Sierra 7
is an Adobe Flash Rail Shooter game, made by SHD Games about an elite operative going by the callsign "Sierra 7" who must complete various missions around the world to stop militia groups out for government-targeted violence & carnage.
A mobile sequel to the game was recently released sometime around August 2019. Its trope page can be found here.
This game contains examples of the following tropes:
- A.K.A.-47: Averted, mostly because, as a free flash game, there's no need to pay royalties.
- Anti-Frustration Features:
- In "Kosovo Sniping", compensating for wind is very poorly explained (see the Guide Dangit entry if you can't understand how it works), but to alleviate your frustration, the enemies cannot tell you're shooting, even if the bullet whizzes right by their faces. They only sound the alarm if you shoot the entirely wrong guy, and at least your Voice with an Internet Connection is clear about who you're supposed to snipe next.
- In the "statistics" menu, you're shown how close you are to completing the emblems that involve killing a set number of people.
- Once you beat the game, you have the option to restart the game on a different difficulty level. If you do this, any weapon and emblem unlocked for beating a level will be locked again. Fortunately, weapons and emblems unlocked for killing a set number of people stay unlocked, as do the ones that involve beating the game on "recruit" and "veteran".
- There are three instances where you have to react and shoot immediately as you enter a room, or you fail the mission. Luckily, in each case, your Voice with an Internet Connection will warn you that there's something in the next room and you should be careful, the locations of the things you have to shoot always remain in the same positions, in the latter two cases there's a door you have to breach before you enter the room, allowing you to reload, heal up, and get ready before you face whatever's in the room, and for the last two examples (all of them on recruit), on all difficulties a red outline appears on the screen, indicating where you need to shoot (even on elite, where the game takes your entire HUD away).
- Blasting It Out of Their Hands: A realistic take on this trope. Sometimes enemies will fire at you from cover by sticking their hand out and blindfiring, and in "Kosovo Base" you have to stop General Arel Promichek from killing himself. In both cases, you don't so much as shoot it out their hands as you cripple their whole arm and take them out of the fight. As the bloodstains left behind show, it's not exactly clean either.
- Blatant Lies: The "Medical Officer" emblem states that your reward for achieving it is a "med pack", and when you beat a level with no damage, the subsequent unlock screen even shows a respectably sized medical kit. Of course, as the HUD and the animation of Sierra 7 using the "medkit" shows, it's literally just a bottle of painkillers.
- Bomb Disposal: At the end of "Tangiers Hotel", you have to defuse a bomb.
- Bottomless Magazines: The M60E4 plays this trope straight, though it still has a heat meter to prevent you from holding down the trigger indefinitely.
- Bragging Rights Reward: Sensibly Averted, actually. Your reward for beating the game on veteran, the middle difficulty, is the M60E4, the best gun in the game. There's no reward for beating the game on elite, the hardest difficulty, because if you do beat it on elite, you've proven that you can beat the game with everything you have unlocked.
- Checkpoint Starvation: The harder the difficulty you're playing on, the less checkpoints activate. On elite, there are no checkpoints at all. Luckily, each level is short enough that this is never really an issue.
- Chekhov's Skill: You are taught how to use the Night-Vision Goggles and the breaching charge clacker in "Training", and they both come into use in the game exactly once. The NVGs you use in the assault on Kosovo base, and the breaching charge you use at the very end of the game, where you blow up a weapons cache from a safe distance.
- Concealment Equals Cover: Sierra 7 almost never takes cover, preferring to stand in the open and let enemies take potshots at him for whatever reason. The two times he can Take Cover! though (three if you count the 'Hostile Arena' challenge, five if you want to be pendantic since you do take cover behind three different barriers during the HMG fight) this trope is played straight as an arrow, as no amount of anmunition will destroy your cover.
- Dramatic Gun Cock: Sierra 7 always does this on drawing the Mossberg 590 and M60E4.
- Defeat Means Playable: Implied. Near the end of "Somalia Street", you face off against an HMG mounted on a pickup. When you beat the game of veteran difficulty, you get the M60E4. The firing sound is exactly the same as the HMG on the pickup truck, implying that at the end of the level Sierra 7 nabbed it for himself.
- Dynamic Entry: In "RSA Embassy", you breach the embassy by Fast-Roping from the roof, down three floors, and swinging through the windows.
- Everything Fades: Played straight.
- Featureless Protagonist: Sierra 7 is this. All we can tell is that he's likely male, judging from his grunts when he gets hit. However, this is averted in the iOS port with this screen shot from the beta.
- Guide Dangit: In the "Kosovo Sniping" level, you're told to compensate for wind, but since your scope is a very basic crosshair, you can't exactly tell HOW you're supposed to compensate for wind. Well, not exactly. There are three lines below the crosshair, each correlating to a wind level. You're supposed to sight the target up on the endpoint of each line. Simple enough, but you're never told about this in the slightest.
- Gun Porn: There's a gallery that allows you to view the model of each gun in the game. It doesn't really serve a purpose except for this.
- He Knows About Timed Hits: Played completely straight in both the tutorial and "Training".
- Heroic Mime: Adding to Featureless Protagonist, Sierra 7 doesn't talk either. In fact, he never makes a sound from his mouth except for when he gets hit (whereupon he grunts in pain), he's using a sniper rifle (he breathes in and out to stabalise his aim), and when he's defusing a bomb (he breathes a sigh of relief when he successfully defuses it).
- Hostage Situation: The "RSA Embassy" level involves you resolving such a situation.
- Idiosyncratic Difficulty Levels: "Recruit", "Veteran", and "Elite".
- Irony: The reward for the "Medical Officer" emblem, awarded for doing a No-Damage Run on a level, rewards you with a "medkit", which heals 20HP, and the reward for the "Munitions Management" emblem, awarded for not reloading (so you're forced to beat a mission with one mag from your primary and one mag from your sidearm)note , is the vest, which allows you to bring two extra spare mags for your primary. In practice though, you can get both in "Irish Safehouse", and you can (and probably will need to) utilize both rewards, especially the medicals, in subsequent levels.
- Interface Spoiler: If you stop moving for longer than a second or two, enemies are about to pop out of cover.
- Justified Tutorial: Your Voice with an Internet Connection explains that he's forced to explain the basics of operating as standard procedure in the optional tutorial, and the first "mission" is essentially a killhouse that you must pass in a limited time.
- Mooks, but no Bosses: As to be expected from a pseudorealistic game. The closest thing to a boss is a dude manning an HMG mounted on a pickup, and he's not much harder to kill either.
- No Name Given: The Voice with an Internet Connection, which is why he's referred to exclusively as such on this page.
- Pretty Little Headshots: Averted; if you headshot someone, half of their scalp is ripped off their heads.
- Tactical Suicide Boss: In "Somalian Street", the dude manning the HMG always fires in bursts, instead of protracted supressing fire. He doesn't even fire in random bursts, he fires them to an exact rhythm, so you'll know when to pop out of cover to shoot him. If he chose to fire random bursts, you wouldn't have stood a chance, since the HMG is otherwise extremely damaging.
- Taking You with Me: The bomb technician in "Tangiers Hotel" has a detonator in his hand near the end of the level, obviously intending to blow you with him to Kingdom Come. And if you don't shoot him quick (quick being less than a second), he'll succeed in doing so.
- Timed Mission: As explained above, you have a limited time to clear the aforementioned killhouse (one minute and forty five seconds, specifically).
- Stop, or I Shoot Myself!: Non comedic variant. In "Kosovo Base", in the final room General Arel Promichek is holding a pistol to his temple. If you don't shoot his arm to stop his suicide, as mentioned above, you're treated to an extended cutscene of him blowing his own brains out and his corpse falling to the floor.
- Short-Range Shotgun: Subverted, as at a reasonable distance the spread gets bigger and less damage is done, though because of how most of the firefights in this game take place within 10 meters, it's rarely noticable.
- Useless Accessory: A few firearms are shown to have flashlights attached. They're all unusable.
- Voice with an Internet Connection: You're always assisted by a voice, though who he exactly is is kind of vague. In any case, he briefs you at the start of each mission and warns you whenever danger is around the corner.
- Worst Aid: Following on from the Blatant Lies entry, Sierra 7's idea of medical treatment for bullet wounds is to take painkillers. He doesn't even pour out a sensible dosage into his free hand, he just opens the cap and then chugs the whole damn bottle.
"Mission accomplished."
