The AMC Squad
The AMC Squad is a free first person shooter in the Build engine, starting out life as a total conversion for Duke Nukem 3D; it can be downloaded via its moddb page
Episode One was released in 2011, Episode Two in 2015, Episode Three in 2019, and Episode Four slated in 2022.
The setting for AMC takes place in a universe where other Build engine games, and selected other shooters of the same genre, have a connected storyline. Duke Nukem is widely believed to be dead; the Earth Defence Forces and various other factions decide to create a replacement for him, tasked with protecting Earth and its peoples. As the game progresses, more and more shadowy forces reveal themselves to have dark plans for mankind, and a shadowy race of beings from Beyond lurk in the darkness, waiting to strike.
Initially launching with 8 full characters, each additional release has added more main characters as well as side characters. All characters have full voice acting, and weapon sets unique to each one. Agents like James and Highwire use conventional modern weaponry; others like Micky and Geoffrey used more hi-tech equipment. On the other end of the spectrum are characters like Sang who uses magical weaponry, and Merlijn who wields mostly swords and bows. Missions are selected via a world map; many missions allow you to use any character available whereas others will force a specific character for story/gameplay purposes.
Alongside the first person shooter gameplay, there is a research system similar to X Com UFO Defense where you can vastly upgrade the AMC Squad's capabilities over the span of the game. AMC shares many tropes with its parent game Duke Nukem as well as Shadow Warrior (1997) This main page contains the gameplay-related tropes; for story tropes click the 'Synopsis' tags
If you're all done trying to be funny, let's get these tropes listed!
- Abandoned Mine: Part of the finale of Episode 1 at the town of Providence. Oddly enough, a section of the mines contains the near complete wreck of an airliner. How did it get in there? Eventually, said mines are followed by a Temple of Doom where the climax takes place.
- Ambiguous Situation: It's not clear whether Duke is actually dead, or if he's just missing in action after another world-saving mission. The readme for an early version of AMC claimed Duke had voluntarily gone into hiding to have a vacation, but said readme file isn't included with the most recent releases.
- Armor-Piercing Attack: Many weapons fit this category, and specifically do extra damage to armoured enemies.
- Armor Is Useless: Subverted; body armour has specific game mechanics that protect against lower-calibre weapons like shotguns or smaller pistols.
- Art Evolution: The original editions of the game had sprites based on the original Build Engine titles that inspired it. Later versions, including the most recent, use custom-made sprites for all the characters, enemies and weapons.
- Beating A Dead Player: Should you be killed by a Pig Cop, there's a chance he'll walk over and relieve himself on your body; other more vicious enemies will just keep attacking to prove a point.
- Boom, Headshot!: The vast majority of enemies can be headshot; not only does this do additional damage but it can also circumvent body armour.
- Bottomless Magazines: Some weapons that should, don't have magazines. They just use ammo straight out of the pool; ostensibly for gameplay reasons, as some characters were designed to feel more like classic shooter protagonists.
- Bragging Rights Reward: The chibis, little collectible figurines depicting Super-Deformed versions of the playable characters and side characters, are only found in secret areas throughout the game (and in some cases, require a little outside-the-box thinking) and play a little jingle upon their collection. Your reward for grabbing chibis: seeing them lining up the edges of the map display in the Mission Command room.
- Convection, Schmonvection: Many levels require you to be within touching distance of Lava to proceed.
- Evil Laugh: Several enemies do this to you, including a massive haunted airship that you're stuck in
- Faceless Goons: The vast majority of human enemies wear helmets; the AMC and EDF soldiers also fit under this category (mainly since having helmeted off variants would be too resource intensive to reflect all the possible gender and races)
- Fighter-Launching Sequence: Whenever launching a mission, a small cutscene showing the chosen Agent boarding the AMC's flier, and then taking off plays. As the squad gains newer and more advanced vehicles, this scene changes as well
- Final Boss: Each episode has a final boss to fight, each one getting harder.
- Furry Confusion: Snowfall can visit and pet Kagura's cat in her quarters, despite being an anthropomorphic cat himself. Both fail to see anything wrong with it.
- Giant Space Flea from Nowhere: Episode 2 level The Ghost Ship culminates with one. While a fair bit of foreshadowing comes up about the problem at hand, fixing said problem results in a Sea Monster Scripted Battle battle against the Abyssal Colossus, an Eldritch Abomination with shades of the themes of the Abyssal Dimension. It's not apparent why it comes up at the climax of the level, but still leaves quite an impression for anyone caught off guard.
- Gun Porn: Oooooooh, yeah. In addition to several characters having firearm-heavy loadouts, any character can access any number of guns for their Slot Zero weapon in the armory at HQ.
- James, in particular, can wield an arsenal of entirely real-world firearmsnote . Highwire can also carry multiple real-world Soviet firearms in his arsenal.
- Guns Akimbo: Some characters can duel wield certain weapons, though this also usually leads to greatly decreased accuracy.
- Guns Do Not Work That Way: A character can have multiple weapons that take the same ammunition and even same magazine types, but the ammo pools are completely independent from each other. Averted in a few cases, such as the personalized M-16 James uses, whose underbarrel shotgun draws from his main shotgun-type ammo pool, true to real life.
- Harder Than Hard: Armageddon is the hardest difficulty setting; enemies do twice as much damage, there's more of them, and advanced enemies show up much earlier.
- Hard Mode Perks: With that said, from Expert and above, the raise in enemy count does help in getting additional base budget (earlier versions provided an explicit multiplier, but this is no longer the case), but two things stand out; First, finishing episodes on Expert rewards golden weapons which ignore enemy resistance, and second, finishing episodes on Professional and above unlocks extended epilogues to each episode.
- Half the Man He Used to Be: Many enemies can be cut into pieces with Melee weaponry; the pig cops in particular are sliced in two straight down the middle.
- Heavily Armored Mook: Many enemies wear heavy armour that needs armour piercing to damage; unfortunately holding down and dumping a fully automatic shotgun into one of these guys just won't cut it, especially on the higher difficulties.
- Jet Pack: Whilst very rare, Jet packs do show up in AMC as a usable inventory item.
- Joke Item: The player can pull a cleaning mop out of its inconspicuous bucket of all things to defend oneself with.
- Katanas Are Just Better: Averted; though they still deal blistering damage most of the time, Katanas can't hurt heavily armoured enemies.
- Powered Armor: AMC Agent Micky wears powered armour, and enemies wear even bigger varieties.
- Mini-Mecha: Many enemies can be found using smaller mechs, as well as larger ones. They're almost all heavily armoured, and require an Armor-Piercing Attack to damage.
- Laser Sight: Several of the weapons you can use have laser sights attached; you can sometimes even customise the colour.
- Lethal Joke Item: As well as the Shrinker, one of the main characters has a weapon which instantly turns regular enemies into mundane household objects, like a broom or a mop. Sometimes they even get turned into a Coffee maker...which the player can then drink from and gain health.
- Locked Door: There's a lot of these; doors which can never be opened play a locked sound and usually trigger a quote from the player stating so.
- Ludicrous Gibs: alongside regular Gibs, blood can stick to the ceiling and drip down; you can also kick enemy heads around like grizzly footballs.
- Not Quite Dead: Pig Cops and HMG cultists can sometimes sit up and fire off a last few desperate shots before dying for good.
- Nuke 'em: From Episode Two onwards you can find portable Nuke ammunition for the Zilla Missile Launcher.
- One Bullet Clips: Mostly true; though when reloading a weapon, the gun's magazine only gets thrown away in if the magazine was emptied. Mags with bullets in them don't, implying the player is still holding onto them.
- Personal Space Invader: The shotgun cultists can try and directly blow your head off if you get too close, requiring the player to mash the use key to reverse the situation and blow their head off instead. The Chainsaw cultist also does this, but it will always kill the player
- Red Eyes, Take Warning: Many enemies in AMC have glowing eyes; they're usually red but can sometimes be white, green or even blue.
- Secret Level: Each episode usually has at least one secret level.
- Silver Bullet: Silver bullets appear in AMC, and are needed to take down supernatural enemies on the higher difficulty levels. They only come in .45 calibre, for unspecified reasons.
- Standard FPS Guns: AMC has a huge amount of weapons. Many of these are purely conventional, though some weapons can fire alternate ammo types which can be much more exotic.
- Sequel Escalation: Each episode assumes the player will have played previous ones, and gathered upgrades along the way.
- Shock and Awe: Lightning attacks can damage both armoured and supernatural enemies; they also have a hidden feature where enemies standing on metallic surfaces will suffer additional significant damage.
- Stuff Blowing Up: The first part of the Jungle Pyramid mission during Episode 3 is surprisingly full of corridors that spontaneously explode as Zaxtor walks by. It only gets worse from there within the actual pyramid where some traps involve magical orbs that violently detonate soon after they appear, with a wide blast radius to boot.
- Too Awesome to Use: The Zilla Missile Launcher, re-appearing from Shadow Warrior, can use atomic warheads.
- Updated Re-release: Happened many times; Episode 3 was re-released twice, though the 2nd time was for AMC's 10th anniversary.
- Videogame Caring Potential: Unlike the game that inspired it, in The AMC Squad, captured women can specifically be saved.
- Wide Eyes and Shrunken Irises: The otherwise sinister cultist shotgunners can, and will comically display these if their attempt to one-shot the player character starts backfiring on them, alongside a scream of terror.
- Wingding Eyes: The car dealership employee at Garmid will briefly and proudly display dollar signs if the player character insists all the way on buying the supercar on display, for a prohibitive 600 budget units. No matter who you play as, the character does not have the required paperwork or license to drive it, relegating it as a mantle piece in the base's lobby.
