Video Game / Armory & Machine

A machine sits alone in the darkness. It is warm.

Armory & Machine is a 2017 story-driven Idle Game with RPG Elements for the iOS and Android, developed by the Canadian Daybreak Industries.

The player controls the Machine, an AI whose goal is to collect heat and resources while building an Armory to supply fuel for exploration, ammunition for combat, and workers to automate functions. It then sends out units to scout the wasteland around it, and find out what exactly happened that caused the Earth to become a wasteland.

Download the game here (iOS) or here (Android).

A sequel, Armory & Machine 2 was developed by Uken Games.

This game contains the following Tropes:

• Action Bomb:
  • The Sludge Pile can use an explosion attack, which, if not interrupted, will most likely one-shot the player. If this is interrupted or survived, it deals massive damage to itself with Self-Destruct the following turn.
  • The Pulsating Mass explodes as its only attack after a countdown, and it too deals massive damage to the player if it hits.
• A.I. Is a Crapshoot: The Original Machine is a probe that went haywire and created its own armory and troops to destroy the Earth.
• Anti-Armor:
  • The Inventor Skill tree specializes in attacks that deal more damage to Shield but less to health, making it great against high shield but less useful against actual HP.
  • The Original Machine's Heat Beam deals a massive amount of damage to your shield, practically guaranteed to take it all out, but deals absolutely nothing to your health.
• Armored But Frail: All the common enemies in the Laboratory have an extremely frail 500 HP but sport a massive 5000 shielding. This makes the armor-piercing Hunter Skills extremely effective against them.
• Armor-Piercing Attack: The Hunter Skill tree specializes in Penetrating Damage, which bypasses enemy shields altogether. Some enemies are also capable of using this against you.
• Back for the Finale: In the Brutal Bonus Level All-Stars, every boss in the game returns as souped-up versions of themselves for the regular encounters. This even includes the Star Aggressive Dingo and the Star Writhing Mass. The level description even states "Relive your favourite moments from the game!"
• Bears Are Bad News: The boss of the Forest area is a Mutated Bear who has a rapid Thrash attack as well as an unbelievably powerful but slow Acrid Bite. It also can Hibernate to restore its HP.
• Bear Trap: The Clamp Trap and Reinforced Clamp Trap skills in the Hunter tree place these down. This deals heavy penetrating damage while also interrupting the enemy's current attack. However, both skills also have a casting time which can be interrupted.
• Blade Spam: The Hunter's Infinity +1 Sword Limit Break is called Centenary Gashes, which deals heavy damage and penetrating damage. It also costs a whopping 120 Steel Blades per use.
• Body Horror: Every enemy in the Bio Swamp is a rotting monstrosity. We have charming fellows like Weeping Hunchback, Irradiated Sore, Vomiting Behemoth, Mound of Despair and the boss Writhing Mass. All of them have "attacks" that include stumbling, pulsating, vomiting, having their flesh slough off, and even tearing themselves apart, almost none of which hurt you and several of them hurt themselves.
• Boss in Mook Clothing: All the areas starting from the Badlands have an enemy that is encountered more rarely than the others and generally trickier to face or more deadly than the other enemies in the area. Defeating them will provide you with twice the amount of resources as well as other rare goodies. Subverted by the Mound of Despair, which is more of a Piñata Enemy since it cannot hurt you but has a giant amount of health.
• Boss Rush: The bonus level All-Starts features souped-up versions of every boss in the game including the Final Boss as regular opponents.
• Brutal Bonus Level: The "All-Stars" level features extremely souped-up versions of every boss in the game as regular opponents in there, including the Final Boss. Defeat 10 of them and you can fight Fifi's Ghost.
• Combatant Cooldown System: This is how enemy attacks as well as some of your attacks work. All enemy attacks have a casting time, during which they can be interrupted and cause the attack to fail. All your attacks have a Cool Down time before they can be used again. While most of your attacks are instant, some of them also have a casting time, and if you use any other attack or take damage while they're casting, you get interrupted.
• Confusion Fu:
  • The Ninja Frog enemies in the Cliffs rely on this tactic to throw you off. Most of the time, they will spam a useless move that does nothing like "Shhh...", "Sneak", "Patience", "Quiet", etc. in order to distract you from its real dangerous attack, Shuriken. Sometimes, they will even heal you with Honorable Healing. The trick is that it will always follow "It's Coming" with either Shuriken or Honorable Heal.
  • The Matter Randomizer enemies in the Laboratory use only one attack called "Mystery", a Random Effect Spell that has effects such as dealing damage to you, healing them, repairing their shields, or multiple effects at once.
• Cooldown:
  • All the player's skills have this. Stronger attacks generally have longer cooldowns.
  • The Feral Badger in the Cliffs area plays this differently. It has four attacks that go in decreasing succession and intensity (Quadruple Swipe > Triple Swipe > Double Swipe > Single Swipe), and starts a round of attacks with Quadruple/Triple, followed by the next one in the order. After Single Swipe, it takes a nap for a while giving you breathing room and an opportunity to hit it with casting time attacks.
• Crapsack World: Most of Earth has been turned into a barren wasteland by the Original Machine.
• Damage-Sponge Boss: The Star Writhing Mass has 50000 HP, the most of any boss in the game. It also is incapable of attacking you and frequently uses self-harm moves that damage itself, making it a Zero-Effort Boss who only has a massive HP pool as its advantage.
• Death Is a Slap on the Wrist: In-universe, dying in battle means that the Machine lost an expendable drone fighter, which it can easily replace. In-game, dying is more of an annoyance as you lose the fuel needed to initiate combat and whatever ammo/resources you used in the battle.
• Death of a Thousand Cuts:
  • The LMG and SMG attacks in the Soldier tree can be fired extremely rapidly, but deal weak damage per hit.
  • Several enemies in the Cliffs onward have attacks that hit multiple rapid times for low damage, which can easily interrupt any of your attacks with a cast time. Special mention goes to the Pebble Swarm, whose Chip Swarm attack hits an extremely huge amount of times for weak damage each.
  • The Mound of Despair can perform an attack called "Agony", which deals several rapid hits... on itself.
• Death or Glory Attack: The Sludge Pile's Explosion. Fail to interrupt it, and you take a massive 3000 damage to the face which will probably kill you the first time you see it. Successfully interrupt or survive it and it follows up with Self-Destruct, which deals massive damage to itself.
• Dishing Out Dirt: The Dirt Elemental, Pebble Swarm and Rock Golem all have rock- and sand- based attacks.
• Early Game Hell: While the first combat area of the game is easy, the Badlands and the Cliffs are much trickier with far deadlier enemies that can potentially two-shot you. Once you gain the ability to upgrade your stats (after beating the Cliffs boss), more skill slots, as well as better skills, the late-game becomes one of the easiest parts of the game.
• Easy Level Trick: The Laboratory can be mostly trivialized with the Ballista skill, which one-shots all the Armored But Frail common encounters and can deal hefty damage to the Furnace Mech boss as well as the rarely-encountered Matter Randomizer. While Ballista has an enormous cooldown time, that doesn't matter if the enemy dies instantly.
• Elemental Embodiment: The Landfill has several Earth elemental monsters such as Dirt Elementals, Pebble Swarms, and the Rock Golem boss.
• Evil Counterpart: The final area of the game contains Ashen versions of the three character class types of yours as enemies. The Final Boss is a Machine similar to the player character — although in this case, the player is actually its Good Counterpart because said Machine is the original one.
• Fighter, Mage, Thief: The Soldier, Inventor, and Hunter paths respectively. Soldier skills focus on high raw damage, making it excellent at damaging enemy health but is incapable of bypassing shields. Inventor skills specialize in in heavy Shield damage, allowing it to easily destroy enemy shielding but is less effective against health. Finally, Hunter skills deal penetrating damage, which bypasses enemy shielding and hits health directly but are generally less damaging than Soldier skills.
• Foreshadowing: As you progress through the game, the logs show that your fighters and probes discover other similar fighters/probes that have been long destroyed in places your troops have recently discovered. The final area of the game the Facility reveals that there is another Machine like you who produced its own troops that destroyed most of the world — and said Machine is the original Machine, to boot.
• Frog Ninja: One of the enemies in the Cliffs area is the Ninja Frog, who uses several fakeout moves before throwing a deadly powerful shuriken.
• Gimmick Level: The Badlands is a "technique" level that teaches you the importance of Stun. All the enemies and the boss have an invoked That One Attack that has a slow-ish cast time but hits for a giant 300 or 400 damage at a point where you only have 600 HP. You need to Stun them when they charge said attacks in order to avoid massive damage altogether.
• The Goomba: The easiest enemies in the game are oddly enough, the crater walls around your Machine. They deal extremely weak damage by crumbling or dropping debris on your fighters, and have the lowest health in the game at 300 HP.
• Gratuitous Ninja: Even in a post-apocalyptic sci-fi game, shuriken-throwing Ninja Frogs inexplicably exist in the Cliffs area.
• Great Bow: The Ballista skill. On use, it deals a huge amount of penetrating damage along with regular damage. Its drawbacks are that it costs 30 steel bolts as ammo per use, and it has a very long 30 second cooldown.
• Grenade Launcher: This is the exact name of one of the Soldier Skills. It uses up two grenades to fire a powerful 500 damage grenade, and has half the cooldown time of Frag Grenade which deals the same damage.
• Health/Damage Asymmetry: Downplayed. At the start of the game, your troops have 600 HP, and the enemies have far less. However, enemies in the second area have 600 to 800 HP and a powerful attack, but your damage per second should exceed theirs if you stun their dangerous moves. The third area presents enemies with at least 1000 shields+HP combined and deal up to 300 damage — but by this point you have several attacks that can bust their health down quickly such as Grenade. The enemies in the Landfill, Laboratory, Forest and Facility will generally have more health and Shield than you do, but at this point you will be having four to six attack slots which makes your damage far greater than theirs.
• Helpful Mook: The Dust Crawler will use Soothe to heal you for 100 HP after using its dangerous Gnaw attack. If Gnaw is interrupted, it's a nice 100 HP heal. The Ninja Frog will sometimes use Honorable Healing which heals you 100 HP, allowing you to survive a second Shuriken.
• Infinity +1 Sword: The Ultimate Skills for each class tree require you to purchase all the previous skills (costing loads of materials), and then an insane 10000 Materials to obtain the Ultimate Skill. Said Ultimate Skills have zero casting time preventing them from being interrupted and deal an absolutely ridiculous amount of damage, being capable of one-shotting every single enemy and boss up to the Final Boss. The main downside is that they consume an absolutely insane amount of ammunition resources when used, and have a minute's worth of cooldown if they fail to kill something (such as the Optional Bosses).
• Item Crafting: The core mechanic of the game. You need to craft resource producers, items, and ammunition for all your stronger attacks.
• Killer Rabbit: Some of the enemies in the game can qualify, such as all the rats in the Badlands, the Frantic Fox in the Forest, and Fifi's Ghost, who is a ghost cat.
• Kukris Are Kool: The Kukri skill in the Hunter skill tree. It deals a good amount of damage and penetrating damage.
• Limited Move Arsenal: Initially, you only start with one skill slot, and unlock the other five with keys dropped from bosses as the game progresses.
• Luck-Based Mission: Two enemies in the Cliffs exhibit this thanks to how their A.I. Roulette works. The Vacuous Bat will normally spam "Fly", which does nothing, but will every so often use Swift Bite for 300 damage. The rarely-encountered Ninja Frog will normally spam useless "attacks" to fake you out for its actual Shuriken attack, which again appears randomly and deals 300 damage. You only have 600 HP the first time you encounter both, meaning that if the Random Number God is not on your side and they perform Swift Bite/Shuriken twice, they will kill you.
• Mighty Glacier:
  • The Sad Rats in the Badlands are this compared to the Mad Rats. Their Nibble deals 90 damage as compared to the Mad Rats' 30, but has three times the casting time.
  • The Rock Golem of the Landfill area has slow attacks that are easily interrupted, but hit for a lot of damage.
  • The Angry Wolf enemies in the Forest have relatively slow attacks that hit hard.
  • The Giant Hogweed has a very slow attack in Venom that hits extremely hard.
  • The Mutated Bear's Acrid Bite deals an insane amount of penetrating damage but also has an insanely long cast time of over 10 seconds, giving you plenty of opportunity to interrupt it. Its other notable attack Thrash averts the trope, however.
  • The Ashen Soldiers and the Ashen Hunters in the final area have slow-casting attacks, a number of which hit hard.
  • The Final Boss, the Original Machine has slow-casting attacks that can deal very powerful damage or massively heal it.
• Mirror Boss: Three of the enemies in the final area, the Ashen Soldier, Ashen Inventor and Ashen Hunter all use abilities similar to the player's class abilities. They even deal similar damage as some of the player's class abilities (e.g. Ashen Soldier's Revolver Shot deals 2100 damage, same as the Soldier class' Sniper Rifle).
• Motifs: Heat. Your most important resource that other resources stem from is Heat. Several of the logs that occur as your upgrade your Machine are based on heat production, warmth, or the glow it produces. Finally, the Original Machine has a motif of an overdose of heat with all its fighters burnt and ashen compared to yours, and the Original Machine itself relies on heat- and laser- based abilities..
• Mutual Kill: This is possible if you use Explosive Trap to defeat an enemy but are unable to survive the self-damage. This counts as a loss for the player, since the fighter didn't survive to return back to the Machine with resources.
• Piñata Enemy: The enemies in the Bio Swamp have attacks that do nothing or hurt themselves (with one exception that deals a pitiful 10 damage), and drop precious Fuel when killed. The Mound of Despair especially fits this, dropping a whopping 20 fuel (twice that of the Writhing Mass boss), but is rarely seen and has a giant amount of HP.
• Plant Mooks: One of the enemy types in the forest is a sentient Giant Hogweed that tries to kill your fighters with venom. This is, in some ways, Truth in Television, as the real-life Giant Hogweed is phototoxic.
• Playing with Fire: The Furnace Mech boss of the Laboratory attacks with flame pulses of varying intensity. The Original Machine also uses fire-based attacks like Heat Beam and Inferno Blast.
• Physical, Mystical, Technological: The Surroundings is split into three different areas — the Landfill, the Laboratory, and the Forest. The Forest (Physical) contains wildlife and killer plants who attack with Natural Weapons, the Landfill (Mystical) contains elementals that control the earth and rocks via unknown forces, and the Laboratory (Technological) is filled with Mecha-Mooks that use technological attacks like flamethrowers and electricity.
• Powers as Programs: The player equips skills into their skill slots in order to use said skills in battle.
• Random Effect Spell: The Matter Randomizer is a rare encounter in the Laboratory and it only has one attack called "Mystery". Said attack does one of a random variety of effects such as dealing damage, healing its shield or HP, or even multiple of those effects at once.
• Rat King: The second boss of the game is the Rat King, who like the other Rats has a very powerful attack among weaker ones, this time called Royal Decree.
• Regenerating Shield, Static Health: Shielding regenerates over time unless it's depleted to zero, after which it will stay down for a downtime period before it starts regenerating again. Health does not regenerate, but both the player and enemies have skills that can heal themselves. The rare Forest encounter Moss Crawlers makes use of this by having a low 500 shield that regenerates extremely quickly.
• Rock Beats Laser: The Hunter Skills are essentially primitive traps and more archaic weapons like Ballistas, Kukris, and Bear Traps. Thanks to dealing Penetrating Damage, these weapons are extremely effective against the futuristic robotic enemies in the Laboratory, all of which have high shield but pathetic health. Ballista and Bayonet in particular will One-Hit Kill all except the boss and the Matter Randomizer.
• Rodents of Unusual Size: The enemies found in the Badlands are giant rats of varying natures, and the boss is the Rat King himself.
• RPG Elements: The game's combat system features equippable abilities from a Character Class System as well as ways to level up your HP and Shield stats.
• Science Fantasy: The game is mostly Science Fiction with robots and weaponry. Then you encounter the Landfill, which has Earth-Elementals as enemies and a Rock Golem boss.
• Self-Harm: Several of the Body Horror enemies in the Bio Swamp have attacks that hurt themselves, often involving tripping over, having their own flesh slough off, or having a horrible case of agony.
• Spam Attack: The player has SMG and LMG which deal weak but rapid damage, while several enemies have a rapid-hitting attack intended to interrupt moves with a cast time.
• Static Stun Gun: The Shock Baton skill deals a heavy amount of damage to enemy shields and also stuns them by interrupting their current move, causing it to fail.
• Superboss: The Star versions of all the bosses in the All-Stars Bonus Dungeon (except the Star Writhing Mass) are souped-up versions of their former selves, sporting much more attack and health than their original counterparts. The final boss of that dungeon, Fifi's Ghost, would qualify as the boss of all those superbosses, being the final opponent in that area.
• There Is Another: The player's Machine soon finds out that it isn't the only Machine around, after finding destroyed remains of other fighters in places their fighters haven't explored. This is because there was another Machine around before yours, and it was the one responsible for destroying most of the world via its fighters.
• Took a Level in Badass: Every "Star" version boss encountered in the All-Stars Bonus Dungeon has beefed-up health, shields, or damage compared to their original counterparts. This goes twofold for the Star Aggressive Dingo, the Warm-Up Boss of the game who now sports 50x the health its original counterpart had.
• Video Game Cruelty Potential: The Bio Swamp features enemies that cannot attack at all (with one exception, but even the Vomiting Behemoth's sole and rarely used attack is far from threatening); instead all their moves consist of stumbling around or hurting themselves as their own bodies tear themselves apart. And what reward do you get for entering this place and slaughtering its harmless, pathetic inhabitants? Nothing but Fuel, a resource you can make yourself and will never truly be short of.
• Video Game Delegation Penalty: Workers can be used to automate tasks, but their efficiency rating is initially only a fraction of what you have by simply doing things manually. Certain types of ammo can have their crafting speed or amount boosted if you craft them manually.
• Warm-Up Boss: The only strategy against the Aggressive Dingo is to keep using Attack! Attack! Attack!, since "Smack" is the only skill you have at the time. It'll go down just barely before you do.
• Where It All Began: The final area of the game lies right beneath the crater that the Machine and its Armory landed in.. In a story sense, it's revealed that the player Machine is a probe that was sent into space and managed to return back to Earth after an accident.
• You Dirty Rat!: Rats are a rather prominent enemy type in the game, with every Badlands encounter being a rat of some sort and the boss being the Rat King, Android Rats appear in the Laboratory, and the Moss Crawlers in the Forest are presumed to be rat-like creatures due to using "Nibble" as an attack.
• You Require More Vespene Gas: Heat is the main resource in the game and all other resources require heat to produce.
• Zero-Effort Boss: The Writhing Mass in the Bio Swamp has no attacks that can damage the player, and one that damages itself. This means it will eventually whittle itself down without player input. The only way for a player to lose against it is to use Explosive Trap and have less than 920 Max HP, since it will kill the boss in one hit and count as a win if the player survives the self-damage. Even its All-star boss version does absolutely nothing other than whittle itself down.

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