The War Sequence

And you get to fight each and every last one of them.^note  Except for the two Behemoths, thanks to hardware limitations, but you do still get to kill an even 1,000 of the mooks.

"Hear me, my hordes! The spell is nearly complete! Until then, you WILL keep that whelp from interfering with my ritual. I don't care if the whole lot of you get lodged on the end of his blade. You will buy me the time I need! Do not fear him... Fear my wrath if you fail me!"

— Lord Ghirahim, The Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword

Stage of a game where the enemies begin to come out in huge droves, typically near the climax. May be part of a Zerg Rush. Increasingly common as systems have become more powerful, as it requires large amounts of sprites or polygons on screen at once. The War Sequence can cause a kind of Fake Difficulty, but looks impressive and is so fun to beat (even if it's not required you beat everyone) that that's overlooked.

If you're lucky, there may be a near-equal force on your side as well, making it more of a true battle and averting One-Man Army at the same time. You'll probably be expected to carry the weight of the battle on your own, though... However, a character who beats a War Sequence without backup usually qualifies as a One-Man Army. Conservation of Ninjutsu usually means that the player has a relatively easy time wiping out the mooks. If not, it can easily become That One Level.

In the worst case of One-Man Army scenario, the War Sequence would be The Last Dance, which you have to stay alive as long as possible, you're likely to be overpowered by the swarm and die in a heroic manner, but, there is nothing to regret.

Not to Be Confused with Big Badass Battle Sequence; The difference is this trope lets you actually participate in the war, and is specifically a videogame trope; The other trope is general with major forces fighting major battles.

These are likely to be the best levels ever.

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Examples:

Action Games

• Rune had a scene in which you're trapped in a room, forced to fend off hundreds of zombies while waiting for an enormous door to open.
• Zone of the Enders: the 2nd Runner featured the "Mars Melee," where the player and the hero from the first game had to protect the Redshirt Army from hundreds of enemies. It's by far the longest, most frantic battle in the whole game. You even get a special on-screen radar for this battle just to show you how many of the buggers you're up against.
  ADA: "Warning: Large enemy wave approaching."

Action Adventure

• Although in Bully, 'Complete Mayhem' only requires you to take down the four clique leaders (and their bodyguards), the rest of the school's students spend the mission fighting amongst themselves, and as a timeless mission Jimmy is free to get involved in any of these skirmishes. He also has Russell on his side to even the score a little.
• Elden Ring inverts this: the battle against General Radahn, if you choose to fight him, gives you the chance to summon no fewer than seven Assist Characters to help slay him, in a game that usually only gives you one per boss fight. And even then, Radahn is so huge and powerful none of your allies last longer than a few seconds against him... which is why their summon signs respawn. His fight is therefore built around a strategy of accompanying waves of NPCs into battle to whale on him, retreating when they get picked off, then summoning them back in to repeat the process until either you or he dies. To set the tone, his boss fight is advertised as the Radahn Festival, a "celebration of war", and takes place on an old battlefield still littered with corpses and weapons.
• The Legend of Zelda:
  • The Wind Waker:
    • Partway through the game, you run through the entrance hall of a large castle, where many armored guards are frozen in time, like statues. When you leave, however, they all have come back to life and you have to kill them all before you can proceed. There are only about twenty of them, but they are the strongest enemy in the game.
    • The lower levels of the Savage Labyrinth contain large groups of generic enemies.
    • The secret grotto on Shark Island has a particularly long battle sequence against a horde of various enemies.
  • Twilight Princess:
    • The prelude to the Arbiter's Grounds dungeon is a one-man assault against an army of Bulblins occupying fortified positions. Bullbo riders outside, an army of archers in the camp itself, and ending on a one-on-one with Lord Bulblin - who sets the place on fire when he loses, forcing you to appropriate another Bullbo to charge out of there.
    • Another time, you have to kill all the mooks in the hidden village before you can advance. Probably the best use of the bow and arrow in the entire series.
  • Skyward Sword has this as part of the finale with Zerg Rushing Mooks, ending with the final fight against Ghirahim. It's also a direct nod to the above two games. The page quote sets the scene.
  • Tears of the Kingdom has The Demon King's Army right before the Final Boss. It starts with a wave of Bokoblins and Boss Bokoblins large enough to break damn near any weapon in the game. Take them out, and a wave of Lizalfos spawns to take their place; take them out, and a horde of Gidbos spawns; take them out, and there's one last wave of Moblins. If you complete all the regional main quests before coming here, you'll have the series-first party members to back you up - five of them, in fact. If you didn't, then you'll have to fight the appropriate bosses of the incomplete quests without the ally abilities that those bosses are designed to be fought with.
• LEGO Star Wars
  • The first game has the Geonosis Arena battle, where you have to fend off hoards of droids and Geonosians while completing various objectives.
  • There's also "Defense Of Kashyyyk", where you have to fight your way across a beach where a buttload of clone troopers and battle droids are doing their best impression of D-Day.
  • The second game has one part where you must fend off a legion of stormtroopers on the Death Start.
• Ninja Gaiden II (360 version) features a long stairway corridor near the end, where the ninja mooks you haven't fought since the first couple of areas will swarm at you; IIRC, around 3-400 of them. This is no doubt done solely so you can revel is slaughtering them with all the powerful weapons you've acquired since you last fought them. It works. Well, except for the massive slowdown...
• In [PROTOTYPE], the War events are straight-out examples of this: Alex temporarily teams up with either the soldiers or the Infected. Both sides get a limited number of combatants and you have to wipe out the other side before they wipe out yours. And yes, unintentional friendly fire is a VERY real possibility and DOES count against your side (I'm looking at you, notorious Whipfist-users). And to make it even crazier, it doesn't matter how much of your side remains at the end, only how fast you did it.

Beat 'Em Ups

• The Matrix: Path of Neo recreates the Burly Brawl sequence from the second film, though (a) there were only up to eight "real" Smiths at a time (the rest were lower-resolution and skidded away if you got too close to them), and (b) there was a mandatory trick to beating them all.
• "Long Battles" from the Like a Dragon series are extended fights that see the protagonists tearing through room after room of yakuza, gangsters, government agents, and whatever other baddies the games throw at them. The most impressive is from Yakuza 5, when Kiryu solos a 100-man army of Tojo Clan yakuza who are armed with everything from baseball bats to anti-tank missiles, and he's still got enough energy left over to look for Round 2 against their handlers when he's done.
• The number of enemies in Little Fighter 2's story mode scales according to the number of characters in your party. Make a party of 8 and fights against dozens of enemies at once become more and more common as the game goes on.
• The final push to the Premiere in Mother Russia Bleeds involves walking through a long hallway filled with dozens upon dozens of mooks. Fortunately, the game is generous enough to hand you the katana, the most powerful melee weapon in the game, right at the start.

Fighters

• Dragon Ball Xenoverse has a post-game story mission that takes place during Bardock's last stand against Frieza. Now, the Time Patroller joins them as they fight off Frieza's soldiers, then the mad tyrant himself, in orbit above Planet Vegeta.
• Super Smash Bros. has this in the form of 100-Man Melee/Brawl/Smash^* Century Smash in Ultimate, one of a handful of difficulty levels for each game's respective "Multi-Man/Mob" modes. True to its name, it has you fighting 100 opponents in one match, up to six at a time. There is also an "Endless" difficulty, which appropiately only ends when the player is KO'd.

First-Person Shooters

• Although virtually any mission is the ARMA series qualifies, there are a few specific missions of events that definitely escalate the scale of combat from "minor infantry skirmish" to "full on war."
  • In ARMA 2 the Russian invasion of Chernarus definitely counts, as well as the dream sequence opening. In Operation Arrowhead that opening invasion of Takistan counts. ARMA 2 also has a bonus mission where you play as helicopter pilot during World War III.
  • In ARMA 3, the third chapter of the campaign qualifies, as NATO returns to Altis to mount a full scale offensive against CSAT and their AAF allies. If Kerry abandons the final assault, the whole island collapses into chaos as the NATO assault is broken, and the world collapses into World War III. However, this is the non-canon ending, presumably because it brings about the end of the world.
• The ferris wheel showdown in the escape from Pripyat and the escape from the village in Call of Duty 4. In both cases, you need to get on a helicopter before you're overrun.
  • The final sequence of the American campaign in Call of Duty: World at War is essentially one of these. If you don't call in air strikes, you can just keep fighting as long as you want.
• After 15 years of gaming, many a Doom mod has either this or really scarce ammo; some more extreme cases have the player(s) fighting multiple boss monsters at once.
  • Hell Revealed is the definitive example; its mass-monster battles were so iconic that for years this style of gameplay was called "Hell Revealed-style gameplay", but nowadays such maps are usually just called "slaughter maps". Other important mods revolving around slaughter maps are Alien Vendetta (notable for having one of the first maps to break the 1000-monster barrier), Deus Vult and its sequel (which have maps with over three thousand monsters, sometimes attacking hundreds at a time), and Scythe 2. Some slaughter maps go so crazy with enemy counts, they lag the game.
  • The official Doom games have a couple slaughter maps as well, the most infamous being Final Doom's "Go 2 It", a secret stage with 200+ enemies, including 19 enemy-reviving Arch-Viles and 13 Cyberdemons.
  • The infamous Nuts.wad has the player square off against over 10,000 enemies in a hodge-podge, including 800 Cyberdemons. The real kicker is that, while most of the above examples split up their fights into segments, Nuts has you fighting the vast majority of these enemies at the same time, in one giant room. Downplayed in that monster infighting scores the vast majority of the kills for the player, who mostly has to focus on moving and picking up invulnerabilities. The original Nuts was intended to be a test file for an archive upload function, hence its size; the sequels are even bigger in scope, but they're more well-balanced; Nuts 3 is especially playable and even features story elements.
• Miniature war sequences at the finale of Fallout 3 and the Broken Steel DLC while generally the whole Operation Anchorage DLC is a giant war sequence. In the first instance, the Lyons' Pride attacks the Jefferson Memorial with Liberty Prime as support, who mows down dozens of Enclave soldiers who in turn demonstrate liberal use of air and artillery support. In the second, the Brotherhood attacks Adams AFB as a diversion to let the player infiltrate the Mobile Base Crawler sitting next to the runway. Finally the OA has the Lone Wanderer doing trench warfare against hordes of Chinese while everything around him/her is being shot to hell by artillery and bombers flying overhead.
• Fallout: New Vegas has the Second Battle of Hoover Dam, where you'll either be fighting for NCR, Caesar's Legion, or alongside the former for Mr. House or an Independent Vegas. Depending on how you've dealt with other factions you'll be supported by either the Boomers providing air support from their bombers, the Great Khans or even The Remnant of the Enclave.
• The final mission of Far Cry has the player entering a volcanic caldera with at least a dozen of the toughest 'normal' creatures in the game (the giant, rocket launcher-armed grunts) and 1-2 dozen lesser enemies (although some of them were invisible).
• Halo:
  • Several of the late-game areas with the Flood in the original Halo: Combat Evolved had them coming in infinite waves, as well as the final run to escape. The Library somewhat approached this but did not fully qualify. Likewise, there are also a couple areas in Halo 2 which provide an effectively unlimited amount of enemies to shoot down.
  • In most games from Halo 3: ODST onward, there is a multiplayer match option called Firefight which is this. Waves upon waves of enemies to shoot down. No goal, just survive as long as possible. Halo 5: Guardians Firefight doesn't have the infinite waves, but it otherwise ups the scale tremendously from previous Firefight modes, and even includes boss enemies.
  • The ODST campaign has its share of this too, most notably the fight on the New Mombasa Police HQ's rooftop against hordes of Brutes and Banshees (which gives you a ton of explosives and heavy weapons to play with), and the Firefight-esque final battle.
  • Both Halo: Reach's Firefight mode and campaign have lots of this (in fact, all the original FF maps are set in the same places where massive battles occurr in the campaign), and in one cutscene there's a big advance of UNSC forces that the Covenant meet head-on. The campaign concludes with a Last Stand against endless waves of Covenant among the ruins.
  • From Halo 3: The battle outside the array in the level "The Covenant". It is the final major battle in the human-Covenant war, and the Covenant throw everything they have left at you, with the crew of Forward Unto Dawn doing likewise. Appropriately, it has more total forces and more variety of vehicles than virtually any other battle in the series. The music "One Final Effort" plays, the battle begins, and then the Covenant send two scarabs against you. And yes, it's the Best Level Ever.
  • Several of the Mantis sequences in Halo 4 have you fighting off incoming waves of enemies.
  • Justified for the Mantis sequence in Halo 5: Guardians as Jul's Covenant is making its last desperate attempt to assassinate the Arbiter with all of their remaining forces on Sanghelios.
• Left 4 Dead has triggers in the game that need to be tripped to advance, which do things like open gates or topple bridges to create ramps. These (extremely noisy) events summon hordes of fast, angry zombies to attack the group in a miniature war sequence (miniature because only 30 zombies appear at any one time, though it certainly feels like more and there may be multiple waves). The in-game AI Director can will also throw these hordes at you after a Boomer (a special zombie) attack, when the group loiters too long in one place, or whenever it damn well pleases.
• Inverted in Medal of Honor: Allied Assault and Frontline with the D-Day levels. Here, YOU'RE the mook, along with several thousand others, being wiped out in countless numbers by an unreachable enemy. Only after about 20 minutes of dodging machine gun and rifle bullets, mortars, artillery, mines and the sea itself (and watching hundreds of hapless mooks fail to do the same) do you actually get to strike back at the enemy.
• Hell in the final level of Painkiller is this taken it's logical conclusion; the entire level is a landscape comprised of a series of wars frozen in time. You start out at a medieval siege, go through the broken wall and find yourself in the trenches of World War I. You then move into the final zone, which is an urban wasteland presided over by a giant mushroom cloud.
  • Sadly, the actual enemies in the level are just a procession of ghostly melee-focused enemies. Killing 66 of them summons the final boss, Satan himself (he only sticks around for about 30 seconds at a time, so you need to act fast).
• Serious Sam has lots of WAAAAAAAARRRR!!! Sequences in store. The player will often always find himself trapped in a wide open space with dozens of enemies spawning around him at a constant rate. This often includes Beheaded Kamikazes and Sirian Werebulls coming from all directions, making you really glad that you at least have an open space to work with.
  • One such sequence — precisely, the last one before the Final Boss of The Second Encounter — even has the sky darken and then rain meteors for the entire sequence. It's not just for show, either: those meteors can easily kill both Sam and Mental's goons.
  • "The Guardian of Time" from BFE. Over seventeen hundred enemies. Followed by a final boss fight where hundreds more can spawn.
• Team Fortress 2 has this as a gamemode: Mann vs. Machine pits a team of 6 against several waves of Mecha-Mooks. The weakest of the robots are on (almost) equal terms with the player character, and that's not taking into account the various gigantic robots thrown into the mix. Luckily, the players can upgrade their weapons' attributes, so they can be the one man armies the game requires them to be
  • The 2012 Halloween Update takes this to a ridiculous extreme, with a single Mann Vs Machine map added (among other things of course). The catch? The map consists of 929 ENEMIES. Oh yes, and this doesn't count support units, which can spawn infinitely. In fact, the map has so many enemies at one time, that even players with high-end computers have reported a lagfest. You may weep now.
  • If your computer can handle all the enemies without blowing up, the sheer amount of cash they drop will allow you to buy some seriously powerful upgrades. A rocket laucher that can fire 11 rockets at once, with each rocket healing you per kill, on top of your Healing Factor of 15 health per second? It's possible, and awesome.
  • The 2023 update introduced a server setting for 100 players. Yes, 50 versus 50 teamfights. Due to the deliberately small size of maps (originally made with at most 24 players in mind) it is wildly chaotic on a level most other multiplayer games can only dream of. This makes every engagement into an utter meat grinder as fallen mercenaries and fallen guns pile up.
• The Darkness has a sequence that breaks up the game taking place in some form of hell, being comprised solely of a distorted and horrible version of World War I (as if it wasn't horrible enough already).
• Half-Life and it's remake, Black Mesa, have the Surface Tension chapter, in which we finally see the human and alien military going all out at each other. While at the start the U.S. Marines seem to have the upper hand, with several established strong points, as the level advances the aliens start beating them back, and by the time the chapter is done the humans are in full retreat, desperately bombing the entire compound.
• Half-Life 2 has the run for the Citadel near the end of the game, with the rebels and Combine shooting it out in the destroyed remains of City 17.

Hack and Slashers

• In the Dynasty Warriors series, practically every stage matches the trope. At lower difficulty levels, the computer-controlled allied generals will be quite capable of eliminating any opposing generals you don't get to first; however, at higher difficulty levels, they Can't Catch Up. At the highest difficulty levels, this can even lead to being a rather LITERAL One-Man Army, especially in the earlier games, if you play as your side's commanding officer, and there is no way to lose besides your character or the CO's death. If you cannot achieve immediate and significant momentum for your side by killing generals and cutting off reinforcements, your side will be reduced to you alone in mere minutes, no matter how well you hold off the thousands of opposing soldiers.
• The introductory and end sequences of Heavenly Sword, where you take on Bohan's entire army. The first part of the final chapter, "The Goddess," is especially awesome, as you get to rock out using the full power of the titular sword, killing up to a thousand or more of Bohan's men before the final battle with Bohan proper begins.
• The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King has the Battle of Pelennor Fields. As Aragorn, Legolas or Gimli, the first part's objective is to join the Rohirrim and Dunedain in fighting and killing a full hundred enemies among orcs, uruk-hai and easterling humans. Soon after, the easterling Mumak war elephants shows up, and you're tasked to defend Merry and Eowyn from them, single-handedly destroying their armor and scoring the killing shots; there's also the small matter of the Witch-King himself swooping in to attack them. From here you have to handle the Mumakil approaching from either edge of the field, the groundlings that will do their best to hinder you, and also kill the Nazgul's mount. It's as thrilling as it sounds.
• This was the pride and glory of Ninety-Nine Nights, which boasted the ability to have over 1000 enemies onscreen at any one time.
• Onimusha 3: Demon Siege has a similar sequence against demons.
• Japanese game Ikusagami (Demon Chaos) fits an insane 65,535 enemies onscreen at once. Don't believe us? See for yourself.
• Bayonetta 2 gets in on the action close to the end of the game when Bayonetta gets transported 500 years into the past to the conclusion of the Witch Hunts. It consists of two levels: the first is fighting your way through the angelic army attacking Vigrid with a fancy suit of Umbran Armor, the second represents the last stand of the Umbran Witches against the overwhelming numbers of angels.
• While Fire Emblem Warriors follows the formula of the Dynasty Warriors, the Anna Battle of the History Mode map The Path is Yours condenses the story of Revelations and the map itself, by having the player (as Corrin, Lianna, and Rowen) face off against both Nohr and Hoshido (and Anna).

Miscellaneous Games

• Gauntlet. Since basically every enemy is produced by Mook Makers, you'll butcher thousands of enemies in each level.
• Iron Grip is a shooter in one mode and an RTS in the other, and in co-op the shooter players face off against the many, but expendable, troops of the RTS players. In other words, if you're playing the shooter mode the entire game is this.
• We Love Katamari has a level which requires rolling up one million roses. Doing so in one session takes long enough that many guides recommend using rubber bands on the controller and leaving for a while. Fortunately, you can save and resume later.
• There are two different "bosses" in Sonic Heroes, Robot Carnival and Robot Storm, which are really War Sequences.
• Vampire Survivors: The whole time. In every stage, and from minute one, you're going to be pelted with utterly ridiculous amounts of enemies numbering in the thousands before you've even spent ten minutes in the field, and your only defense is to pile on items until you can turn yourself into a one-man Bullet Hell to try and fend them off.

MMORPGs

• In City of Heroes the developers have added zombie invasions as well as alien invasions that spawn in the open. Numbers of enemies, as well as their power level (minion, lieutenant, boss, elite boss) that spawn is based on how many heroes/villians are in the vicinity to fight them, so if you have a few dozen players you can expect to see hundreds of zombie and/or alien mooks show up for a good old fashioned curb stomping.
  • Related to the alien invasion sequence, a Rikti Mothership Raid involves heroes and villains cooperating together to do battle with an endless army of Rikti soldiers, all lieutenant rank or higher, with some among them very powerful spellcasters specializing in AoE attacks to keep teams on their toes. The battle only ends when a timer (invisible to the raiding teams) finally runs out, but players can add time by setting explosives in the mother ship's exhaust grates.
  • During the 2009 anniversary, on at least one server, a zombie invasion coincidentally occurred at the same time as the Freedom Phalanx was triggered (by a GM) to attack the City of Villains. Eight very powerful hero NPCs, a hundred villain players, and easily three times as many zombies suddenly in the same zone at the same time in a three-way battle across the zone.
  • Not to escape mention, older issues of City of Heroes behaved similarly to the World of Warcraft examples above; back before there was a limit on how many enemies a player could have aggroed, it was possible for a sufficiently tough tank to aggro an entire map (or in some cases, an entire zone!) massing a hundred enemies or more in a single location.
  • A few specific tasks act like this, as well. The infamous Lazarus Task Force has a final encounter with three of the neo-Nazi 5th Column's top brass, supported by many troops, with MANY reinforcements joining in as the fight progresses. As one player put it: "... and then the entire 5th Column ambushes you!
• Champions Online has a Nemesis mission ("Deathray Demolition") which culminates in your character's (player-created) Nemesis trying to escape after you destroy his death ray. As a last ditch effort, he snaps his fingers, and a crap ton of his minions start pouring out of every conceivable doorway or portal and try to swarm you.
• Kingdom of Loathing has you start and finish a war between Orcish Frat Boys and Hippies. You get a special reward if you manage to wipe out both sides of the conflict.
  • The Valhalla Invasion event had players team up to take out hordes of skeletons invading the adventurers' afterlife.
• Lunia, an MMORPG, does this often. The first one happens in History Stage 1-2, where you were forced to defend a village from an oncoming orc siege. Since the game's management changed to Ijji, they changed the stage to make it much easier (as in, removing about a hundred orcs or so), and removing the whole "Defend-This-Spot-For-3-Minutes" objective, but the hard-mode version of this stage, Legend 1-2, is similar to the old version.
• In World of Warcraft, many dungeons have AoE pulls with tons of throwaway, easy to kill mobs. One of the more exciting versions occurs in Zul'Farrak, when the players (and their temporary NPC allies) get Zerg Rushed by at least 100 trolls. The Battle for Mt. Hyjal takes this trope to the logical extreme, with waves of 8 to 20 or so enemies coming at once. There's also a set-piece vehicle battle in the Ulduar raid dungeon which is intended to evoke the feel of an epic war sequence.
  • Special mention goes to one quest in the recent Death Knight chain, in which you join an army of thousands against another army of hundreds. The player has no impact on the ending of the sequence, nor can you die during the battle, but it's still the biggest war sequence in the game.
  • Deliberately recreating this scenario is a favorite technique of high level players who wish to clear a low level dungeon—rather than fighting the encounters in their designed sequence, you just rush through the zone, attracting every enemy in your path, and then fight them all at once.
• A special mention goes to the final shutdown event of Tabula Rasa, in which hundreds of players gathered to defend the AFS Headquarters against a truly massive Bane invasion. Unwinnable by Design, as the GMs simply ramped the enemies up until the defenders were overwhelmed.
• Several adventures in Dungeons & Dragons Online can easily become this, almost always referred to as "Assault" in the quest title. The first one involves 200 kobolds attacking a Stormreach outpost; a later has nearly 300 goblinoids of all types descending upon the same one. Others still have even more enemies.
• PlanetSide 2 basically IS this trope. Three factions, thousands of players per server, larger battles can quickly ramp up into utter insanity.
• Global Agenda has the "Dome Defense Raid" an epic, Nintendo Hard, All Your Base Are Belong to Us attempt by the Recursive Colony, where the game's Main Hub gets ransacked and swarmed by a massive horde of robots, and it's up to 10 of you to defend Dalton Bancroft as he targets an EMP Kill Sat on the largest groups.
• Phantasy Star Online 2 has these, typically as time-limited pre-scheduled Emergency Quests.
  • The Mining Base Defense quests are Tower Defense quests that task up to twelve players in a single instance of defending a mining base from onslaughts of Darkers.
  • "Unleashed Prestige": in the first half of the quest, players fight their way across a frozen ocean towards a battleship, fighting off Phantom enemies along the way.

Platformers

• One of the bonus stages in Super Robot Wars spinoff Another Century's Episode 2 loosely recreates the climactic battle of Endless Waltz, with the player having to take down 1,000 Serpent mobile suits. It's a survival stage, though, and technically you only need 100 kills to succeed.
• Following on the ending of the previous game, Mega Man Zero 2 begins with Zero being found by an army of Pantheons (basic robot grunts). When you get control, the Pantheons are coming towards you from the left, and they'll keep coming as long as you keep killing them. If you do it for too long, Zero interrupts to say "This isn't fun anymore" — but what does he know?
  • Also in Zero 1 he has to fend off an attack on the base by marching through the desert and slashing his way through an infinite spawn of Pantheons until he reaches the boss, Fighting Fefnir of the Four Guardians.
• Ty the Tasmanian Tiger 2 actually starts off this way. Pity no one else seems intent on helping you afterwards...
• Terraria has several "boss events" that are a War Sequence requiring player(s) to kill a hundred or more enemies to beat the event; depending on gear and base defenses, players can mow down the entire army in a matter of minutes.
  • Pre-hardmode, the Goblin Army is a hundred-strong army of goblins with varying professions. The number increases for each player (starting at 120 and scaling by +40 for each additional player). To solidify the point that this is going to take a while, they drop weapons that actually help you in taking them down easily. Hard mode adds the Frost Legion, Pirate Invasion, and Martian Madness events as themed clones of the Goblin Army, with similar scaling based on player number and a bar at the bottom right of the screen denoting event progress based on kills alone.
  • The hard mode Frost Moon and Pumpkin Moon events instead feature wave-based progress as players defeat enough enemies in a wave (based on "point value" of each enemy defeated) before progressing to the next one, ending at 15 waves (with 5 bonus waves for the Frost Moon event).
  • Hard mode Lunar Events are centered around four different sections of the map, and players must defeat 100 (or 150 if in Expert mode) enemies themed around each Celestial Pillar to be able to damage and destroy the pillar and progress to the next boss.
• The Ratchet & Clank series has featured them starting with the third game. They were mostly optional in that one, but Tools of Destruction featured several plot-relevant examples. (Where you had the support of two crotchety old war bots, who provided entertaining commentary.) One towards the end of A Crack In Time really stands out though: You travel back in time to a famous battle, and your presence changes the historical outcome!
• Pizza Tower has the aptly named War level, where Peppino gets ahold of a pump action shotgun and Gustavo assists with a rocket launcher firing Brick at enemies, beginning an Unexpected Gameplay Change to a Run and Gun style. Uniquely among the other levels, War is a very tight Race Against the Clock from picking up the shotgun all the way to the end, going from trench warfare in a battlefield under bombardment to a laboratory filled with weird Peppino clones.

Puzzle Games

• Deadly Rooms of Death: The City Beneath combines this with The Unfought as Beethro witnesses the battle between the Stalwart Army and the Aumtlich. The Stalwarts are getting massacred, and a player might expect Beethro to step in and win the fight single-handedly, but instead we cut to a goblin named Gristy, who opens a briar trap that easily deals with the Aumtlich.

Role-Playing Games

• Tales of Xillia features a war between Rashugal and Auj Oule starting on a huge battlefield. The player characters have to run across this field to stop the Lance of Kresnik from being fired, which constitutes a number of Random Encounters with soldiers from both sides, followed by a Boss Rush that ends with a Climax Boss, all with very little chance to heal. It even works its way into the plot, with the party members thoroughly exhausted after crossing the battlefield.
• The Granfalloon boss in Castlevania: Symphony of the Night had a seemingly infinite number of animated corpses attack you (they do eventually run out) while a horrific monster, composed of said corpses, shoots beams at you. The monster returns as a boss (under its proper name, Legion) in later games, strategy intact. It's particularly horrible in Curse of Darkness, where the corpses now act as suicide bombers (and deal tremendous damage if you get caught in the explosion).
• Crisis Core:
  • A series of optional missions where the player can mow down, successively, 50, 100, 200 or 1000 enemy soldiers at a time. Disappointingly, and thanks to the PSP's limited hardware, the soldiers only appear in groups of approximately fifteen at a time, with a one-on-one fight against their squad leader in between groups, which makes these battles extremely long and tedious.
  • The final battle, considerably upscaled from the original ending. Rather than Zack merely dying at the hands of a trio of grunts, he takes out practically the entire Shinra army... and then dies at the hands of a trio of grunts.
• Dark Souls II has the final battle of the third DLC, with you descending into The Old Chaos to battle the charred knights of the Burnt Ivory King, followed by the man himself. You can recruit your own knights to fight alongside you, who are said to be the reincarnations of the enemies you're fighting against.
• Dragon Age: Origins:
  • First, in the Dead Trenches, you team up with the Legion of the Dead at a bridge, to fight several waves of darkspawn, eventually pushing to the other site and confronting an Ogre and a Rain of Arrows.
  • Second, you defend Redcliff Castle alongside it's guards in what you've been told is the Final Battle, before finding out that The Horde is going to assault a different target, before you can get there.
  • The Big Badass Battle Sequence at the end of the game consists of fighting on four battlefields, alongside Ferelden's army, while being able to call in troops from the allies you have chosen (via horn signal), taking a break to command the rest of your companions, who are holding the line to prevent enemy reinforcements from flanking you. After assaulting your way into, then fighting through The Very Definitely Final Dungeon, Fort Drakon, you fight the Final Boss, with many of the Non-Player-Characters you've met helping you in a display of Rank Scales with Asskicking. Notably, during this final battle most of the darkspawn you face are much weaker than normal, going down in just one or two hits. This allows the game to throw far more at you than you would normally be capable of facing.
• The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion has the "Breaking the Siege of Kvatch" and "The Defense of Bruma" quests. Thankfully, you have assistance from the local soldiers in both.
  • If you've levelled up significantly before doing these quests, though, you're forced to effectively be a One-Man Army, since the enemies scale with you but your allies stay the same level throughout.
• The final mission in the original (and about 2/3 through the expansion) of Fable has you chasing Jack of Blades; you don't have to but if you so choose you can just sit there for hours hammering his infinite supply of minions. Not only is this the greatest place in the whole game to gain XP, but if you have a large enough weapon it is really really fun.
• In Hellgate: London, the final stretch to the Hellgate is filled with the usual swarms of demons fighting slightly-tougher-than-typical Templars. But inside the cathedral where demons pour through endlessly, it's up to you alone to fight to and through the gate into Hell's own battlefield.
• One of the most famous examples is the above-pictured segment from Kingdom Hearts II. The whole scene plays something like this: Sora is left to face a thousand Heartless (there's even an enemies-killed counter during this sequence starting at 0 that will hit 1000), while Donald and Goofy are busy slaying the rest. The two types of Heartless present each have a different reaction command. Armored Knights enable the "Rising Sun" reaction command which lets you swoop around and wreck anything you crash through. Surveillance Robots can be seized with "Snag" and enable "Sparkle Ray", a powerful laser that Sora swings around to take out multiple other Heartless in one go. This means you can win the battle in the span of minutes by repeatedly hitting the triangle button, mopping up the final mooks without reaction commands, and look absolutely badass while doing it.
• Kingdom Hearts III mimics the scenario from II in the final world of the game, with Sora, Donald, and Goofy fighting not only Heartless but Unversed and Nobodies as well—and set to the exact same music track. It's finished off with them summoning the train from Big Thunder Mountain Railroad to fly around and shoot the enemies with a cannon, knocking out countless in seconds.
• One of the main features of RPG The Last Remnant are the War Sequences. The player controls up to 18 units arranged in up to 5 unions; larger battles have them facing waves upon waves of enemy unions over a huge flat plain. The most notable War Sequences are the battles at the Nest of Eagles, The Six Bases, Koenigsdorf and The Holy Plain. With some awesome Clash of Opposites music track reserved solely for these battles, they are one of the game's most enjoyable features.
• Shenmue Chapter 1: Yokosuka was an early pioneer of The War Sequence, boasting a 70-man battle at the climax. Hey, it was a big deal back in 2000, and more to the point Shenmue is set in the real world with a realistic martial arts battle system, so Ryo and Guizang defeating the entire Mad Angels biker gang single-handedly really is badass!
• As old as Tales of Phantasia. You had to rush through a maze-like plains, defeating enemies in your path (and there were a lot), and take out the boss at the end. (See: Foe-Tossing Charge)
• The final area of Too Human could be considered an example of this trope... if it weren't for the fact that you're slaughtering dozens of enemies in a single battle is pretty much the norm from the beginning and not just for this final level. The final level is quite explicitly a war however and in most of the game you have a group of poor bastard allied mooks following you, so it probably qualifies.
  • Of course, the mooks are with you in the final battle as well. Unfortunately, there are enemies who will kill your mooks, and resurrect them to fight against you. You don't realize how powerful the Wolfs actually are until you're on the wrong end of their rifles.
• The first Knights of the Old Republic games feature endless waves of Sith attacking you as you make your way to the final boss. The second game's last level Sith flood is limited, but there are still a crap-ton of them.
  • In the room before Malak he locks you in a room with a bunch of droid-creating machines that swarm you and don't stop coming until you destroy all of the makers. If you have enough computer spikes, you'll succeed, but it's more fun to hold them off for as long as you can before just turning around and opening the door (he doesn't lock it).
• Neverwinter Nights 2 had the defense of Crossroad Keep late in the third act.
  • The second expansion to Neverwinter Nights, Hordes of the Underdark, has the Siege of Lith My'athar: the player must defend the city from the Valsharess' invading army. Much like Crossroad Keep, the player's choices factor into the difficulty of this sequence: complete enough sidequests and you can recruit additional reinforcements (golems and a deva) while thinning out the enemy forces (by driving away the undead, the beholders and/or the illithid).
• The Witcher 2: Assassins of Kings starts with one, as you help the Temerian King Foltest fight through the Baroness La Valette and her forces to secure his two bastard children, which are his only heirs, however improper, to the Temerian throne. However, it is far from the last major battle sequence in the game.
• The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt features a couple, both against the Wild Hunt. The first is the defense of Kaer Morhen which also doubles as the Siege. The second is when you confront the Wild Hunt's main flagship in the climax.
• In Tales of Vesperia, there is a segment where Brave Vesperia are defending the Zaphias refugees from the monsters on Hypionia. Yuri and Flynn team up to fight their way through two-hundred foes to get to the center to trigger a superweapon intended to wipe out the whole mob.
• At the end of Mass Effect 3, you and two squadmates are pitted against what seems to be the entire Reaper force present on Earth, a battle lasting a good ten or fifteen minutes as you Hold the Line to try to take down the last obstacle between you and your target destination. It's also the last battle in the game, and depending on your choices the last battle in the war.
• Talesof Zestiria has a war sequence which falls firmly under One-Man Army territory: once Shepherd Sorey gets on the battlefield, everything is massively on Hyland's side. Why? Because he can channel the power of the Seraph and no one can see the Seraph just the effects of what he does. Thanks to the Invisible to Normals Seraphim, Sorey basically looks like he can No-Sell sword strikes, strike other solders down without his blade even touching them, use telepathy, burn arrows out of the air with a glance, and casually rearrange local geography. Destructive weird stuff just happens around him. As a bonus round, Sorey just did the minimal of what he had to do to protect his friend who was being held hostage to force him into participating in the war.
• Xenoblade Chronicles X: Chapter 8, which, rather than being a mission where you explore someplace new and kill some enemies at your leisure, is an enormous assault by the Ganglion on your home base of New LA. Most of the Chapter consists of fighting wave after wave of enemy war machines as they bear down on the city while sirens roar, bullets fly, and explosions happen all around.

Run And Gun

• Gunstar Heroes pulls this one off as well in the form of Stage 5, the first stage you don't choose to go to. It's basically a ten to fifteen minute charge, involving you ripping through everything in sight and sound, turning the streets red with blood and explosions, and at times forcing you to drag on at virtually no health. It is hard. But it is awesome.
  DESTROY THEM ALL!
• Guns, Gore & Cannoli2 has a completely bonkers D-Day sequence where the protagonist, an Italian mob enforcer, storms Omaha Beach.

Shoot 'Em Ups

• Smash TV really goes to town with this. May be considered an inspiration for Serious Sam and Painkiller.
• Hades Castle from Death Smiles. Around three times longer than any other stage, with massive amounts of enemies that will fill the screen with bullets if you don't keep them under control, constantly changing scrolling directions, several new enemy types that spew huge waves of bullets, Giant Mooks that take up half the screen and flood the other half with bullets, a few Degraded Bosses, enemies thar shoot new types of projectiles like an arcing shot that turns into an upward stream of bullets, a crazy penultimate sequence with dozens of dancing ghosts and bullet-hemmoraging statues and tops it off with two tough bosses. Very intense.

Simulation Games

• Various missions in the Ace Combat series really drive home the point that you are fighting a war. Ace Combat 6: Fires of Liberation explicates it, with the cutscene for the first mission showing that Talisman/Garuda One is (initially) just one amongst many pilots defending Emmeria, as well as the ally assistance system where helping allies to accomplish secondary objectives would lead to being able to get their help back later.
  • While Ace Combat 7: Skies Unknown doesn't quite have as large a scale as 6, there are still some major standouts.
    • Arguably Mission 12 is the first mission to really enforce the scope of the war, seeing the player and their allied squadrons defending several allied ground teams while dozens of enemy tanks, helicopters, fighters, and artillery try to wipe out the ground forces defending the Stonehenge railgun network. Then just when things seemed to have slowed down, the Eruseans send in an Arsenal Bird escorted by dozens of drones trying to Zerg Rush your allies.
    • Mission 15 sees the player arriving to provide assistance while the Osean forces try to subdue the enemy capital. By the time the mission begins, there are already three areas engulfed in battle: enemy and allied tanks battling downtown, enemy fighters running airstrikes on allied units in the outskirts, and ships from both sides battling off the coast of the city. All the while, a stream of enemy fighters are coming from the south to chase down the player, and more enemy units arrive throughout the area to slow down the ground advance after the halfway mark.
    • Mission 19, being the penultimate level, caps the conflict off with an absurd amount of units engaging in dogfights throughout the airspace, with Osean and Erusean allies fighting against Erusean hardliners and their drone support. As soon as that's over, another Arsenal Bird arrives carrying its own drone swarm that keep your allies busy while you single-handedly destroy the Arsenal Bird piece by piece.
• One of the missions of Freelancer involves taking out an alien battleship... while shaking down 6 gunboats, 3 battleships, 4 cruisers, and roughly 20 fighters. In fact, the second half of the storyline is pretty much one great big War Sequence.
• In the FreeSpace community, this sort of mission type is called "Battle of Endor" and many people discourage it due to the complexity, system requirements, and difficulty of making it balanced and fun, but some custom campaigns have produced very respected Battle of Endor missions, such as "Nemesis" from Inferno Release 1 and "Universal Truth", "Delenda Est" and "Her Finest Hour" from Blue Planet.
• Area 6 and Easy Venom in Star Fox 64 have a much higher enemy density than any other levels (both being the last rail-guided level in their respective paths).
• In Tom Clancy's H.A.W.X., the PC and his squadron mates are called upon to go to Rio de Janiero to protect it from an alliance of hostile nations. Cue a huge battle with dozens of planes, landing craft, and tanks, ending in a dogfight against four aces flying Su-47s.
• X-Wing Alliance:
  • The player's Y-Wing is inadvertently dumped out of hyperspace in an Imperial exercise area, where no less than four Imperial II-class Star Destroyers are conducting exercises. It is possible for a decent, patient player to wipe out their TIE Fighter squadrons and destroy all four Star Destroyers (by blowing off their shield generators, ion cannoning them into dormancy and lasering them at leisure).
  • As befits a Star Wars flight simulator, the last four levels consist of the Battle of Endor itself.
• Certain plot missions in the X-Universe series fall under this. X3: Terran Conflict, for instance, has the last two missions of Operation Final Fury, where the player must first repel a Kha'ak assault on their base, then invade and destroy the last Kha'ak hive in the Community of Planets.
• Vector Thrust and its campaign in the Alpha build has this for a final battle, with dozens of aircraft on your side and even more on the enemy's duking it out above the sea. Being the unoptimised Alpha release, this was usually enough to crash the game or destroy the frame rate.
• A lot of MechWarrior missions can feel like this, as you are expected to overcome extremely high odds on a regular basis.
  • For the genuine feel of the War Sequence, though, you can't beat latter half of MechWarrior 4 Mercenaries, where the player, no matter their factional alignment, is thrown into battle with all manner of enemies—by that point you are expected to be piloting an Ace Custom 'Mech of your own and shredding lesser opponents en route to taking out the big boys. The final missions on Tharkad or New Canton can definitely be quite the battle. Often you'll be outnumbered at least 5-to-1, and even worse if you start including vehicles and aircraft into that mix. Even with the supplemental lancemates the game lets you hire and outfit to bring with you, they're still a challenge, but they are glorious.
  • Mechwarrior 5 has the endless Warzone mission type, where your singular Lance is required to hold out as long as possible and destroy as many enemies as you can until you have to call in for evac. The enemy will keep spawning and assaulting your position in waves, and will not wait for you to beat the last wave before spawning in a new one. Since you get a cash bounty per kill, this meant to be a reliable way to amass cash (so long as repairs don't get too pricey, the cash flow isn't that generous).
• The entirety of Battle Engine Aquila is this. It's about managing the enemy troops, flying around the battlefield to take out the right ones before they damage your forces' composition. So while you do have troops on your side, it's All Up to You.

Stealth-Based Game

• Hitman:
  • Silent Assassin ends with 47 taking on several dozen bodyguards, with every weapon in the game at his disposal. After 19 levels of sneaking around and only firing the occasional shot, the Catharsis Factor is enormous.
  • Blood Money climaxes with 47 waking up at his own funeral and wasting a few dozen FBI agents (as well as an innocent priest and reporter).
• Metal Gear:
  • The final part of Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty begins with Snake and Raiden cutting through dozens of Mooks (which doesn't seem like many until you remember this is a Stealth-Based Game) as they fight through Arsenal Gear. Then the game unloads multiple simultaneous Metal Gears for the player to dispatch.
  • Near the end of Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater an Unexpected Gameplay Change happens. The game changes to a fast-paced rail shooter with unlimited ammo and a swarm of Mooks upon which to unload it.

Strategy Games

• AI War: Fleet Command: AI fleets are invariably bigger than yours, it's just a matter of where and when they might rush in, and to ensure it can be in a context you can manage. One specific and very regular example is Cross-Planet Attacks, where AI planets all over the galaxy have their mobile defenders pack their bags, join the Mobile forces, and (usually) head for your territory en masse. Later in the game these can often outsize your fleet five times over, and it's better to confront them at a properly defended chokepoint if you don't want them to roll you. It gets especially bad if the Hunter fleet decides now is the time to rush all in exactly at the worst place possible and make it five times worse. And another example is the frequent and heavy Exogalactic Strikes you will get if you do basically anything with the Fallen Spire. The AI utterly despises the Spire and will overreact immediately to any movements, ensuring you get a good feed of gigantic hordes knocking on your door. But then again, you have Spire vessels and installations, which are pretty good at slicing hordes up with Beam Spam.
• Command & Conquer puts greater emphasis on counterplay and macro-management as compared to the Warcraft series' emphasis on micro-, so it's not uncommon to see an army smashing into another one head-on until one side or the other gives, with various superweapons providing added pyrotechnics.
• The final battle in the C route of Blaze Union is like this, with enemy soldiers taking up around 80% of the available squares. This is a strategy game that only lets you attack five enemies at once. It's That One Level.
• In Dragon Force, an entire game spent gradually taking over a seven-kingdom continent using limited engagement and careful management of generals goes down the drain when hordes of dragons—by far the most dangerous enemies in the game—appear in every corner of the map. Instead of fighting the dragons, which massacre most types of troops and just regenerate anyway, the goal is to get the seven main characters to a specific area where they can fight the Big Bad as quickly as possible. Instead of the usual all-out combat, the winning strategy is to deliberately abandon those hard-won castles and fortresses in their path, so the AI will take extra time occupying the buildings instead of waiting on the roadway to engage your heroes.
  • That was a textbook example of The Computer Is a Cheating Bastard. With a little care, insignificant ninja generals who were practically worthless normally could take out seventy or eight dragons at a time with only twenty or even ten samurai units, and deal major damage to the enemy general - then you finish them off with your next general in the second round of combat. Oh, except they were immortal and would respawn a moment later. God damn it!
• Harpoon is a real time strategy simulation involving naval combat. While there are a lot of low level missions, like getting a small group of ships on an escort mission to port, or attacking one enemy base, there are numerous huge missions that effectively replicate an entire theatre of combat. Examples include a mission for Harpoon Commanders Edition that recreates an attack by North Korea, China & Russia against Japan, South Korea & the United States. Recreating the original Gulf War invasion of Iraq is another.
• Most Fire Emblem games have at least one chapter towards the end of the game consisting of a huge map with tons of enemies (and often lots of reinforcements), with the enemy commander being a Climax Boss. The map itself tends to be fairly open in terrain and the enemy force often contains lots of mounted units. Examples:
  • "Camus the Sable" in the first game.
  • "The Last Decisive Battle" in Mystery of the Emblem.
  • "Across the River" in Thracia 776.
  • "The Binding Blade" in Binding Blade.
  • "Cog of Destiny" and "Victory or Death" in Blazing Blade.
  • "Blood and Sand" in The Sacred Stones.
  • "Clash!" in Path of Radiance.
  • "The Conqueror" in Awakening.
  • "Light Scatters" in Fates: Birthright.
  • Every chapter from 22 onwards in Fates: Conquest.
  • "Black Flames" in Fates: Revelation.
  • Things get truly out of hand in Fire Emblem: Radiant Dawn, at the end of Part 3, when almost every important character in the game (including a good number of peace-lovers) clash with each other amongst a huge army of Mooks. What's more, this is a rout map so you're being expected to wipe out almost all 100+ enemies to win. Then the increasingly ominous death counter hits 80, and a sudden plot twist immedeately cuts the battle short.
  • Chapter 17 of Fire Emblem Engage is not only a large map with a ton of enemies, it also has six bosses, all carrying Emblems. And you have to beat all of them to win.
• In an early mission of StarCraft you are supposed to hold off apparently endless numbers of Zerg long enough for the Sons of Korhal to rescue the colonists. However, as it is an early mission the Zerg numbers are not actually that overwhelming, and it is easy to actually destroy the attacking forces by just having 7-8 bunkers at each of the two entrances to the city. In the later mission where Kerrigan is captured it is also possible for the player to hold off the supposedly overwhelming Zerg attack by filling the area to the max with siege tanks and bunkers with Battlecruiser air support, although in this case the Zerg horde keeps replenishing until the mission ends regardless of what you do.
  • StarCraft II gets a few, including a call back to the early mission mentioned above, but the best example is the final Protoss mission in Wings of Liberty. The main objective is to survive for a certain amount of time, but the mission only actually ends when your base is destroyed. It also features a kill counter, with bonus objectives for reaching certain milestones. So how long can you hold out for?
• The Total War series completely revolves around thousand-men armies duking it out on the battlefield. The game engine was so efficient while rendering these battles, it was even used to create a History Channel documentary.
• The Supreme Commander games are built around this concept, with an Arbitrary Headcount Limit of up to 1,000 units per side. If you go for more than a minute or so without at least one phalanx comprised of 100+ heavy tanks crashing into a similarly sized enemy formation, you're probably playing it wrong, and that's still a mild example by SC standards. Supreme Commander 2 was one of the first games with full native multicore processor support to enable just these kinds of mass battles between hundreds, if not thousands of units at once.
• The last part of WarCraft III: The Frozen Throne's Orc campaign has your three-to-four heroes take over a human city crawling with soldiers, while you're backed up by equally large amounts of Horde soldiers. Both sides fully embrace We Have Reserves philosophy on this one.
• Halo Wars, start to finish. From the infantry level (massive mobs, a holdout in a Forerunner building, and one memorable cutscene of a Spartan squad holding a bridge against dozens of Elites) to combined-arms (the trailer is an actual battle that takes place, and has everything from marines fighting Elites to Warthogs to Banshees to Scorpions to much larger and scarier units), fights including multiple Scarabs, and a notable battle on top of a cruiser. It's safe to say that this game is made of this trope.
• Dawn of War II has the Last Stand mode in which the player selects a faction hero to fight off wave after wave of enemies.
• XCOM 2 culminates in your strike team launching an assault on the aliens' headquarters on Earth while the rest of the planet rises against the occupiers. Your objective is to destroy three of the toughest enemies in the game, which are backed up by endless waves of alien reinforcements so long as those primary targets are alive, in a boss chamber that is itself as large as some maps. By the end of the fight, everything is either destroyed, on fire, or covered in plasma burns.

Survival Horror

• Dead Rising effectively follows this trope from start to end, since an infinite supply of Zombies can—and will—spawn out of the thin air anywhere you aren't looking at the moment. Your first encounter with the Zombies, however, is specifically designed to show this off... a tidal-wave of undead flesh flowing endlessly through the front gates of the doomed mall, washing over anything and anyone who stands in its path.
• Resident Evil 4 has the Cabin Defense level, which has Leon and Louis hide Ashley and keep a horde of Ganados at bay until their numbers thin out so much they give up.
• Resident Evil 5 has the Public Assembly battle at the end of the first level. In addition to the seemingly endless hordes of Majini, the Executioner is stalking you with a humongous axe.

Tabletop Games

• Near the end of Planescape: Torment the players get embroiled in a battle of the Blood War with both sides constantly respawning their troops. The PCs can get involved, or simply stand to one side and watch. Since it never stops, theoretically thousands upon thousands of enemies could be killed in this one battle. However, in an unusually-for-Black Isle linear and tightly-scripted game, this is one of the few areas where you have total freedom to earn large amounts of EXP, so throwing yourself into the free-for-all with wild abandon could be a good idea as well as fun. Especially if you still have the game-breaking AoE spells you can gain ridiculously early in the game up your sleeve.
• In Throne of Bhaal, the Expansion Pack to Baldur's Gate 2, your party will charge an army trying to reach one of the bosses, and he'll stay away for a few minutes while you entertain yourself by slaughtering his minions.
• Icewind Dale: Justified, since it was far less talking and far more fighting in the first place.
• In Warhammer 40,000 this is the entire point of Epic and Apocalypse specialist game, where hundreds of models duke it out in a massive battle.

Third-Person Shooters

• Played very much straight by Star Wars: Battlefront II. The second Kashyyyk mission in the Rise of the Empire campaign, appropriately named "A Line in the Sand", recreates the Separatists' siege of Kashyyyk from Revenge of the Sith, and you better believe it's All Up to You to get the Republic through this battle in one piece. After taking the command post on the beach and holding it for a while, you must fall back behind a huge sea wall to protect a Wookiee oil refinery on the other side. With limited reinforcements and a single tank at your disposal, you must Stand Your Ground and prevent the limitless swarms of droids from destroying the refinery for about three minutes. The sea wall itself is a great metal gate connected to two consoles on your side; if the CIS troops manage to destroy either console, the gate falls and their grenade-lobbing tanks can roll in and join the fun; if this happens, the voice-over of your commanding officer lets you know that all hell is about to break loose with the line, "They've breached the sea wall! Brace yourselves!" By means of consolation, if the refinery survives this hellish firefight, Yoda arrives Just in Time and the whole battle turns around, allowing you to drive off the CIS and claim victory.

Tower Defense

• While the enemies in Desert Moon tend to Zerg Rush in the hundreds, special mention must go to the final wave of the final stage. You have around 40 or so engineers wielding Improvised Weapons v.s. 2800 vicious Bursters, Hunters and Zombified Engineers. Carnage WILL ensue.

Wide Open Sandbox

• In Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas, at the end of the Los Santos mission chain when CJ arrives late to a gang fight after discovering a horrible secret and has to kill waves of Ballas (some of them driving cars) while protecting his brother, with only the help of a few surviving gang members and some cars parked in a circle for cover.
• Grand Theft Auto IV has a mission where a bank robbery goes awry and the enemies come in droves. Somewhat coupled with Escort Mission, only your allies are very useful in combat. Also a Fake Difficulty since there are only a few roadblocks that you really have to destroy, but there are so many of them it is entirely possible to lose your head and start engaging anyone in sight.
• Red Dead Redemption, especially during the Mexican arc where you actually are helping to fight a war. For both sides, even.
• Grand Theft Auto V has two of these. "The Paleto Score" has the entire police department, NOOSE teams, and the army combating a bank robbery and "The Third Way" has all three protagonists taking down every crooked FIB agent and Merryweather soldier sent after them, as well pulling an all-out massive assassination campaign against every main antagonists immediately after.
• Saints Row: The Third's penultimate mission, "Three Way", features the entire city of Steelport breaking out into chaos as the Luchadores and STAG attack each other full-force, with the Saints trying to clean up the mess by killing off both groups in the worst outbreaks of fighting. Naturally, there's countless enemies that you're required to kill, not to mention the extras that randomly spawn around you every second or two due to double maxed notoriety.

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