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"Smash! Smash! Smash! Mwahahahahahahaha!"

The Smash Mook is the most single-minded enemy in the history of gaming (either Tabletop or Video Games). All it does is direct attacks without any real strategy. You can expect few, if any, fancy tricks when fighting it. It may be a major threat, or a minor one, but they all fight the same way, smashing, smashing, and more smashing.

What sets these apart from most enemies, whether regular enemies, Goddamned Bats, bosses, or a Boss in Mook Clothing, is the lack of variety and reasonable challenge in spite of this — these characters tend to be extremely tough and hit like trucks, so that despite simple and predictable attacks they'll still take a lot of work to bring down. You encounter this enemy, you can expect these traits. Nothing more, nothing less:

Much like their attacks, their choice of weapons is simple and direct — Smash Mooks almost exclusively fight with clubs, maces, giant hammers or any kind of improvised blunt instrument. If they're especially elaborate, they may have a ball-and-chain or a flaming version of their basic options. In some cases, the Smash Mook won't use any weapons at all and will instead resort to simple physical attacks such as blows, headbutts, or trying to sit or step on the player.

These are very common as a Wake-Up Call Boss, as they represent an opportunity for players to learn that fighting the enemy head-on doesn't always work, and in order to counter these mighty brutes, one has to resort to advanced tricks — in essence, they're meant to teach you not to fight like a Smash Mook yourself by being better at it than you. Typical strategies for dealing with them include Hit-and-Run Tactics, bogging the enemy down with Status Effects, exploiting their charges against them or luring them towards environmental hazards. If the Smash Mook fights as a part of a group, it might be a good idea to stay clear of him so you can Shoot the Medic First, then come back for him when he's alone and weakened.

Sometimes, however, the difference is mostly cosmetic: players might face two or three at once, and they are not much tougher than a regular enemy — just enough to be distinct.

In fantasy settings, this role is often assigned to ogres, giants, trolls, cyclopes, and similar large humanoids. It's often fairly rare to see a member of these species as something other than a big, dumb brute with a big stick, and exceptions are often deliberately played up as subversions of what would be expected from them.

Often overlaps with Giant Mook (although even those allow some variety in their attacks) and Damage-Sponge Boss, but is less dangerous than a true Elite Mook. If it ends up being a pushover, then it's a Fake Ultimate Mook. See also Mighty Glacier, Stone Wall, and Unskilled, but Strong, which these characters often are. When one is fast on top of that, it'll often become a Lightning Bruiser. When they use weapons, these will typically also be examples of Primitive Clubs, Savage Spiked Weapons, or both.

This used to be called "The Ogre", but that name was gobbled up by Our Ogres Are Hungrier.


Examples:

    open/close all folders 

    Action-Adventure 
  • Batman: Arkham Series:
    • Batman: Arkham Asylum: The Titan-infected thugs fit this trope to a T, right down to having a meaner boss version in Bane.
    • Batman: Arkham City: The first boss is a guy called Mister Hammer, a one-armed giant with a sledgehammer whose sole aim is to crush you into a fine red mist.
  • Drakan has the giants. There's a twist with them, though: when killed, they fall forward, instantly crushing you if you don't get out of the way in time.
  • Goblet Grotto: Every enemy, with a lone exception of two Mook Maker heads. Regardless of whether you’re fighting a skeleton, an yeti, a fireman or a biker, all them would only move towards you and spam their single attack with ridiculous speed. Luckily, most combined this trope with One-Hit-Point Wonder.
  • Killer is Dead has the Big Guard Wire, which fights with a buzzsaw-mace hybrid and has two attacks — swing it around and swing it downwards, as well as block with it.
  • The Legend of Spyro:
    • In contrast to the swarms of weak Mooks and the more elite foes that gain various tricks and special attacks as enemy levels and the game progress, the rock brute family of enemies never develop any tactic beyond stomping over to Spyro and hitting him with the big rock they have for a right arm. They get away with this chiefly by having a great deal of health, and because if they do land a hit Spyro will be left dizzy for a while.
    • The Legend of Spyro: Dawn of the Dragon: While most grublin variants are small, agile, and relatively fragile, and provided with varied skills such as flight, acrobatic agility or projectile weapons, two variants stand out for their much more brutish and direct fighting methods, as well as their much greater size, strength and toughness:
      • Orc mobs in the later parts of the game sometimes include towering warriors armed with heavy shields and morningstars, which are noticeably slower than their companions and attack with powerful, sweeping blows of their weapons capable of dealing considerable damage.
      • Trolls are huge, apelike brutes with arms ending in clublike boulders. They're slow, lumbering behemoths whose only attacks are a hard pound against the ground, a flying leap to smash from above, and a spinning sweep of their arms. However, they're also strong and tough enough to be able to take on Spyro and Cynder alone, instead of having to rush them in large numbers like other grublins, and cannot be stun-locked.
  • The Legend of Zelda:
    • Moblins are only there for collision damage, but they'll shake things up with a projectile. They truly fit this trope in the 3D games, however:
      • In The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time, all they do is pace back and forth in narrow corridors and charge Link if they see or hear him. The large Moblin at the end of the maze carries a club, and the only difference is that the attack sends shockwaves through the ground to hurt you from a distance.
      • In The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, Moblins are found in ones and twos alongside tribes of the much smaller Bokoblins, serving as supersized bruiser backup for the much smaller and weaker 'blins. While Bokoblins tend to use one-handed clubs alongside shields, spears, or bows from long range, Moblins favor huge, crude clubs with which to pound you into the dust with great overhead swings, which can leave the weapon jammed into the ground and the Moblin vulnerable while it tries to get it free (they will also use spears for faster jabbing attacks, however). If Link is too far away to hit, they'll instead pick up barrels and Bokoblins and throw them at him. They also have the crudest fighting style of all basic enemies, and rely on their high health pools, high mass and being Immune to Flinching to wade through attacks that would stun smaller foes or send them flying.
    • In Ocarina of Time, the Iron Knuckles' battle strategy consists solely of hitting Link with a giant axe capable of smashing stone pillars into dust. In The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker and The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess, sword/mace wielding Darknuts fill this role.
    • The Legend of Zelda: Spirit Tracks: You're ambushed by pirates on your way back to the Ocean Sanctuary. You fight them in the train carriage, and they come in waves. One wave is a single Smash Mook; it pulls its arm back, prepares to swing, and then after a long time finally swings its club. The damage it does is monstrous, so it's best to play it safe.
    • The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild:
      • The typical battle strategy of a Hynox — a giant cyclopean miniboss — consists of trying to crush Link with powerful punches, sitting on him if he's under them, and uprooting trees to use as clubs or to throw at him if he tries to run.
      • Taluses — giant Rock Monsters fought as overworld minibosses — have only three attacks: they hurl their rocky arms at you if you're far away, punch you at close range, and try to fall over on top of you if you're under them. They're also slow and far from nimble and tend to telegraph their attacks. They get away with this by virtue of having very high health pools and by being completely invulnerable to damage unless hit in one specific weak spot.
  • Remember Me: Skinner Leapers are an interesting case. Instead of simply having a large amount of hitpoints they’ll actually block all regular attacks used against them and require Power Moves or use of Fury to defeat them. They also receive significant buffs in the presence of other Leapers. However, their moveset is exactly the same as that of basic Prowler Leapers and consists of nothing but basic kicks, punches and occasionally a grab attack.
  • Shrek the Third had the Cyclopi, which were tough and did nothing but punch you hard, even as plenty of weaker enemies had special attacks. The Shrek impersonators in the ruins of Far Far Away were also this.

    First-Person Shooters 
  • Chasm: The Rift: Most large humanoid enemies have some form of ranged attack as well as their primary melee (Gross, the ogre, can throw stones, the Executioner can throw his axe, etc), but the Lionmen and Vikings are limited to charging you and clobbering you with their maces and axes.
  • Doom: In the first game, Pinkies fill this role. Their only strategy is to run in and bite their target, a predictable pattern that makes lone ones easy to juke or even punch to death with the non-berserk fist, time-consuming as it may be. But in mixed enemy groups, they shield other ranged and potentially more dangerous hellspawn from being targeted, they move faster than any other monster, and can take a good amount of damage from regular weapons — more than a dozen bullets or two to three shotgun blasts to take down just one, and even if the rocket launcher kills them in one shot, a barrage of rockets will still not beat back even a small flock of them before they close in enough to be a facerocket hazard. Spectres, a variant with a permanent partial invisibility effect, are exactly the same, but used less often as a frontliner and more of an ambush enemy in darker locations.
  • Halo:
  • Hard Reset: Gorilla robots. They love Knockback, and have two attacks: either they charge at you like a bull, or they use a Shockwave Stomp. The latter will still be executed even if they’re otherwise paralysed with the shotgun’s secondary fire.
  • Left 4 Dead:
  • Marathon has the appropriately named Hulks, who are lumbering cyclopean bullet sponges that will smash any BOB's, Defense Drones, or space marines that get in their way.
  • Star Wars: Battlefront:
    • The AI-controlled Jabba's Guards at the Jabba's Palace map frequently spawn in the corridors and smash anyone they encountered, forcing the players to advance slowly and watch out for them. They can easily smash five troopers at once, thus significantly altering the match's score.
    • Star Wars Battlefront II (2017): Riot troopers in the singleplayer campaign will charge straight at you with electrified batons and attempt to smack you upside the head with them. Given that they lack enhanced health, speed, or even any sort of handheld shield, and don't really do that much damage either, this tactic verges on Suicidal Overconfidence.
  • Warhammer 40,000: Darktide:
    • Scab Maulers are hulking humans in plate armour and armed with two-handed chainaxes. Slow but strong and heavily armored, their attacks are crude due to their heavy and unwieldy weapons, but deal devastating damage if they connect.
    • Crushers are Chaos-corrupted Ogryns, a Human Subspecies characterized by somewhat exceeding the build and brains of an average gorilla. Chaos has done their intellect no particular favors, but they have high health, heavy armor and a lot of strength, and in battle their attacks boil down to stomping over to the players and hitting them very hard with their enormous two-handed clubs made of lengths of rebar with chunks of concrete still attached.

    Game Mods 
  • Ice and Fire (Minecraft): Trolls fight with three attacks that all boil down to "swing axe/hammer/tree trunk/stone column really hard", with the overhead swing having the added ability to break solid blocks.

    Hack and Slash 
  • Dynasty Warriors: Xu Chu is this no matter what game he appears in. He is never a commander and is always a subordinate to Cao Cao, so he will often be an enemy on the field to those who oppose the Kingdom of Wei. He has two primary tactics: swing his club to send enemies over the horizon, or smash the ground either with his club or himself to do area of effect damage. Almost everything he does is a variation of those two tactics, but don't underestimate them or his pleasant, simple-minded demeanor — he is freakishly strong and was rightly feared for being one of the primary causes of death by Collision Damage in the fourth installment of the game, where being nailed by a flying body could kill even the toughest general.
  • In Mordhau's Horde mode, the first boss-type enemies your party will encounter are ogres. These giant men move and attack slowly, but their club smash covers a lot of area and is able to kill multiple poorly-defended players in one blow. Additionally, if you get too close to an ogre while avoiding his club attack, he may try to stun you with a kick, and then smash you with his club.
  • Sengoku Basara has Honda Tadakatsu. Most characters in Sengoku Basara have a basic attack combo and four special attacks that offer different ways to attack people (such as ranged attacks, Flash Step, or attacks with different areas-of-effect). Tadakatsu is unique in that most of his special attacks are non-offensive: Instead, they activate different 'modes' that give him different ways to use his basic attack combo to slap enemies silly. This lack of flexibility is used for Competitive Balance as Tadakatsu is otherwise a Lightning Bruiser.
  • Warriors Orochi has Orochi's "Gyuki" type of officer, a race of enormous ox-faced demons carrying equally huge granite clubs. They have maybe four moves to call on (in a game where playable characters will have no less than a dozen different attacks), all of which are some variant of "bash with club" or "bash with something other than club".

    Metroidvanias 
  • Hollow Knight:
    • Husk Guards are Giant Mook versions of the common husks found wandering around the map, wield immense, club-like nails, and have only two attacks — a massive overhead swing and a hard blow against the ground that sends shockwaves rippling out. Neither is particularly subtle and both are highly telegraphed, but the first attack in particular will take off two masks of damage at a time instead of the one point of damage most enemies deal.
    • The False Knight, a huge armored figure wielding a massive morningstar, fights with a similarly direct method. Its main attacks are a telegraphed overhead smash that sends shockwaves across the whole arena, a flying leap ending in an overhead smash, and a fit of violent bludgeons against the ground that causes rocks to fall from the ceiling.

    MMORPG 
  • City of Heroes: While the Trolls can all qualify as this, the Supa Troll takes the cake. They spawn during a certain event and if left unchallenged, will run around the map and smash anything and everything until something smashes it back. If high level heroes are on the map, they can be stopped at the spawn point, but if there are none, then the low level heroes run the risk of being pummeled.
  • Guild Wars: The jotun are gigantic club-wielding loincloth-wearing humanoids. The giants are actually smaller and don't use melee weapons. They do, however, throw rocks and knock you down by stomping the ground, though.
  • RuneScape: For a long time, all bosses were this... and all monsters behave like that. Monsters attack you until you die, they die, or they can't get to you if they're solely melee monsters. They had only up to three options: Smash with melee, shoot projectiles, shoot magic, and the only thing that changed was power. TzTok-Jad, the strongest boss of the times, level 702 (players get up to 138 maximum as a comparison) does only the two latter, the former if you stand next to him, and summons healers once at half health, which is unique. The battle effectively degenerates to switching invulnerability-giving protection prayers in time to protect against missiles and magic respectively. The next strongest boss, the Corporeal Beast, is a breakthrough due to its ability to target an area, from which players have to run away. The Barrelchest, a robot-like being with eyes and brain in a glass dome controlling it, also only smashes the player with his (?) anchor. The fact he bypasses prayers and can hit the ground to produce damage to the player makes the battle a damage race. The new generation of bosses, in form of Dungeoneering, has most bosses have some gimmick to avert this trope. The result isn't really a success. It does invert the trope, though — Astea Frostweb summons spiders, uses prayers and freezes the player in place to walk away, all of which are player-accessible tactics everywhere else, while the player is generally just trying to mangle her with weapons. On the other side, bosses like the Rammernaut, the behemoths sans Stomp, Plane-Freezer Lakhrahnaz and pretty much any boss that requires a method to make him vulnerable rather than having a special attack play this straight.
  • Spiral Knights: Lumbers move slowly and have one attack that's easy to dodge, but it does a massive amount of damage at higher difficulties and also leaves the target stunned and sometimes also burned, shocked, poisoned or frozen.
  • World of Warcraft:
    • Ogres are quite common enemies. Whether they're level 20 or 70 all they do is hit you with something ("Me smash! You die!"). Then again, so do most normal mobs in the game (although most humanoid enemies tend to have at least some variety). Sometimes they have disarm, knockback or cleave attacks, but then they are usually recognizable for having a different model. Lower level of this type of mobs do nothing but autoattacking you, and they start adding more varieties to the attacks as you progress the dungeon levels such by adding interrupt, stun, Mortal Strike, Whirlwind, enrage, or add some magic to the attacks.
    • As an example for an actual boss, Patchwerk. He begins the Construct Quarter of Naxxramas and is one of the toughest fights in the place. Naxxramas also used to be the toughest instance around. What does he do? He hits hard. Really hard. And he hits someone else besides the tank hard. Really hard. No raid damage, no aggro dumping, no complicated phases, no mind control, no adds... nothing. It's hard to even pull aggro.
      In fact, give the tanks 3-5 seconds before the fight to build some aggro, and make sure you're not a flimsy Rogue or, God forbid, a Death Knight, and you don't have to worry about pulling aggro at all. The fight is usually described as a "tank and spank damage race", seeing as he will go into hard enrage mode after six minutes. It gets even more ridiculous when he passes 5% of his health (and he has a lot) — he Frenzies, which increases attack speed, attack power... you get the picture.

    Platformers 
  • Mercenary Kings has the Pikeman enemy, which is large, has decent health (though not unexceptional) and will attack by moving around and stabbing you with his pike in any direction you happen to be in. This includes downward attacks if you're below him and stabbing diagonally. The Crypt Guards, despite having their own sprites, are still the Underground Monkey version of Pikemen in function, but are placed in more strategic locations to take advantage of their ability to stab through walls, making it harder to fight back against them without armor-piercing rounds (which pass through terrain.)
  • Sonic the Hedgehog:
    • Sonic Heroes; Egg Hammers and Heavy-Egg Hammers are a robotic version of this trope. They weld large hammers. Three guesses as to what their attacks are.
    • Sonic Unleashed: Dark Titans are such classic Smash Mooks that they perfectly mimic the feeling of a giant monster beating on your skull. There is little in the game more satisfying than maxing out your strength and combos then beating them to death.
  • Spyro the Dragon (1998): While most advanced Gnorc varieties have a number of tricks up their metaphorical sleeves, from flight to shields to various ranged attacks, the Big Gnorcs and their Ice Gnorc reskins just have their great size, an immunity to charge attacks, and a very big club.
  • Super Mario Bros.:
    • Super Mario Bros. 3: Thwomps, which make their debut here. Their whole strategy consists of nothing more but staying still and trying to smash Mario or Luigi when they walk past from below. They're pretty much treated more as glorified hazards than actual enemies.
    • Super Mario 64:
      • Whomps, which are cousins of Thwomps, will try to smash Mario if he's in front of them instead of below.
      • The game introduces Bullies, enemies whose only attack consists of ramming Mario, hoping that he falls off the platform they're currently in.

    Real-Time Strategy 
  • Age of Empires:
    • Age of Empires II: A handful of unit lines, such as the Knight line and the Boyar line unique to the Slavs, have no attack bonus against other unit or building types. In both of these cases, it's because of their powerful combination of high HP, armor, movement speed, and attack power.
    • Age of Empires III: The Hussar and their civilization-unique counterparts (Delis for the Ottomans and Cossacks for the Russians) have no positive or negative attack modifiers against other unit types. Like with the Knights in AoE2, this is because of their high speed, attack and HP combination.
  • Total War: Warhammer:
    • Several factions have access to Monstrous Infantry units that fight with two-handed weapons such as clubs or maces, which they typically use for great overhead swings that, while slow compared to those of smaller, nimbler units, tend to deal splash damage and ignore their targets' armor stat.
    • Giants, found in several armies, have no ranged attacks or special abilities of any sort — their battle strategy is to simply amble over to the enemy and start swinging their clubs. Similarly, most "Feral" forms of single-entity monsters, such as Norscan mammoths or the Lizardmen's dinosaurs, have strong attacks and a lot of health but lack speed or ranged abilities. This makes them potentially very powerful units in the early game, as their high attack and high health pools allow them to efficiently mulch their way through infantry or low-level cavalry, but they struggle in the late game due to having few defenses against good ranged units and lacking the flight, speed or breath weapons of high-tier monsters.
    • Rogue Idols, giant rocky colossi in the Greenskins roster, have only two attacks — smashing several enemies with a hard punch against the ground and smashing lots of enemies with a giant bellyflop. Their Regiment of Renown version, the Big 'Un, has a more advanced trick where it tears a rock from its body and throws it to smash from a distance. They're also very slow, taking a good long while to get to their enemies and having long attack animations, but make up for their low speed and lack of grace by having high armor, high attack, and lots and lots of health.
  • Warcraft III: Reign of Chaos:
    • Knights are one of the few units in the game with no abilities whatsoever. They just have high speeds, high armor and a strong attack, and all they do is move and attack. No druidic spells or stealth like Night Elven units, no self-healing abilities like Undead units, no pillage or physical abilities like many Orc units, no arcane tricks like the Blood Elves, and no guns-and-rocketry-based gimmicks like the Dwarves. Even the Knights' early-game counterparts, the humble Footmen, have a special ability, Defend. However, they are one of the very few units that have increased speed that lets them run circles around enemy armies, letting them retreat from bad fights or press the advantage against a retreating enemy, grabbing up a few more kills, or sent to take out enemy supply lines before running out.
    • Among the Heroes, this title goes to the Alliance Mountain King, whose skills are "Smash harder and stun every once in a while" "Throw a hammer that stuns and hits hard" and "Smash ground hard" as well as "Become bigger and immune to magic". The Horde's Tauren Chieftain, whose skills are "Smash ground to cause linear shockwave" "Smash ground to stun nearby enemies" "Make self and nearby allies go fast" and "Come back to life in order to smash again". The Undead Crypt Lord and Night Elf Demon Hunter are less-singleminded but still smashing-oriented heroes. Ideally, these heroes just try and get into a big pileup fight to make a mess of nearby enemies.

    Roguelikes 
  • Angband: Orcs and ogres rely on simple hit-to-hurt melee attacks and lots of them, as do many kinds of trolls (others use claw and bite attacks). They tend to appear in groups.

    Role-Playing Games 
  • Angry Birds Epic: The Brute family of pigs have very high HP and a devastating (albeit slow) attack, but nothing else. Some of the later ones do have a passive ability, but none of them can do anything but smash.
  • Baldur's Gate:
    • Ogres just smash you in melee until they finally keel over.
    • The Throne of Bhaal expansion has fire giants with similarly styled tactics.
    • The same goes for most trolls in Shadow of Amn. They have great durability due to their regeneration, but not much more strategy than "if it moves, hit it until it stops moving".
  • Bloodborne: The Huntsman's Minion enemies are hulking, rag-clad ogre-looking bruisers whose strategy is mostly variations on "rush towards you and beat you with a brick". Except the ones who carry other objects, like dead bodies. Then they go for "rush towards you and beat you with a body".
  • Borderlands 2:
    • The Goliaths become these once you've shot their helmets off, charging, smashing you or the ground and jumping ridiculously far. There's an added twist of them levelling up every time they kill someone, regaining all health lost in process. The special Caustic Goliaths also vomit up acid at you.
    • Lab Rats are a particularly notable subversion. Initially they seem just like any other Smash Mook as they slowly shamble towards you, their hand shielding their face from your bullets... then they lift it to instantly fire a short-ranged, extremely damaging laser burst from their eyes. "Look into my eyes" indeed.
    • The Bullymongs are only able to smash and throw snowballs. They're also the game's starting enemies, though, so it's only noticeable with high-level versions.
  • Dragon Age has several of these.
    • The ogres have decent variety in their attacks, as they're able to kick people attacking from behind or pick up their main target and crush it in their grip, all in addition to standard Smash Mook attacks.
    • The Stone and Steel Golems do nothing but smash you in close combat and occasionally throw boulders.
    • The Sylvans in Brettonian Forest avert the trope: being large demon-possessed trees, they can also incapacitate two party members at once by enveloping them in their roots.
    • The Sloth-possessed skeletons wield two-handed weapons and also fit the trope well. Human two-handers go beyond trope’s limits, however, as they’re able to use powerful Sunder Arms and Sunder Armor debuffs. That and they’re frequently Champions with War Cry, too.
  • Dragon Quest: There are easily a dozen kinds in a few games, even if a lot are Palette Swaps. The page image is the Cyclops, which debuted as an end-game mook from Dragon Quest II.
    • While many (if not most) of the enemies in this game are simple-minded damage machines, the Cyclops and Gigantes are true embodiments of the trope. Only one attack, hit with a club for massive damage, have large amounts of HP... and little else, until Dragon Quest X onwards, where they use Crackerwhack and its stronger variants.
    • Trolls are another classic example. Though unlike their single-eyed comrades, Trolls are very prone to critical attack and missing their targets.
  • Drakengard: A few missions have ogres that fit this trope well. They're made slightly more interesting in the sequel, in that they require a specific strategy to effectively kill (a strategy that consists of "jump and hit it in the head"), and you also get a party member who's particularly good at killing them.
  • The Elder Scrolls
    • A variety of enemies of this type have been featured throughout the series, often crossing over with being Giant Mooks. These include Minotaurs, Giants, and Ogres. Trolls act as a smaller, but faster, and much more lethal version of this trope in large part thanks to their extreme Healing Factor.
    • The "G I A N T S" Game Mod for Morrowind adds bigger varieties of this trope. Much bigger. They have different names and are dressed in different clothes, but they have powerful basic attacks.
    • The "Martigen's Monster Mod" for Oblivion injects giants and a variety of other nasties, including (lore friendly) giant Goblins.
    • Skyrim has giants that can, almost literally, smash you to the moon. They also have a punch attack and a sweep attack, for variety's sake.
    • The Battlespire Dungeon Crawler spin-off and Redguard Action-Adventure spin-off games include Vermai, a blind and aggressive form of lesser Daedra which provide a Downplayed example of the trope. While not particularly large, their only means of attack is their relatively strong physical attack.
  • Etrian Odyssey: The Forest Ogre F.O.E. has only one attack: hit one of your guys hard. It will kill one or zero characters per turn. Your healer can resurrect one character per turn. It is mathematically impossible to lose to, but boy will you burn through a lot of resources trying to kill it.
  • Fallout: Super Mutants, with a few notable exceptions, are dim-witted brutes with a propensity for close-range physical violence. This is especially true for the behemoths, mutants from the east coast populations who have become very big, very aggressive and very stupid as they aged, and who can typically be found wielding uprooted fire hydrants as makeshift clubs.
  • Final Fantasy:
    • Final Fantasy in general subverts this with the Behemoth enemy, a colossal, purple horned beast that hits like a train and has more hit points than the moon. Occasionally, they'll have some weak magic just for variety, but usually you don't realize they aren't just a standard Smash Mook until they cast Meteor on your whole party when they die — or worse, to counter any magic you use on them.
    • Zus, the resident giant flyers of the franchise, don't have any special attacks to speak of, but they hit hard.
    • Final Fantasy bases most of its monsters from D&D (it just later changed the names of those which were actually trademarked), and the ogre is the first enemy of this kind that you face in the game.
    • Final Fantasy VI has a monster sprite type called "Gigas". The first one you encounter, Hill Gigas or Hades Gigas depending on translation, subverts this with an earthquake spell that can easily mean a Total Party Wipe if you don't have Float yet. Subsequent iterations play it straight, though, particularly Gigantos, a Boss in Mook Clothing with three attacks: punch you, counterattack by punching you twice and then punching you in the throat, and punching you three times in the throat. A typical throat-punch can often be a One-Hit Kill and his regular punches aren't far behind.
    • Final Fantasy XI: Acroliths. They either hit things, hit lots of things, or hit things really hard.
    • Final Fantasy X has the Wendigo as a boss example. After you blow away the heal-bot beast tamers following it, all it does is punch. Punch hard enough to knock out even Wakka or Auron in one hit. This is not a Puzzle Boss; just cast Blind on it and pray.
    • Final Fantasy Tactics A2: Headless monsters. They can hit, charge a turn for a double strength hit or occasionally use Ground Shaker to hit multiple characters in a line. Behemoths are mainly there to hit hard too, but they also have Cross Counter which makes them a bit trickier (it deals double damage on enemies with a counter skill and negates the counter).
  • Fire Emblem: The Sacred Stones: Cyclopes are absolutely huge and have the most HP of anything in the game, barring the final boss. They'd be considered Goddamned Bats — what with their high defense, attack and resistance to magic — if 1: they didn't miss 80% of their attacks. and 2: you didn't have a bishop in your party.
  • Golden Sun: Dark Dawn: A Smash Boss takes the form of the five Ogre Titans. Each one is different colored and different sized depending on how strong they are, but all they ever try to do to you is beat you up with giant axes. Gotta give them credit for trying, though; the last, largest one, takes a damn long time to kill (only Dullahan has more HP), and is so large it has to take a step back to hit you with its axe.
  • Icewind Dale: Ogres are typical examples — "Me will crush you! Crush you to goo!"
  • Kingdom Hearts: Every breed of enemy you encounter has at least one of these:
    • The Large Body Heartless is the most frequent. They do have some speedy moves, but that's not against this trope, and it's necessary, as they would be too easy to avoid otherwise.
    • In the other games, there's the Berserker Nobody in Kingdom Hearts II, the Bruiser Unversed in Birth by Sleep, and the Kooma Panda Dream Eater in 3D.
  • Live A Live: The Headhunter is a late-game enemy with exactly one attack in its arsenal, and its only tactic is to approach the closest hero so it can smack them with said attack at close range. It's also one of the game's superbosses, and this attack deals enough damage to kill any hero in a single hit unless their defense has been buffed through the roof.
  • Mass Effect 3 has Reaper-created Turian/Krogan hybrid monsters called — quite creatively — Brutes. Ironically, the whole point of adding Turians to the monsters' mix was so it would have a keen tactical mind, but presumably charging straight at your enemies to smash them is a fairly good tactic when you're Nigh-Invulnerable and they didn't give you a gun.
  • Nox: The ogres typically only charge and attack, though Ogre Lords also carry shuriken for ranged attacks. Also in this list are stone and mechanical golems, who chase you relentlessly and can smash you into a pulp in only 1 or 2 hits, and Lich Warriors, who do the same thing but are even faster.
  • Ogre Battle:
    • Surprisingly enough, the titular ogres don't count. In-Universe, Ogres are Demon Lords from the Netherworld that are feared for their incredible prowess. Ogres, whilst massive, hammer-wielding brutes, are versatile and powerful foes with incredible weapons and multi-hitting attacks. Oddly enough, the only game to actually feature generic Ogres is the 64 version...
    • Giants, who appear in March of the Black Queen and Tactics Ogre: The Knight of Lodis, are massive club-wielding brutes. They have high strength and HP allowing them to dish and take out heavy damage, but are extremely slow and dumb.
    • Golems are equally simplistic. From their first appearance in March of the Black Queen, all they do is throw particularly heavy punches. You can even recruit them fairly early on, giving you the potential for squads filled with these powerful constructs. (The downside is that they're incredibly fragile.) The opposite is true of Golems in the N64 version. They are incredibly tough, but do (relatively) poor damage.
  • Pokémon:
    • The highly aggressive bull Tauros can learn seven different moves that translate to "ram into things until they faint".
    • Galarian Darmanitan (introduced in Sword and Shield) enforces this with its Gorilla Tactics ability, which gives it a huge boost to power, but locks it into only using one move.
    • Pokémon Ranger: In Shadows of Almia, Kangaskhan works like this. It takes a lot of loops to earn its trust, but it doesn’t move around much. Its only attack is to fire a devastating Hyper Beam… which is highly telegraphed and leaves it wide open for more loops after it finishes.
  • Super Mario Bros.:
    • Mario & Luigi: Superstar Saga has the Clumph, a big club-wielding ogreish enemy in Joke's End. It can only really smash the ground to make shockwaves, but is still dangerous despite that.
    • Paper Mario: Clubbas are club-wielding enemies whose attacks include "club once for lots of damage" and "club three times for normal damage".
  • Tales of Phantasia: Golems are a clear cut example with very high hit points and attacks that typically knock back or stun your party. Usually act as meat shields to mage enemies, who take full advantage of your inability to get past the golems to hit/interrupt them.
  • Valkyrie Profile: Played entirely straight with the Trolls in the second game, sans for the fact they also slowly regenerate. All they do is hit you with their clubs and soak an annoying amount of damage.

    Survival Horror 
  • BioShock
    • In BioShock, the iconic Bouncer Big Daddies were unable to do anything besides charge forward and attempt to drill your character. BioShock 2 had added Brute Splicers, which will smash Delta with their fists and throw any heavy object they find on the ground. If you’re on the level above them, they’ll actually jump up there without breaking their stride.
    • BioShock Infinite had the Handymen, which behaved much like Brute Splicers, although they were occasionally able to create and throw ball lightning at you. If you were on the Sky-Rail, they would grab onto it and electrify the rope. Jump off at the right moment, though, and you would get several seconds of uninterrupted shooting with no punishment.
  • Dead Space had the aptly named Brute Necromorphs, which only attack by smashing and throwing things, unless they legs are removed. Then they sit down and lob explosive grenade-like things from the exposed hole in their stomach. Dead Space 3 replaces them with similarly-functioning Alien Necromorphs.
  • In The Persistence, berserkers are just big dumb brutes that do little more than flail their arms around you, but man are they good at it.
  • Resident Evil:
  • Silent Hill:
    • Silent Hill 3 has the Insane Cancers, who lacked any special attacks and are primarily notable for their insane speed and health, taking eight shotgun blasts to kill.
    • Silent Hill 4: In spite of their unsettling appearance, the Twin Victims ultimately boil down to this.
    • Silent Hill: Homecoming: The Siams, although these have a weak point in the form of a female-like form at the back, and can also be stunned much more easily.
    • Silent Hill: Downpour has the Prisoner Juggernauts, a giant version of regular Prisoner Minions. While the Minions can block and counter-attack and have an attack where they slap Murphy hard on both ears to incapacitate him, the Juggernauts apparently lost their brains as they gained in size and do nothing besides smashing.

    Third-Person Shooters 
  • Gears of War: Berserkers. They see you, then what do they do? Charge straight at you. If they don't do an insta-kill, they will follow up in a matter of seconds. But they have nigh-invulnerability, powerful attacks and very predictable one-track attacks.
  • The Suffering had Festers, which fought with a slave’s punishment ball used as a heavy flail. They were bulletproof, requiring melee attacks, explosives or flame to take down, and their primary attack was to slam the flail into the ground hard enough to produce a shockwave 3 meter in diameter. They would also occasionally release explosive rats during the fight and at death. Isolationists in the sequel averted the trope further by being able to shoot charged bullets from their crutches. The sequel, Ties That Bind also had Gorgers, which existed to fill the gap between “basic” Slayers and Isolationists. They either smashed or knocked the main character down and attempted to eat him.

    Tower Defense 
  • Mini Robot Wars, an Expy of the above game, most Machines that don't shoot will simply smash your minirobot turrets. Special mention goes to the Giant and Titan machines: the latter will smash up to THREE minirobots at one go!
  • Plants vs. Zombies: The Gargantuar usually does nothing other than advance slowly and smash your plants flat with a held object. He does have a secondary "attack" where he throws a fast but squishy Imp Zombie into your defenses once he gets down to half of his health.

    Turn-Based Strategy 
  • Battle for Wesnoth: Ogres. Trolls also apply, but at least they regenerate. Heck, most melee-only units with one attack option are this, whether a lowly Orcish Grunt or a high-level Loyalist Royal Guard. Some do have minor ranged attacks, though, just as most ranged units have minor melee attacks. Some also have different damage type options.

    Visual Novels 
  • Fate/stay night:
    • Servant Berserker, Heracles, embraces this trope. His "Mad Enhancement" skill boosts all of his stats at the cost of leaving him too insane to use any of his other skills, leaving 'hit it very very hard' as his only option as far as attacks go. He can, however, hit so hard that even if you dodge the air pressure can still kill you. While a Servant's Noble Phantasm is normally a powerful magic weapon, his "God Hand" is his own body and lets him No-Sell just about anything you throw at him (he wields a random slab of rock instead).
    • Fate/Zero: Averted by this story's Berserker, Lancelot, whose "Eternal Arms Mastery" ability prevents him from losing his weapon skills due to mental influence (including Mad Enhancement). He also has the ability to turn any item he holds, including machine guns and broken telephone poles, into a low-ranked Noble Phantasm, or even steal Noble Phantasms from other Servants and use them at the Rank they originally were.

    Wide-Open Sandbox 
  • Saints Row: The Third: The basic Brutes. While their more advanced counterparts would shoot you with miniguns or flamethrowers, they would either run up to smash you or throw cars at you.
  • Valheim: Almost every biome has a Giant Mook, several of which are powerful enough to damage the environment: trolls (especially with clubs), abominations, golems, and Fuling berserkers (who can even damage boulders). Human nature being what it is, players soon figured out that a monster who can smash walls into kindling can also make an efficient forest-clearing and mining tool (although this requires good reflexes and equipment, as while the big monsters' attacks are relatively easy to avoid, they tend to bring friends).

Non-Video Game Examples

    Card Games 
  • Magic: The Gathering tends to put these in red and green; if they have an ability, it will either be trample, meaning that if the creature that's blocking them is small enough, they will smash right through and hit the player behind it too, or it will be haste, meaning that it doesn't have to wait a turn to activate before it smashes. In very rare cases, a creature may actually have both at the same time.

    Fan Works 
  • Shadows Awakening: Ironfist. Unlike his two partners, he has no kind of special ability other than being very strong. His main (and only) attack pattern is trying to pulverize his enemies via fist slams.

    Literature 
  • The Lord of the Rings: The Trolls are probably the archetype of the modern ogre-type fantasy brutes (although in The Hobbit they do show some degree of intelligence and cunning), mostly serving as heavy, dim bruisers used by the forces of evil as living siege engines and tanks. This is even more apparent in the movies and subsequent video games, where all trolls are modeled specifically this way.

    Tabletop Games 
  • Dungeons & Dragons:
    • Dinosaurs generally have a large amount of health and a single, hard-hitting attack that they can use once per turn. They are far from the most complex monsters a DM can run, but they can prove quite dangerous in spite of that: a Triceratops or a Tyrannosaurus rex can easily ruin a low- to mid-level party's day.
    • Fang dragons can pull tricks in combat like trip attacks, but they're definitely this compared to other dragons. They don't have breath weapons, are poor fliers, and have only limited offensive spell-like abilities, but they are really good at, and thoroughly enjoy, charging in and tearing enemies to pieces with their various physical weapons.
    • While other fiends possess tricky spell-like abilities or other magic, the huge, saurian ghargatulas just charge in to bite, claw or sting opponents.
    • The ogre, the epitome of this trope if you go strictly by the moves listed in the monster manuals (imaginative Game Masters can make them more cunning). In fourth edition, where even kobolds have four or five game-altering techniques apiece, ogres still just mostly have variations on "hit with club" or "hit with club a lot". (Although one has "hit with flail" and another has "hit with javelin and then hit with club".) Giants, especially hill, stone, frost, and fire giants, fill this niche for higher-level adventures; they generally have two ways to attack, hitting you with a melee weapon or chucking a rock at you from afar. This is averted with frost giant jarls, cloud giants and storm giants, who carry more sophisticated weapons and have access to magical powers, making them much more versatile.
    • Trolls are too primitive and unintelligent to create complex weapons or use them effectively, but are very strong and have an extremely potent Healing Factor. As such, their favored approach to battle is to simply wade into melee and start beating people to death with their bare fists and claws, while relying on their regeneration to keep them alive.
    • Monsters in 4e are sorted by roles; soldiers are durable but don't hit very hard, skirmishers are mobile, artillery are ranged and so forth. Smash Mooks tend to be listed as Brutes, who are very durable and don't hit very often, but hit hard when they do — and sometimes Elite Brutes for those that smash really hard.
    • Fifth Edition reduces many monsters to this. For example, the marilith goes from a terrifying demoness with a dozen special powers and spells along with devastating melee to having two moves: an attack with her tail and six swords and a very short-range teleport.
  • Legend System: The Utter Brute track for enemies focuses more on granting raw stat numbers than new abilities.
  • Pathfinder:
    • Official material explicitly notes that a cloud giant (or a gang of them) can make a good Breather Boss for higher level parties because while they are huge, strong and tough, they lack Damage Reduction, energy resistance, Summon Magic, and other bothersome abilities high-level enemies tend to have; the most exotic ability they have is a fog cloud spell-like ability. They have lots of feats, but true to this trope, they are things like Power Attack (smash extra hard), Great Cleave (smash multiple people), and Awesome Blow (knock someone over by smashing them). Pathfinder also twists this tradition by having splat books of things like orcs, ogres, and giants with classes and unique abilities, letting you have things like Smash Mook Assassins or Smash Mook Squishy Wizards.
    • Xulgath spinesnappers (also called bonebreakers, marrowventers, and similar colorful epithets) are nine-foot-tall colossi and much stronger and larger than their common human-sized kin. They're described as fighting "with the speed, grace, and strength of a sledgehammer", making them ideal as shock troops, combat champions and little else. Their illustration shows one wielding a giant bloodstained sledgehammer, of course.
  • Warhammer: Many armies have a unit of a very large allied species whose basic job is to hit things really hard and soak up damage.
    • Da Orcs have Trolls, incredibly stupid beings just about capable of wielding tree limbs as clubs, who in battle rely on their immense strength and regenerative powers to stay alive while they smash their foes to pulp.
    • Giants, present in a number of monstrous factions, are big primitive brutes who fight with crude clubs made from uprooted trees, sometimes with swords jammed into them if the giant is especially clever. They have a list of Special Attacks that chiefly boils down to "swing club", "eat tiny thing", "step on tiny things", "pick up enemy and throw it", "headbutt", and "stuff down pants".
    • The Lizardmen have the Kroxigors, who can grow nearly two stories tall, have scales tougher than armor and go into battle wielding either enormous bronze mauls and cudgels or their bare fists. They also function as construction workers and heavy lifters out of battle.
    • The Warriors of Chaos use their own version of Trolls, which are even bigger, tougher and stupider than the ones tagging along with the Orcs and wield proportionately-sized clubs — even Throgg, a legendary troll with a genius-level intellect, still prefers to fight with a titanic stone warhammer with which to pound hordes of enemy infantry into paste — after all, if you're five meters tall, can kill a human with a blow of your hand and can walk off a cannonball to the chest, wading into melee and hitting whatever's in the enemy colors is a perfectly effective and resource-efficient strategy to use.
    • The Ogre Kingdoms are almost entirely this; any given Ogre army consists chiefly of nine-foot-tall musclebound brutes wielding giant mauls, clubs, crude hatchet-like swords or monstrous iron knuckles, alongside the occasional giant or mammoth-sized mountain beast.
  • Warhammer 40,000:
    • Ogryns (which are essentially Ogres IN SPACE) fill this general function in Imperial forces, in addition to being among the few decent hand-to-hand fighters in the Imperial Guard. They are armed with Ripper Guns, giant shotguns designed specifically to not break when the Ogryn inevitably reaches close combat range and starts hitting people with them.
    • The Tyranids and Orks are both certainly capable of building armies that amount to Smash Mooks galore. In particular, the former employ Carnifexes whose only noteworthy weapon are giant crab claws designed to tear apart tanks, and the latter have a battle strategy that always employs the step "run at our enemy while screaming and hit them with my axe" (sometimes with no succeeding step).
    • Aberrants and Abominants are mutant Genestealer hybrids characterized by immense strength, aggression and stupidity. In battle they're equipped with giant hammers, mining equipment or uprooted street signs and used as shock troops and linebreakers, relying on their armor and tough flesh to soak up incoming fire and their immense strength to break apart enemy formations, fortifications and armored vehicles with crude, sweeping blows of their weapons.

    Webcomics 

    Western Animation 
  • Star Wars: Clone Wars: In "Chapter 6", the gladiator Giant Flog is a hulking, primitive colossus wearing nothing but a loincloth, who fights using a giant piece of rock attached to a chain that he swings like a flail. He's immensely powerful but lacks technique or finesse, which ultimately proves to be his undoing when he fights Asajj Ventress. Her more acrobatic fighting style allows her to easily elude Flog's clumsy swings, severe the chain of his flail and bring down the hulking giant.

 
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Smasher

Smashers are enemies that carry giant pillars of which they use to, well, smash.

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Main / SmashMook

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