not to mention having done the same to the Maiden Sari in a flashback. Plus there's Kuja whose Ultima Spell is a horrifying combination of Planet Killer, Nuke 'em, and Rocks Fall Everybody Dies.
  • Although all the biggest lightning spells come from above, Final Fantasy IX's Thundaga definitely looks the most impressive, almost like a small-scale reverse-Eden.
  • "Death from Above" also happens to be the name of a giant bee Notorious Monster in Final Fantasy XI, which fits under the Giant Flyer subsection.
  • The Yovra enemies in Al'Taieu also qualify for this trope. They hover around in the sky and can't be targeted...until they hear you, promptly dropping down to dispense death to the unlucky party.
  • Final Fantasy XIII: This is how Hope's full ATB skill "Last Resort" dispenses its death. A collection of holy orbs rain down from the sky promptly dealing a bunch of damage to their unlucky target(s). Fang's eidolon Bahamut does this as well with its Megaflare attack, sending a ball of non-elemental damage from the sky to the enemies below.
  • This is a reoccurring theme in almost all of the big summons in Final Fantasy. Examples are almost all of Bahamut's summonings, one of which involves him firing a Moon Killer which blasts through the moon to reach its target. Other notable ones are Eden from Final Fantasy VIII, Ark from Final Fantasy IX, which combines Kill Sat with Cool Airship, and Final Fantasy XII's Exodus, whose ultimate attack drops a meteor the size of Texas on your enemy's head. It is as cool as it sounds.
• Fire Emblem:
  • The Bolting (Anima), Eclipse (Dark) and Purge (Light) magical tomes allow the user to attack a target far from their normal one space reach. If a boss has them as one of their weapons, expect them to use it to let you know that they're not to be trifled with. Especially if we're talking about Ursula from The Blazing Blade, whose Bolting is infamously strong — to the point of "giving birth" to the "FUCKING BOLTIIIIING" minor meme.
  • Ballistae, giant artillery pieces which allow you to drop heavy projectiles from long distance. They're their own unique class in Fire Emblem: Shadow Dragon & the Blade of Light, Fire Emblem: Mystery of the Emblem, their DS remakes, and Fire Emblem Fates, while in the GBA and Tellius games they are map objects that any Archer or Sniper can mount.
  • This is also how the Battle of Belhalla finishes in Genealogy of the Holy War. Death by a "fire rain" via the Meteor spell, courtesy of the court magicians under the orders of the guy who just killed your leader. Aaaaaahhhhh!!!
• Flaming Zombooka: The Dropper makes mini-bombs fall from above, likely killing all the zombies unlucky enough to be underneath.
• Foxhole features many ways to rain explosive death on your enemies; including mortars, howitzers, field artillery, and rifle grenades.
• Gears of War includes the Hammer of Dawn, the targeting laser for an Orbital Death Beam. The sequel adds the Mortar, which has a nearly vertical arc allowing the player to wreak death from above. Then you include the gunships, the Kryll, and the razor-sharp killer ''rain'' and it just goes bananas.
• Godus: The meteor power allows to you wipe out anything in a small area, creating a nice crater in the process.
• Golden Sun has several varieties, mostly in the form of summons:
  • Giant Flyer — the Fusion Dragon, more or less. Also, the Eclipse summon, which is essentially a dragon which breathes lasers.
  • Kill Sat — Judgement and Catastrophe; arguably also the unleashed attack of the Phaeton's Blade, sending Frickin' Laser Beams down on the target.
  • Meteor - the Meteor summon, and a more localized version in the Sol Blade's "Megiddo" unleash.
  • Nuke 'em — would be several, if the party didn't mysteriously disappear at the beginning; most egregiously Charon
  • The Doom Dragon's attack, Cruel Ruin, which appears to shoot a chain of exploding beams, each destroying massive areas of land. Also, the Daedalus summon, which brings out a giant ancient-looking robot that shoots several small missiles that hit immediately and a final, huge one, which three turns later, hits for a large explosion.
  • Rain of Arrows — Atalanta.
• Gruntz:
  • The birds in "Trouble in the Tropicz" drop bird poop that kills any gruntz in a 3x3 radius.
  • The aircraft in "High on Sweetz" drop exploding packages that kill any gruntz in a 3x3 radius.
  • The spotlights in "High Rollerz" force your gruntz to sing if any spotlights catch them. Since your gruntz can't sing properly, a trapdoor opens up underneath them and removes them from the game.
  • The UFOs in "Gruntz in Space" have two searchlights that instantly melt any gruntz that come into contact with it.
• Halo:
  • The Covenant's standard tactic against a hostile world is to have a fleet plasma-bombard it into molten glass.
  • The UNSC's orbital MAC guns can also be used to attack targets already on a planet's surface.
  • Halo Wars and Halo Wars 2 let players who are playing as the UNSC faction call down fire from the MAC gun (Magnetic Accelerator Cannon) of an orbiting warship, or, mixing this with It's Raining Men, they can drop ODSTs (Orbital Drop Shock Troopers) on enemy positions. In addition, the Covenant (if you're playing as Regret) can call down an orbital laser beam which can be left active indefinitely (and steered around) assuming you have the resources, while the Banished can call down various types of orbital plasma bombardment.
  • Halo: Reach:
    • The target locator, with which you can designate targets for artillery.
    • At the end of "Tip of the Spear", the Covenant supercarrier Long Night of Solace delivers a DFA attack on the UNSC frigate Grafton.
  • Halo 4 has targetable ordinance drops. While intended to supply the user with a weapon, the drop will also insta-kill most players if they're standing under it.
• The Tasen and the Komato in Iji have what is called the Alpha Strike, which involves a bunch of ships firing lasers at a planet. The Tasen use it before the game (at half power!) to kill almost all of humanity (along with most other life), and the Komato almost fire it at at full power near the end, which would have destroyed the planet.
• Kid Icarus: Uprising: Viridi is fond of using Reset Bombs (designed reset the Earth to its natural state) as meteors to kill the humans or strike down the Aurum.
• The Legend of Heroes: Trails of Cold Steel has a few characters whose final attack in their S-Craft pull off this trope. Examples include Agate, Aurelia, Gaius, and Crow in Cold Steel IV.
• The The Legend of Heroes: Trails in the Sky trilogy have a few of these as a Limit Break for party members in the second game:
  • The abovementioned Agate, for his Dragon Dive ability, charges up and lights on fire, before leaping into the air, and crashing down onto the enemy, shattering the ground beneath him.
  • Tita Russel, a Wrench Wench who loves working with her Gadgeteer Genius grandfather, pulls out a laptop and orders a Kill Sat laser to eviscerate the enemy over a large area. This seems inconsistant with her civilization's technology level (who only recently invented their first computer, the CAPEL).
  • 11th-Hour Ranger Josette Capua, as a Sky Pirate, can call down her father's gunship to bombard the enemy with its mounted gatling guns.
• The Legend of Zelda:
  • The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess introduces a combat technique called the Finishing Blow, a One-Hit Kill which involves Link jumping very high in the air and coming down to impale the foe on his sword. The same technique reappears in Skyward Sword. In both games, it is used to finish the final boss.
  • More generally, the Jump Slash attack is activated by jumping into the air and attacking before Link lands, turning the leap into an overhead strike that deals double damage to any enemy it lands on.
• Magical Battle Arena: Sakura's THE CREATE super has her dropping a ton of King Penguin playground slides all over the battlefield.
• Marathon:
  • The A.I. characters, one of whom described a plan to destroy the power station of the Pfhor on the planet Lh'owon as, effectively, "Step one: drop an asteroid on the roof of the (underground) power plant. Step two: drop the badass protagonist down the hole." This is about 25% of the way through Marathon 2: Durandal, and similar plans occur elsewhere in Bungie games (The Master Chief in a drop pod is more dangerous than a warship).
  • In Marathon 2, the titular Durandal tells you he is "Introducing the Pfhor (the main enemies at that point in time) to the joys of orbital bombardment." Of special note is that throughout this level, as you progress, the occasional distant and muted rumbling boom can be heard. Presumably Durandal enjoys what he's doing a little TOO much. Then again, he is QUITE rampant. And that's Durandal once he's STABLE.
• Marvel vs. Capcom: Storm's snow storm super games. Or, as this video would say, MAKE IT RAIN!
• Mass Effect:
  • Mass Effect: Near the climax, Ace Pilot Joker drops the Mako APC almost on top of Saren, from the Normandy.
  • Mass Effect 3:
    • The overhauled Normandy SR-2 provides air support on occasion, like when it does a Gunship Rescue for Commander Shepard and Admiral Anderson from the invasion of Earth, at the beginning of the game.
    • Shepard kills a destroyer-class Reaper on Rannoch by using a targeting laser to smite it with the combined firepower of the entire quarian fleet. Seven times.
• MechWarrior:
  • There's a tactic called "Death From Above" that involves using your jump jets to levitate your 'Mech and then crashing it down on top of an enemy 'Mech. Obviously, since this will damage your 'Mech as well (and requires very precise piloting to pull off), it's viewed largely as a last-ditch desperate gambit... but Ramming Always Works.
  • Mechwarrior Living Legends has the Long Tom Artillery Tank, a 90 ton vehicle that fires a 200kg high-explosive shell capable of smiting battlemechs from over a kilometer away or a mere 100 meters away when fired like a mortar. Inscribed on the barrel are the words DEATH FROM AFAR!
• Mega Man:
  • Doctor Weil holds the world hostage by way of Kill Sat in Mega Man Zero 4. When that plan gets foiled, he decides to use the space fortress for a Colony Drop — two versions of the trope for the price of one villain.
  • In Mega Man Star Force 3 the same thing more or less happens again.
• Mercenaries 2 lives and breathes this trope, allowing the player to call in everything from Tomahawk missiles to Tac Nukes... for the right price, so much so that Yahtzee calls the game "Airstrikes 2: Hooray for Airstrikes" and this article's Quotes page has no less than three quotes involving it.
• Meteos revolves around this; every populated planet and non-planet in the universe is being bombarded by multicolored meteors that, if left by themselves, will make the planet explode.
• Metroid: In Metroid Prime 3: Corruption, Samus can call in an air strike from her Cool Ship once she has acquired the correct Power-Up and is in an open area. This kills most ordinary Mooks and is needed to destroy certain objects her suit weaponry cannot destroy.
• Miku Monogatari ~Yume to Taisetsu na Mono~: Stage 5 - 4 has a gimmick where, for every seconds, flames raining from the skies, forcing you to take a shelter. Beside that, several stages has falling large rocks and the final boss has a attack that make laser beams fall from the sky in its second phase.
• Monster Hunter:
  • The Bow class has the Arc ability, which shoots an arrow up into the air, which then falls back down as one of several different special attacks, such as a Rain of Arrows or an explosive blast, depending on the bow's listed Arc skill.
  • Monster Hunter: World: Bazelgeuse is essentially a draconic B-52, with its scales acting as the bombs. And it is one sneaky little devil. Imagine this: you're just minding your own business, walloping something you need parts from, you hear a creepy string glissando, and then...KABLOOEY.
• In ONRUSH, it's possible to crash out an opponent's vehicle by landing on top of it from a big jump, something that even a Blade or an Outlaw can do to a Titan or an Enforcer. The passive ability of the Charger encourages this, as it curves slightly toward enemies on the ground while landing from way high up.
• Overwatch:
  • Pharah Amari has jump jets, concussion blasts and a rocket launcher. Her ultimate ability rains a barrage of rockets (and justice) upon the enemy.
  • To a lesser extent, there's Doomfist, who's ultimate has him leap into the air and come crashing down, dealing huge damage to anything he lands on.
• Phantasy Star Online:
  • The game loves doing this with its bosses. The final bosses of Episodes 1, 2, and 4 each have an attack that rains destruction on the party. Dark Falz has "Heaven Punishment," in which he puts a slow-down effect on the party before firing skywards, raining beams of light down randomly (which are somehow dodgable), Olga Flow has "God's Punishment" which is an instant kill if it connects, and the snake trio in Episode 4 has "Divine Punishment" which fires down a single beam that causes a shockwave that can't be avoided, but does less damage the farther away you are.
  • Player characters can do this as well with the "Divine Punishment" special, which targets up to 16 enemies in front of them and blasts them with light-elemental beams. Of course, since it's the player using it, it's nowhere near as effective... unless it's tagging enemies for experience points, or an area that's extremely allergic to holy rays of death.
• Pikmin 2:
  • Careening Dirigibugs are insect-like enemies that float in the air on organic balloons, periodically producing bomb rocks from their mouths and dropping these explosives down towards you and your squad.
  • In caves, thing falling from the roof is a common hazard. These can include smaller enemies, regular rocks that will crush anything beneath and explosive bomb rocks. There are cases where the rocks or enemies will only fall in certain circumstances, like when you're picking up a treasure.
• PlanetSide:
  • The aptly named "Galaxy Drops" are carefully organized raids involving a fleet of Galaxy transports, each carrying a full squad of troopers, exosuit warriors, and a fully staffed vehicle, along with the Galaxy's own gunners and other air support.
  • In Planetside 2, the Galaxy makes a comeback, along with the Liberator gunship, which can carry a quad 30mm gatling turret or a 150mm cannon for bombarding ground targets.
• Plants vs. Zombies 2: It's About Time: Lost Pilot Zombies fall down from trees and stay in the air while eating plants, acting as shields for other zombies.
• Pokémon has a number of attacks that fit this. Doom Desire sends up a wish that, after a few turns, results in an enormous blast of silvery-purple light that completely annihilates the opponent. Judgment is similar, but it requires no charge time, is much stronger, can be any type, and is only learnable by Arceus, the creator of the universe. Thunder calls forth a bolt of lightning from the heavens to strike down the foe, and Draco Meteor creates a catastrophic meteor storm. Weather Ball sends up a small ball of energy that absorbs the power of the current weather, charges up, and falls back down to hit the enemy. Solarbeam (currently) drops an enormous column of weaponized sunlight on the enemy.
• Primal Carnage: The Pteranodon's main attack is to snatch up humans from the ground and drop them from a fatal height. However, if it does this with a Pyromaniac, he will explode on impact, potentially killing other humans he lands near (you'll get an achievement if you kill fifteen people this way).
• [PROTOTYPE]'s Alex Mercer does this repeatedly, except he does it with his own body. So it's kind of It's Raining a Man and Goomba Stomp. Not that he cannot also hijack aircraft with an unusually large supply of ammunition and use them.
• Quake II has the Airstrike Marker key item, which sends the coordinates for the human troops so they bombard the area. This is used for the "Outlands" mission in the base game, the "Industrial Refinery" mission in The Reckoning, and the "Refinery Hangar" mission in Ground Zero.
• Quake Champions: Scalebearer's "Heavyweight" passive ability allows him to frag an enemy by dropping from a higher level.
• Quake Champions: Doom Edition: Some characters have drop-based abilities:
  • Quake III: Arena: Major's "Air Strike" active ability allows her to pinpoint several locations for bombers to throw bombs upon.
  • Hexen: Zedek's "Cannonball" passive ability allows him to instakill any enemy by jumping upon them from a higher level.
• Rage (2011) opens with 99942 Apophis slamming into Earth.
• Raid on Taihoku takes place during an air raid, like what the title said. A few stages sees you running across the bombed out city while avoiding falling explosives (marked by a red Crosshair Aware).
• In Ravensword: Shadowlands, the hostile pterodactyls that live in the Craigs are the only flying enemy, and are an absolute nightmare to deal with if they spot you.
• In ROM Check Fail, did the enemies above you just turn into Goombass? And are there no blocks between them and you? Unless you can fire upward, can control your new avatar well, and are fast on the draw, you just lost a life.
• RosenkreuzStilette: This is one of Sicthe Meister's new moves in Rosenkreuzstilette Freudenstachel; she stops time, leaps up, resumes time and comes crashing down on the player's head with a giant block from nowhere that shatters upon impact with the floor. We guess she must've learned a lot from Dio lately.
• ShellShock Live: Several weapons launch a flare-type projectile that calls down an air strike of various projectiles, from simple explosives, to carpet rains, to... cactus and bouncy balls.
• Sonic the Hedgehog 3: Providing the page image is the pre-boss section of Angel Island Act 2, where Eggman's Flying Battery airship tries to bomb Sonic, who can pretty easily outrun the bombing (or just outright ignore it with a Flame Shield).
• Spec Ops: The Line: At one point, you have to clear out a hostile camp with mortars. Your first shot is an aerial recon camera that you use to direct your fire. The game takes a turn for the dark when you discover that your only ammunition is white phosphorous. The game then takes an even darker turn when you have to cross the now burned-out camp on foot and get an up-close look at your horrific handiwork. The game manages to go even darker when you find a mass of dead refugees, all burned beyond recognition.
• Splinter Cell loves this. One of Sam Fisher's signature move it to climb onto overhead pipes and such to drop on enemies or strangle them, etc.
• Split/Second (2010): Air Strike mode has you racing down the track while a helicopter rains down missiles on you. In the airport race, one Power Play drops an airplane on your opponents — and it's not just a small plane dropping from a crane. A jumbo jet crash lands on the runway.
• Spud's Adventure has Arnie Eggplant hit by falling rocks in a cutscene and killed.
• Star Control 2: An Umgah representative mentions doing this for the lulz: "It so much easier to make good jokes without boring old Ur-Quan slave laws! We wanting to pull a real good one on those stupid nosers from Draconis for long time but since they battle thralls too, we not allowed do even small pranks on them like, say... dropping planetoid in their ocean. Big waves! Big waves! Har! Har! Har!"
• StarCraft:
  • The original not only features the many, many kinds of aircraft (such as Zerg Guardians) that can gun down your poor defenseless Protoss Zealots from above, but there's also the Terran nuke, which does either 400 points of damage straight up or two-thirds of the target's max health (enough to kill the Overmind itself in two shots). Only the Purifier can do that in the sequel, but it blows up entire communities.
  • If you could get the resources together to build them, nothing was more awesome than tooling around with a squadron of battlecruisers (except possibly tooling around with a squadron of carriers). Trump Card: On certain levels, a squadron of battleships AND a squadron of carriers.
• Star Fox: Assault: Multiplayer mode features a rare but incredibly powerful weapon which invokes this trope. It is a cylinder that, when planted in the ground, fires a multitude of colored rockets that spread out and bombard the local area. This weapon achieves the widest spread but lowest density if you plant it on the nose of an Arwing you're flying high in the air.
• Star Wars: The Old Republic: Three of the Imperial classes' abilities fit the bill. The Imperial Agent's Orbital Bombardment skill calls in a Kill Sat, the Inquisitor can conquer a storm of lightning strikes, and the Bounty Hunter's is even called "Death From Above", flying into the air and raining missiles down from above.
• Stick Fight:
  • Potentially lethal obstacles that come from the sky feature in several stages. One such stage has a number of lasers that fire from the top of the screen to the right and gradually rotate to the left, insta-killing players if they're hit. Another has a platform hanging from a chain with spikes on the bottom that can be dropped on players.
  • Every so often, a boss stage is played in which one player is transformed into a flying creature that rains projectiles on the other players in changing patterns.
• Super Mario Bros.:
  • A frequently recurring character is the Thwomp, which attacks the player by waiting until they're standing underneath and then careening downwards to crush them.
  • Another recurring enemy is Lakitu, who hangs from a floating cloud and throws Spiny Eggs at the playing character.
  • The ground pound is a frequently used move introduced in Super Mario World 2: Yoshi's Island that can be used to fall onto enemies and other objects with increased downward force. Also, Mario's traditional attack method of jumping on enemies could technically be categorized within this trope.
  • A certain type of Paragoomba in Super Mario Bros. 3 releases tiny Goombas from the air that latch onto Mario or Luigi, slowing him down and hindering his jumping abilities.
  • Super Mario World:
    • The final boss is against Bowser and his Koopa Clown Car, who attacks with various aerial projectiles- among which are slowly falling flames and giant, black balls.
    • Swoopers are bat-like enemies which hang from the ceiling and swoop down (go figure) from above to attack Mario.
  • Super Mario 64:
    • A bird enemy named Klepto swoops down onto Mario in order to steal his hat.
    • Grindels, which are essentially Thwomps that are covered in bandages.
  • Super Mario Sunshine contains Winged Strollin' Stus, which fly around in the air and attempt to drop themselves onto Mario in order to hurt him. A variant called Swipin' Stu can do this in order to steal Mario's red cap.
  • In New Super Mario Bros., Scuttlebugs reappear from 64, with a new variant that hangs down from a spider web.
    • Lakithunder is a lightning-theme Lakitu and the Castle boss of World-7 who releases lightning from his cloud unto Mario or Luigi alongside the typical spiel of throwing Spinies.
  • Super Mario Galaxy:
    • Cluckbooms fly in circles and attack Mario and Luigi by dropping bombs from their... erm... lower sector.
    • Spring Mario navigates by bouncing high into the air, which can subsequently be used to attack enemies from above.
  • In Super Mario 3D World, the Cat Suit is introduced, which features a midair attack that involves pouncing on to enemies — you guessed it — like a cat.
  • Super Mario Odyssey:
    • Urban Stingbys, insect enemies that tower in the air and attack Mario in a similar fashion to that of previous aerial enemies in the series.
    • One of the Broodals, Hariet, has a phase during her boss fight where she goes into her metal hat like a UFO and drops bombs onto Mario.
  • Mario Party 9: Thwomper Room takes place in a room where the ceiling is lined with six Thwomps that drop down before rising back to the ceiling. Contact with any of them will result in a player being eliminated immediately, and the player that survives the longest is the winner.
  • Mario & Luigi: Bowser's Inside Story has a partial example with the Goomba Storm technique. Bowser orders a squad of Goombas to Zerg Rush the enemy. The player must then tap at the Goombas with the stylus to make Bowser set them on fire, upon which they leap into the air, raining fiery death upon the enemy at the end.
  • WarioWare, Inc.: Mega Microgame$: The VS. minigame Dong Dong pits Mona and Dribble in a duel where they have to use punching bars (which move up and down) to thrust yellow blocks and see who is the first to make one of them fall above the other to squash them. One player controls Mona's bar by thrusting with L, with the other controls Dribble's by thrusting with R. As the minigame progresses, the speed of both bars will either increase or decrease, so timing will be important to aim at the yellow blocks properly.
• Super Smash Bros.:
  • Multiple aerial moves involve either suddenly lunging downwards with an attack or dropping some for of projectile, such as Bowser's Bowser Bomb, Yoshi's Yoshi Bomb, Link's Air Cutter, Kirby's Stone and Cutter, Ike's Aether, and Dedede's Super Dedede Jump as well.
  • In addition to standard moves that involve attacking from above your opponent (i.e Spiking and Meteor Smashes), many final smashes in Super Smash Bros. Brawl bring Death From Above onto the battlefield. Notable examples: Ness and Lucas' PK Starstorm, Pit summoning Palutena's army, King Dedede and his Waddle Dees, Snake's Grenade assault from a helicopter, Lucario's Aura Storm, and all three Landmasters.
• Sword of the Stars: One of the reasons why the default missile warheads are nuclear (the other being that conventional explosives are useless in space). And by no means the only method, assault shuttles, biowar missiles, siege drivers, and to be honest nearly all starship weapons are devastating to planets. Battles against enemy colonies often culminate in orbital bombardment. Interestingly, for early and part of the midgame trans-atmospheric Assault Shuttles are more effective at dealing anti-colony damage.
• Syndicate: Syndicate Wars has a weapon called Satellite Rain, which is a fictional version of Project Thor mentioned in the Real Life section.
• Tales Series:
  • Many spells throughout the series, like Burn Strike, Meteor Storm, and Indignation, come down from the sky.
  • A more bizarre recurring example is the Pow Rain spell, which rains toy squeaky hammers that stun (And in some games damage) whatever they land on.
  • Tales of Symphonia has the Judgment spell used by Collette, Mithos, and Kratos that rained holy light all over. In the OVA Kratos wipes out a dragon riding army of Renegades with Judgment beams from the clouds.
• Team Fortress 2: Having the higher ground affords a tactical advantage to pretty much all of the classes, but the Soldier in particular earns an achievement called "Death From Above" by killing enough enemies in that fashion.
• In Titanfall, calling your titan down on top of an enemy is a One-Hit Kill.
• Unreal:
  • In Unreal II: The Awakening, during the second visit to Avalon, the TCA Atlantis is being bombarded from orbit, while John Dalton cleans the area for the ship's safe arrival. Then in an attempt to land, the ship is blasted with John's crew aboard, killing all three of them.
  • Unreal Tournament 2004:
    • The Ion Painter/T.A.G. Rifle, a targeting laser for an Ion Cannon from a Kill Sat or, in the case of 2004, three cannons.
    • The Target Painter, which instead calls a bomber that cruises across the sky and sends dropping bombs exploding in a straight line.
• The Orcish Wind Riders of Warcraft III will sometimes scream "Death From Above!" when given an order to fly in and throw envenomed spears at enemies below.
• Warframe provides players with a few ways to employ this trope:
  • The Zephyr Warframe excels at this trope. One of her powers launches her high in to the air, where players can take advantage of her lowered gravity to rain rockets and gunfire on helpless enemies below. She also has the Dive Bomb power that immediately launches her straight in to the ground where she produces a damaging shockwave guaranteed to knock down almost all enemies in the game. And the damage out of this power grows the further she falls.
  • All melee weapons in the game feature drop attacks in some form but certain weapons have special moves that embody this trope. The Prova, an electrified baton, radiates electricity from the point of impact in, Heat Sword variants create a blast of fire, and the Jat Kittag, a jet hammer, creates a shockwave so strong it can launch crowds of enemies extreme distances along with easily killing them.
  • A modification players can equip on their Warframe, Heavy Impact, applies a damaging shockwave to players who fall sufficiently fast enough. But when combined with Zephyr's aforementioned Dive Bomb power they become a devastating crowd-clearer.
• Wargame: European Escalation: Massed artillery is an extremely effective tactic. Building an entire army out of artillery, on the other hand, almost never works, but is, on occasion, hilarious.
• Wolf (DOS) will teach you to fear planes and helicopters; human snipers armed with Instant Death Bullets prowl the skies with them, just looking for a wolf to shoot. If you see one coming, don't even bother barking to alert your packmates; just tuck your tail between your legs and scram, because if that shadow touches you, you're going down in one hit.
• In World in Conflict, half the point of the game is calling in a truly vast array of support firepower — small mortar strikes, large artillery barrages, cluster bombs, smart bombs, chemical strikes, carpet bombing, and even the infamous nuke.
• World of Tanks has two flavors of this:
  • Artillery, which lob high-explosive shells all the way across the map, frequently landing on your soft, squishy top armor. Certain artillery can load solid AP shells as well, which are rarely used, but have their place.
  • Tanks, which can throw themselves into flying tackles at other tanks. While full physics support has yet to be implemented in-game, gravity can still be used as a last-resort weapon. Particularly heavy tanks, like the Maus for example, can drop onto nearly any tank in the game and crush them to death. Any tank which can survive the initial impact will rapidly lose it's HP, so long as the assailant can remain on top of the unlucky victim.
• World of Warcraft: The "rawrbomb" is a maneuver pulled off by Druids; shapeshift into a flying form, find a convenient location over your target, then shift into bear form and drop like a stone. When you get within range of the target, pop "CHARGE!" and hurl yourself at the target, smashing into them and landing without damage. Tricky to do, impressive to see, easy to screw up. Warriors can pull off a similar trick.
• Worms has plenty of powerful airstrike Superweapons. Mail Strikes, MB Bombs, Mike's Carpet Bombs, French Sheep Strikes, Concrete Donkeys, and Armageddon all rain death on opposing worms. OK, that last one, as you might expect from the name, rains death on everyone, but the point stands.

Visual Novels

• In Double Homework, the protagonist goes through an avalanche on Barbarossa - twice.

Web Animation

• Dreamscape:
  • Eleenin can fire a beam of light upon her enemy from overhead.
  • Melinda can make it rain purple fireballs.
• DSBT InsaniT:
  • Seth can summon toy bomber helicopters.
  • Amber can float in the air with astroids surrounding her and fire them downward.
• Quite common in Happy Tree Friends. The first examples of this in the series came from "Havin' a Ball", where Cub is crushed by Lumpy in a hospital bed, followed by the latter meeting his fate when the helicopter that was lifting him comes down.
• In RWBY:
  • Torchwick gets abruptly killed by a massive Griffon Grimm swoops down and eats him mid-Motive Rant.
  • On way too many more occasions to count, the characters will jump over a Grimm and launch surprise attacks on its back to kill it.

Web Comics

• The cry "Death From Above!" occasionally appears in the webcomic Dominic Deegan. Dominic's cat, Spark, uses it as his catchphrase when dropping himself onto the head of a (usually much larger) enemy. The same series inverts the entire idea during one story arc, as a villain notes how the city he's threatening was designed to defend against aerial bombardment... then calls up an attack from beneath the earth.
• This incident from Dresden Codak. Admittedly, it's proven later that this thing is a giant walker and not a giant flier, but it's taller than most buildings. I think that qualifies as "above," don't you?
• In El Goonish Shive, Dame Tara kills the spider-like Aberration with a claw attack from above.
• Inverted in this strip of Least I Could Do, wherein young Rayne has been waiting somewhere (on the ceiling?) for his mom to wake up so he can give her a hug.
• The Order of the Stick:
  • An odd version, where Vaarsuvius is saved from a death knight by the severed head of a zombie dragon falling on it. Also the eternal fate of the Flumphs, although they always survive it.
  • Also Belkar's reaction to the Ring of Jumping.
• The orbiting "Clean Sweep Platform" Wrath Of God in Dave Hopkins' Rework The Dead. The undead have taken over L.A? Call in WOG and vaporise them from orbit. Jack also by Hopkins has Angels, particularly Reckonin', doing this on a regular basis.
• Enryu from Tower of God and his ability Red Rain, which is the materialization of countless spears above the enemy. The greatest recorded number was 9000 at a time.

Web Original

• The Innocent is filled with bombardments carried out by children, which are intended to force the bombarded cities to surrender.
• Whateley Universe: A favorite tactic of Murphy's is to teleport over an opponent and then use her warping to accelerate herself to dangerously high velocities. She often does more damage to herself than the one she is hitting, but that's what regeneration is for.

Web Videos

• World War II: The series covers the war's critical aspect of air forces deployed against ground targets. Scores of soldiers and civilians alike will die over the course of the conflict from bombs and strafing runs by aircraft machine guns and cannons.

Western Animation

• In Avatar: The Last Airbender, Aang and the inhabitants of the Northern Air Temple defeat a vastly more powerful Fire Nation army by having complete domination of the skies. They manage to rout the whole force using no ground troops at all.
  • Sort of lampshaded in Avatar: The Abridged Series.
    Sokka: They may have tanks and firebending, but we have the skies. Which means we're gonna win this battle the way battles ought to be won. By bombing the crap out of 'em!
  • Occurs in the finale when The Fire Nation decides that it'll be easier to rebuild after wiping out the Earth Kingdom with their fleet of airships and the power boost from the Comet than ruling over it.
• Invoked word-for-word by Amanda Waller after the Justice League's Binary Fusion Generator has been fired on Cadmus Headquarters, with disastrous consequences for buildings all around.
• In the Joe Oriolo Felix the Cat cartoon "Master Cylinder Captures Poindexter", Master Cylinder has hijacked a meteor and has sent it hurtling towards Earth, with the impact site being Professor's lab and the intention being to destroy the Earth. Felix and Poindexter take the Flying Saucer to it and try to reverse its path with Poinsy's Atomic Jet Pusher, but Master Cylinder steals the device and kidnaps him, escaping and leaving Felix for dead, pinned to a rock by a detachable claw while the meteor continues hurtling towards Earth. Felix manages to break free, and ties Poindexter's flying saucer to the meteor to redirect it towards a crater and inside the moon, where it explodes harmlessly.
• Max's catchphrase, word for word, from the 1990s Sam and Max cartoon.
• Done in grand fashion in X-Men: Evolution, the animated series on the WB. Apocalypse is running amok somewhere in Mexico, all other X-Men around have failed to dent him. Enter the new fully evolved Magneto, cape billowing behind him. He proceeds to use his powers to slam man-made satellites into Apocalypse. Mind you, all that does is piss Apocalypse off.

Real Life

• Severe thunderstorms definitely qualify, because of three major threats they often contain:
  • Lightning. A "bolt from the blue" from a thunderstorm's anvil can strike up to 30 miles from the storm, and lightning from any thunderstorm is one of the biggest weather killers every year, often racking up a bigger death toll than tornadoes unless there was a particularly deadly tornado outbreak in the year. Severe thunderstorms often have even more frequent and positive charge lightning, which makes them an even deadlier lightning hazard.
  • Hail. Hailstones the size of golf balls can cause major injury especially if falling at high enough speed or blown about by high winds. Once hail reaches orange/tennis ball size, it is fatal to humans and animals trapped out in it unless they can find immediate cover for their head. Baseball size and beyond is even worse, in that it can both smash through vehicles and any glass (just as golf ball or higher can), and is big enough to kill anyone who, say, gets out of the car to check out the damage or who survived the glass fusillade in their greenhouse.
  • Tornadoes, though they technically half spin up from the ground and half come down from the storm mesocyclone. Either way, when a funnel cloud "touches down" it is visually, if not technically, one of the most frightening natural invocations of the trope.
• Project Thor (also called either "Rods from God" or "The Sword of Damocles") would have placed bundles of power pole-sized tungsten rods into Earth orbit, with a retrorocket and guidance system attached to each one. The idea was to call down the poles at need, with the rear-mounted guidance system assuring pinpoint accuracy. Sort of a modern-day Rain of Flaming Arrows, save each hit at terminal velocity would have been in the kiloton range. Note that tungsten is the densest metal except for a few that are horrifically expensive (it's nearly twice as dense as lead), and has an incredibly high melting point. That's right, it's Colony Drop, used as a weapon. Unfortunately (or fortunately, depending on your point of view), Project Thor falls squarely into the category Awesome, but Impractical, preventing it from being realized.
• Flechette weapons, such as the American Lazy Dog, mostly used from World War II to the Vietnam War. The flechettes are small metal darts, packed together until dispersed from their container to blanket the target area, impacting with sufficient velocity to shred anyone outside an armored vehicle.
• Morbid humor applies the trope to aircraft that have trouble staying airborne.
• The Vietnam-era F-105 Thunderchief supposedly derives its nickname of "Thud" from this bit of humor.
• The AC-130u "Spectre" Gunship and other variants of C-130 cargo plane that replace the cargo with a 25mm Gatling Gun, a 40mm automatic cannon, and a 105mm howitzer field artillery piece. All can be (and often are) equipped with explosive rounds and the Air Force is considering increasing the caliber of all weapons now that they have improved methods to compensate for the recoil.
• The B-52 "Stratofortress" strategic bomber holds 70,000 lbs. of bombs. With software upgrades, each of these bombs can be as accurate as any precision bomb dropped by a strike fighter. This allows the B-52 to act as close-air-support, dropping 35 tons of death to wherever it's needed.
• The A-10 "Thunderbolt II" attack aircraft (A.K.A. the "Warthog") - A close-air support aircraft capable of carrying a dozen bombs or missiles on the sort of "low and slow" flight plan necessary for accurate ground attack, but its main feature is a tank-busting 30mm rotary cannon that fires 65 depleted uranium slugs EVERY SECOND. It can still do this with about half of everything blown off. Even the noise it makes, onomatopoeified as "BRRRRRRRT", has gained a sort of iconic status in its own right.
  • There is a persistent urban legend that the Warthog's GAU-8 cannon produces more recoil than its engines do thrust and that continual fire of the cannon would eventually stop the forward momentum of the airplane entirely, save that it would run out of ammunition long before that point. While the recoil is significant, in practice the effect on the planes speed is negligible.
  • The Warthog's WWII-era ancestor, the Republic P-47 Thunderbolt, is also well-known for this. Its armament of ten under-wing rockets, 2,500 pounds of bombs, and eight M2 heavy machine guns made it one of the most feared ground-attack planes of the war. And with its powerful engine and brick-house durability, it was a respectable air-to-air fighter to boot!
  • GBU-43/B Massive Ordnance Air Blast "MOAB" bomb — The largest conventional explosive device known to man (unless you ask the Russians, who have yet to prove otherwise), this bomb has to be dropped from a cargo plane because it's too big to be dropped by a B-52.
  • The F-104 Starfighter was referred to as the "Missile with a man in it", partially due to its missile-shaped profile and partially due to its horrific safety record (due to a combination of pilot error and being an unforgiving design).
  • Also from the United States Air Force is the Tactical Air Control Party (TACP). These Airmen are trained and deployed with the Army, whether they be standard infantry, airborne, air assault, or in some cases Rangers. Their job description basically boils down to: If the enemy shoots at you, direct an aircraft to drop a 2,000 pound bomb on the enemy's head. Individual TACPs have "dropped" upwards of 200,000 lbs of bomb in the Iraq War alone. If the enemy is too close for said action, the enemy will likely get shot in the face.
• This is the point of indirect-fire artillery. Born on Western Front of World War I and refined between the wars, by the end of the Second World War United States artillery was known for its lethally accurate barrages and rapid response time, while the Soviets massed their artillery by division and corps, unleashing thousands of guns whose combined fire could convert huge swathes of terrain into cratered wastelands. In the modern era it has only gotten worse, as a battery of modern rocket artillery with just six vehicles can wipe out a battalion of tanks or regiment of infantry in a single firing cycle.
  • That indirect-fire artillery in WWII and Korea was "throw a bunch of shells at the enemy and hope for the best." Now it's all radar-directed. Fire one round, the radar tracks it, adjusts the guns, and looses a full salvo before the first shell even arrives at the target.
  • The wide variety of artillery pieces and warheads means that folks on the wrong end have to worry about the potential of shells exploding on impact, going off overhead (crushing everything beneath them with concussive force and spraying the area with shrapnel), or using Abnormal Ammo like White Phosphorus (an incindiary agent). The tactic of firing a mixed barage of both explosive shells and WP shells is known among US Field Artillery soldiers as "Shake and Bake."
  • A word of caution to artillery commanders: Artillery batteries are themselves highly tempting targets for enemy artillery strikes. If you reveal your position to open fire, it would be best to either be well dug-in or prepared to "shoot and scoot."
• This is pretty much what killed the dinosaurs (although recent research indicates that the earth was trying to become a Lethal Lava Land at the time [again] and that the asteroid was the proverbial straw that broke the camel's back). The Cretaceous Extinction was a Class 4 on the Sliding Scale Of Complete Destruction. The impact was explicitly called Death From Above by a History Channel special about the geologic history of the Earth.
• Any aerial predator that feeds on ground-dwelling prey.
  • Falcons are specialized for catching prey while flying.
  • Owls are the stealth version of this - they hunt at night and are almost silent in flight - most of their prey are dead before they know what hits them.
  • Pteranodon did so, but only to small sea creatures.
  • Also the M.O. for large land predators that spend a lot of time in trees. Leopards and wolverines are known to take down larger prey items in this manner, simply by dropping down on said prey item.
• During the Cold War the Strategic Air Command (or SAC for short) were in control of the nuclear arsenal of the United States of America. The strategy in the event of a nuclear war was to drop calculated and precise B-52 nuclear strikes to weaken the Soviet's ability to mount a counter-attack and then nuclear warheads from our submarines and ground bases would be launched for an all out assault. The motto of the bomber wing (the guys who flew the B-52s and other tactical fighter planes) was "Death from Above" which makes sense as dropping a nuclear bomb definitely counts.
• Project Pluto was an early attempt by the US to design nuclear-armed drones missiles. Propelled by a Nuclear powered ramjet, the missiles would theoretically have near-unlimited range, and be able to fly around on standby mode for years before needing to be refuelled. The project was cancelled due to a combination of the missiles potentially irradiating the atmosphere wherever they went, conventional ICBM rockets being easier to build, and fears that the Soviet Union would develop a similar superweapon of their own in response.
• Historically, Dive Bombers get some special credit for invoking this trope by diving on their targets before releasing their bombs in order to gain better accuracy (making them a very important part of a carrier's one-two punch against enemy ships, alongside Torpedo Bombers attacking from low altitude). During World War II, the Germans, Americans, and Japanese all fielded famous examples in the form of the Stuka, the Dauntless, and the Val, while the British used the less well known Blackburn Skua and Vultee Vengeance. They were phased out at the end of the war (along with Torpedo Bombers) in favor of fighter bombers and heavily-armed ground attack planes such as the A-1 Skyraider.
• In possibly the deadliest single incident of this in history, approximately 2500 people, not counting aircraft passengers, were killed in a series of coordinated attacks on September 11, 2001, in which terrorists flew three hijacked planes into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. The ground death toll was meant to be even higher, as a fourth attack was planned (exact target unknown, but likely somewhere in Washington, DC^note Most theories point towards the Washington Monument, the Capitol Building, or the White House itself), but passengers learned of the earlier attacks and fought back; the plane was prematurely brought down in a field, killing everyone aboard but sparing further ground casualties.
• When Pan Am Flight 103 was blown out of the sky by a bomb, 11 people on the ground were killed by falling wreckage.
• In general, any plane crash over an occupied area runs the risk of becoming this, if unintentionally so, for anyone unlucky enough to be in the path of a doomed aircraft. In the worst case in history, a severely overloaded plane crashed into a street market in the Congo, killing at least 225 people and possibly over 300 (reports differ on the exact number of casualties) on the ground; there have also been two other cases (one in Vietnam in 1966, the other in Bolivia ten years later) where an accidental plane crash resulted in over 100 ground fatalities.
• A common counter-sniping tactic is to call in an artillery strike, or barring that, an Alpha Strike. And while there's no guarantee of success in this venture, it has become standard procedure when dealing with suspected sniper nests since Simo Häyhä's reign of terror on the Red Army during the Winter War.
• Undignified Death variant: Bajamonte Tiepolo's would-be conspiracy against the Venetian government ended when, after being stymied by terrible weather, splitting the party, and seriously misreading the atmosphere of the city, he was unable to rally any popular support whatsoever. The nail in the coffin for the utterly failed coup was when a Signora Rossi opened her upstairs window to join other Venetian citizens to shout abuse at the conspirators and then flung her grinding mortar at them. Grinding mortars are made of stone and average roughly ten pounds in weight, and the somewhat elderly Rossi was apparently a dead-eye shot. Her mortar crushed the skull of Tiepolo's standard-bearer (flag carrier) right through his helmet and he dropped dead on the spot. As Tiepolo was right next to his standard-bearer when this happened, he took this as a meaningful omen and fled into exile.
• In general, be wary of staying under trees with hard, heavy fruits, like coconuts. Humorous as it may be, death by coconut is serious enough they actually have warning signs for it. Durians may be even worse, as mature durians are hard, heavy, and spiked.
• In Australian folklore, drop bears are said to be deadly versions of the koala that drop down from trees to attack people below.

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