YMMV / Madness Combat

The series as a whole

• Alternative Character Interpretation:
  • Jebus gets a lot of this. Why does he still continue to pursue Hank after the Sheriff was killed? Is it either for revenge or because of how much chaos he was causing? Is he really a friendly enemy? And why did he kill him in Consternation? and vice versa.
  • POWERLESS.fla implies that Deimos was alive when Hank used him as a shield. Did Hank not know or not notice it? If he noticed, did he think Deimos was beyond saving or did he choose to not even try because he needed a decoy?
    • Alternatively, this scene shows that events that interact with a person's corpse influence events in The Other Place relevant to that person, with the claw impaling Deimos happening at the same time as Hank using Deimos as a decoy. Since Hank has died and been through The Other Place a few times by now, was he aware of this? If so, did he just not care?
  • In Expurgation, was Sanford screaming from pain or frustration? Or both?
• Aluminum Christmas Trees: While Jebediah Christoff's first name on its own is well-known in fiction, his surname sounds like a fitting part of a Steven Ulysses Perhero name. Believe it or not, the latter is an actual name and surname.
• Awesome Music:
  • Sean Hodges, aka Cheshyre, is considered to be one of the greatest musical artists of all time on Newgrounds, and for good reason. His music fits perfectly within the dark and gritty universe of Madness Combat.
    • "Calliope", the theme song for when the series truly became Madness Combat.
    • "Apotheosis". Hot damn. Combined with the instantly-noticeable Art Evolution, you know this is the beginning of something epic.
    • "Train Madness" from Antipathy. Not only is it pretty infectious, but it's also incredibly chaotic and fully suits the scene that plays along with it.
    • "Consternation". It has a bit of a primal feel to it, and just reeks of a sense of finality, considering that this is the end of Tricky's saga of the series, even having a dark remix of "Train Madness".
    • Abrogation is probably the best of the lot. It features a few distorted snippets of BGMs from prior episodes, which may serve as a Boss Remix, and screams absolute finality given that it plays in what was originally intended to be the Grand Finale.
    • Expurgation bears a similar vibe of finality, but is overall much darker in tone. You can hear the almost animalistic insanity in the song, punctuating incredibly much that Tricky has returned for one last round against Hank and Sanford - and this time, in the form of a body-hopping ruler of Hell itself.
  • Cheshyre isn't the only musical artist who uses his talents to makes songs for Krinkels. There's Arnold Geier, aka API, who made the first song of Antipathy, an intense track that plays along Hank's rampage.
    • He also made the soundtrack for Inundation, which, as short as it is, is also very fitting for an episode that's gonna star Jebus as the main character.
  • There's also Fleetwire, who made ROMP.MP3, the soundtrack for ROMP.FLA, is an intense tune with an undertone of horror which well fits the odd and alarming events happening in the short.
    • He then gives us another awesome track with Eidolon Step, an awesome tune that plays as Deimos finally manages to turn the tables and fight back against the forces of hell. The usage of the M1 Garand ping is astounding.
• Badass Decay: As a result of the series' escalation, enemies that get introduced as a threat tend to fade into the hordes as time goes on. As an example, one Agent was capable of putting Hank on the defensive, and when the same Agent is raised as a Zombie by Jesus, he managed to score a fatal wound. About one episode later, they're getting mowed down by the hundreds.
• Broken Base: While not many people appear to outright dislike them, there are a few who prefer the old character sprites to the ones introduced in DedmosRebuilt, while other fans happily welcomed the new ones.
• Cargo Ship: Hank is sometimes jokingly shipped with the giant blender from Incident:001A due to his incredibly giddy excitement upon seeing it.
• Catharsis Factor: After Deimos had been at Hell's mercy for the majority of his shorts, being impaled and transported across various places, it is utterly satisfying to see him hack all of Hell itself, and become a Pint-Sized Powerhouse that brutally beats down his enemies with nothing more than Super-Reflexes and Super-Strength in the finale.
• Common Knowledge:
  • It's common to assume that any character with a plain design is a grunt, and therefore that Hank, Sanford and Deimos were grunts before they got unique clothes. In reality, characters with plain designs can be many things, including civilians; "grunt" is simply the lowest rank in the AAHW and they just so happen to have a plain appearance.
  • Fans were quick to call the giant skeleton from Expurgation a "MAG skeleton", even though nothing suggests that he's a magnified skeleton rather than being directly created as giant.
• Continuity Lockout: Trying to watch the episodes out of order makes it impossible to understand just what's going on — Dedmos Adventure in particular is hard to appreciate without knowledge of the main series.
• Crack Pairing: Internet shipping being what it is, Tricky and Hank have been paired up quite a lot even though the two absolutely hate each other and have murdered each other several times. But then the Tricky's crossover mod with Friday Night Funkin' included a brief Cry for the Devil moment where, during the bonus track, an unwillingly-resurrected Tricky calls out for Hank in fear and confusion shippers (both new and old) took this brief hint and ran with it, continuing to ship Hank and Tricky. Then it got even weirder...
• Crazy Is Cool: Tricky, who fights with a stop sign and likes to wear peoples' heads as hats.
• Crosses the Line Twice: Easily one of the bloodiest things ever, but you'll probably be too busy being awed to be horrified or offended. It helps that the art style makes the graphic violence easier to digest.
• Ensemble Dark Horse:
  • The Hotdog Vendor has had quite a fanbase despite having short cameos in 2 incidents and 2 episodes and his name never being seen. Due to Tricky's (and most protagonist's) friendly interaction with him, it has led to the Alternative Character Interpretation that Tricky isn't that bad. In addition, he's gained the status of a Memetic Badass in the sense that he is the most powerful character in the entire Madness Combat universe.
  • Rich, the employee of the month. Like the Hotdog Vendor, he's gained quite a Memetic Badass status despite appearing in a poster, a short incident which gets him killed and in Project Nexus 2. It helps Krinkels himself said he was the superior worker to Jebus and Tricky.
• Everyone Is Jesus in Purgatory: Taken up to eleven throughout the series, considering the nature of the animation. The dull-yet-vivid art style, barebones storyline, Grey And Red Morality, and the fact that Jesus himself literally makes an appearance really seals the deal on this trope for many viewers. This is without mentioning the so-called "Higher Powers" that consistently resurrect Hank and other characters.
• Fandom-Specific Plot: The plot of many fan animations consist of having one or multiple OC protagonists assaulting an AAHW or Nexus building. This is also a plot point that often appears in the canon animations, but the assaults in fan animations often aren't interrupted by unexpected events, unlike in canon.
• Fan Nickname:
  • Mag Agent: V3 tends to get called "Ducky" by fans due to his oxygen mask resembling a duck bill.
  • Fans have nicknamed Deimos' new form from DedmosRebuilt, "Rockmos".
  • "Doc" began as a fan nickname back when the closest thing he had to a name was his chat handle, 2BDamned. Another common nickname for him is "Kyle" and "Toby/Tobias" since it sounds like "2B".
  • The dimension where the Deimos Adventure mini-series takes place is referred to as "purgatory" by the fan Wiki, which already used "hell" for the dimension of Expurgation. "Purgatory" is canonically named "hell" in a poster from DedmosRebuilt, and Krinkels has referred to it as "Regular Hell", while the dimension in Expurgation is called "Auditor[Hell]" near the end of the episode when Hank is given powerful weapons.
  • Tricky's giant, skeletal demon form in Expurgation is commonly referred to as "Auditricky", due to having been created when the Auditor absorbed his corpse at the end of Abrogation.
  • The art-style of the new characters' assets introduced in DedmosRebuilt is nicknamed the "Dissenter style" by fans, even though Dissenter is the second episode to use these new sprites.
  • "Mr. Nails" for Mag Agent: Torture because of the nail-like metal stakes driven through his face.
• Fanon:
  • For some reason, fans seem to pin Sanford as an alcoholic.
  • If the fanart will be detailed enough to include these, Deimos' teeth will be drawn as very sharp and pointy.
  • Tricky is often portrayed with a habit of flipping the bird in fan works, even if he never does that in any official Madness Combat works.
  • In Abrogation and Expurgation, Hank protects Sanford several times despite being noted as much less intelligent than before. This has lead the fandom to occasionally headcanon that Hank has Papa Wolf (or to some, Mama Bear) instincts towards his allies, Deimos and Sanford in particular.
  • After Krinkels drew him with a mohawk in one artwork, it is common to see 2BDamned with one in fan works.
  • Fanworks of 2BDamned without his mask tend to depict him having a hole on each of his cheeks.
• Foe Yay Shipping: There are people who enjoy Tricky/Hank and The Auditor/Hank, and while less popular Tricky/Auditor has its fair share of fans as well. Most people ship the former as a joke.
• Fountain of Memes: The Monster Clown himself, to the point that his Friday Night Funkin' mod has an entire page about the memes he spawned.
• Fridge Brilliance:
  • The way dialogue is portrayed in the Incidents is strange at first; A stop in the action to display a black screen with just the subtitles for an otherwise silent exchange. Especially weird when the main series has no problem displaying their dialogue in-frame to keep the action going. But think about why Madness is so monochrome to begin with; because it started as a pastiche of early films, which were primarily silent aside from music. In order to portray dialogue, a common practice was to simply have an actor clearly articulate that they're saying something, then splice in a card with the dialogue. Since the Incidents themselves exist primarily just to explore a single setpiece or joke, much like the original Marshmallow Madness, it's almost bringing it back full-circle.
  • Tricky notwithstanding, Inundation is essentially a final act of Shooing Out The Clowns for the Madness storyline by killing off the only character of the main roster whose existence is inherently parodic in nature. Jesus being, well Jesus, he was always meant as a satire of overly-religious types, slinging around magic and raising people as zombies. So, when he gets the Auditor to destroy the final Improbability Drive even at the cost of his life, that death is literally reining in the Madness universe's outlandishness a bit more by having him "go the way of the Sheriff".
  • Doubles as a case of Meaningful Name. Antipathy. A strong dislike, an aversion. Antipathy is also when things start to go downhill for our protagonist. Conversely, Hank himself starts to show a more marked dislike, an ANTIPATHY to his opponents, if his more brutal kills are anything to go by. The universe itself is starting to express an antipathy for Hank, and vice versa.
  • Sanford is clearly out of his element in Expurgation, as the three-way fight between Hank, Tricky, and The Auditor is becoming a battle between demigods, and his expression reflects that... but you can tell that his morale is already starting to flag after he and Hank end up in Hell and they are cut off from one another. For the very first time in a Madness episode, Sanford has to work alone, and that just isn't the way he does things. His shots become more hesitant and mechanical, his melee fighting becomes more defensive. He doesn't perform the fancy overhead flip with his meathook or any of his slicker takedowns. He's still lethal, but he's genuinely scared—above all else, Sanford can't handle not having someone there to watch his back, and it makes sense because he's always been shown working as part of a team in some form or fashion. He's not Hank, and doesn't have the same mindset for charging headlong into violence alone.
• Germans Love David Hasselhoff: While the series is popular worldwide, it has a pretty large chunk of fans coming from Russia, with them being extremely avid content creators. Other examples also include China, South Korea, and the Czech Republic.
• Growing the Beard: Apotheosis is generally regarded as when the series went from a mildly above-average Flash fight series to something special.
• Hilarious in Hindsight: Viewers of Madness Depredation from 2020 onward are sometimes amused by the sight of Hank's facemask, making it appear as though he were being COVID-compliant as a courtesy or precaution despite his otherwise total sociopathy and recklessness.
• Idiosyncratic Ship Naming: Polycombat for Hank/2BDamned/Sanford/Deimos.
• It Was His Sled: Thanks to the Deimos Adventure mini-series, Deimos' death isn't that much of a spoiler anymore.
• I Am Not Shazam: The mustached beings with actual faces from Romp.fla have commonly been referred to as "Romps", but they're never referred to as such in-universe. This mostly stems from the fact that these beings have not been named as of yet and that "Romp" is merely the name of the short.
• The Law of Fan Jackassery: Unfortunately, the Madness Combat fandom is filled with unsavory, toxic people due in part to its awkward mix of obscurity, and being a relatively large fandom (of around 2,000 individuals or so). Ask just about any of the fans who know what's going on and you'll find that everyone has a beef with someone. There is also a huge gatekeeper mentality where old fans act hostile towards newcomers simply because the new users try a novel approach to their creations, or if they discovered the series from something else that happened to reference Madness. Ultimately with how terrifyingly self-demonstrating this is, Madness Combat could probably even be used as a case study for this trope, since the jackassery levels are right about at their peak. That, and many egotistical fan animators who are highly skilled, but disagree with each other, tend to forego simple camaraderie simply because they feel they are "the best".
  • Krinkels himself has expressed displeasure with this behavior and "tribalist" mindset on some occasions, but would rather not do anything about it because he sees the risks with getting involved, and would rather just keep churning out more content and focusing on things that actually matter.
• LGBT Fanbase: While there are no men or women in Madness Combat (If Word of God is to be believed), the series has a healthy number of gay fans because of the entire cast being predominantly composed of male (or at least male-presenting) characters. With most of the shipping being predominantly made up of gay couples^note (although there's a scant few straight couples but that involves OCs or Rule 63 shenanigans). Not to mention the Ho Yay between Sanford and Deimos. They're arguably the series' Fan-Preferred Couple due to being the first example of teamwork in a series where most main characters fought solo. Their "serious guy and joker guy" dynamic also greatly helps.
• Magnificent Bastard: The Auditor is a member of the Employers and the one behind the AAHW's creation. When Christoff reaches his lair to destroy the Improbability Drive, the Auditor tries to stop him, going as far as infecting him with some sort of disease, but accidentally destroys the Drive in the process of killing Christoff. Quickly adapting to the new situation, the Auditor uses Christoff's halo to make himself more powerful and proceeds to fight Sanford and a revived Hank, absorbing corpses to make himself bigger and stronger; he however commits the mistake of absorbing Tricky as well, at which point the clown takes control of his body and the halo. While initially freaking out, he eventually recovers and decides to help Hank with defeating Tricky. By the end of Expurgation, the Auditor has re-obtained control over his body and the halo while having also seemingly gotten rid of Hank and Sanford.
• Memetic Mutation:
  • The ladder Hank and Sanford climb down in Abrogation became memetic in the fandom, who joke that it's responsible for the time gap between episodes 10 and 11 by claiming that they were climbing down it for the entire seven-year gap between those episodes. Doesn't help that in 11 by the time we get back to Hank and Sanford it's the two of them finally reaching the end of that ladder.
  • Deimos's death is subject of several jokes and memes in the Madness Combat fandom, likely because he dies without much fanfare in the middle of the episode he's introduced in. His comedic personality in a world of violence also generally makes him easy to make memes of.
  • When the Deimos Adventure mini-series started, it became a meme to call Deimos, "Dedmos" (Something Krinkels himself did). With the last episode, people now call him Rockmos because of his new rock form. With some fans even going further with the joke by outright putting Deimos outfit (and cross face) on a rock and calling that Rockmos.
  • "Remember when it started with a fight over a boombox?" or any other sentence that references said boombox. ^Explanation It's something fans often say in the comments of the episodes, shorts and even fan animations. Pointing out the contrast between the silly Excuse Plot of the first episode compared to the later episodes and all the subsequent fan animations made of the series.
  • Tiky ^ExplanationA meme from Among Us that was refitted into Madness Combat's characters, but instead of someone saying "Amogus", there is a Grunt saying "Tiky" in front of a much smaller and silly looking Tricky. Then a bass-boosted version of Madness plays after the Grunt says "Tiky" in video forms of the meme.
  • "HANK! HAAAANK! GET THE SWEET AND SOUR SAUCE HANK!" ^ExplanationA meme that was formerly◊ related to Breaking Bad and originated from 4chan. Due to the name being screamed out on the post, it was immediately overtaken by the Madness Combat and Friday Night Funkin' community. With AetherDX and Kira_Supernova making a voiced version of the meme. Naturally this has only led to many artists and animators creating animated shitposts of the audio. There's even a few where Tricky is replaced by other cast members of MC.
  • Thiccy ^ExplanationAnother byproduct of the Friday Night Funkin' crossover (see Crack Pairing above) coupled with the internet's insatiable desire for Rule 63 / 34 resulted in exactly what you would expect; Tricky re-drawn as a curvaceous woman to make the ship with Hank both more and less weird at the same time... Some even just use this meme name on drawing of Tricky where he's just given a big butt for no apparent reason.
  • Sadness Combat^ExplanationA meme started by Red Labs and [1], with the latter even making the art that would spawn this meme but was colored and touched up by someone else. It depicts a small chibi-fied sad grunt with a wide sad eyebrows and frown, alongside a tear under one of their "eyes" in reference to SpongeBob's sad expression from the episode "Christmas Who?". It has since made rounds in the fandom as either pictures or videos.
  • Madness Combat is an anti-smoking PSA.^ExplanationIn reference to the Running Gag of smokers dying first in most episodes.
  • A common gag for people making videos on the series is to set the geo-location data on Youtube to Nevada.
• Mexicans Love Speedy Gonzales: Jebus was initially created as a shallow Take That! against Christians when he appeared in the very first episode. Since then he became The Dragon during the Sheriff arc before establishing himself as Hank's chief rival and a totally badass Religious Bruiser. After Inundation (an entire Main-series episode centered around him and involving him going toe-to-toe with the Auditor and blowing up his HQ) and a later Retcon in Project Nexus (he's not actually Jesus, but a former Nexus scientist who went rogue after seeing what his research was being used for), many Christian madness fans consider him one of their favorite characters of the whole series.
• Narm: The first minute of Redeemer shows Hank sneaking around The Sheriff's office and making silent kills on some grunts. It's a genuinely suspenseful and tense scene... right up until Hank kills one of the grunts by shoving him into another one. It's clearly intended to come across as disturbingly chilling, yet just looks unintentionally ridiculous in such a serious scene.
• Nausea Fuel: With the breathtaking body count in this series, it stands to reason that some deaths would be more gruesome and graphic than others. Special mention goes to things like Hank tearing part of a mook's face off in Consternation, Jesus ripping out a Mag Agent's brain in Incident: 110A, and around half of Deimos's kills in Dedmos Rebuilt.
• Portmanteau Ship Name: Sanmos for Sanford/Deimos, and 2BHank for 2BDamned/Hank.
• Recurring Fanon Character: The fandom has been around for quite a long time. With several fan animators having their own sonas or fan characters, some have left quite an impact. With even two Fandom wikis dedicated to keeping track of most of them.
  • While somewhat minor, Heather J. Wimbleton, Hank's Rule 63 Distaff Counterpart who wears white and pink), in contrast to Hank's black and red get-up. She's mostly relegated to the artist community of the fandom.
  • In a similar vein there is also White Hank, sometimes called "Wank", who is decently popular thanks to the White Hank Collabs hosted by fan animator kRyy.
  • Liz, a character owned by Dat Simple has also been rather popular with some parts of the fandom. Mostly thanks to being a female Madness Combat fan character that has a unique and cute design, alongside how her fighting style is surprisingly different and unique compared to most MC fan characters, whom usually look and fight like they came straight out of an anime or are insanely hyper-competent One Man Armies. Instead fighting almost realistically, as while she's still a pretty impressive combatant, she also has trouble with stronger opponents and handling stronger weapons due to her build and short height.
  • Kelzad Oox and Yeelon Mekyr from the REALM fan animation series are also quite popular thanks to their unique designs and really polished home series.
  • The main character of Happiness Apotheosis is popular as a Genre Refugee and genuine ray of sunshine in the Crapsack World that is Madness Combat, to the point he was given the Fan Nickname of "Skittles".
• Self-Fanservice: The characters are regularly drawn with more humanoid bodies in fanart. Common depictions include Hank and Sanford being jacked, Deimos being skinny but having some muscle, and Tricky being chubby. It helps that Krinkels also draws his characters this way, particularly the former three examples, himself.
• Sequel Displacement: Consternation has become the iconic episode of the series. The fan game Madness Accelerant (made by the Tom Fulp and MindChamber themselves), released two years after the episode, is essentially a playable version of the episode. Of Hank's many designs over the course of the series, he usually shows up in his Consternation-era getup, in any crossover and game, with even Krinkels acknowledging this as various Incidents and other non-canon shorts showing Hank in the same get up. This is mostly because Consternation has left quite the impact on the series, such as said design of Hank's being his last before his MAG form was introduced. Many characters introduced in the episode have also become a mainstay in the series and its fandom, such as the MAG Agents, the ATP Engineers and the Auditor, further contributing to its iconic status for introducing a lot of new things to the usual mass slaughter.
• Ships That Pass in the Night: Hank/2BDamned is a semi-popular ship, but as of Madness Combat 9.5 both of them have yet to interact. The ship mostly stems from what 2BDamned says at the end of DISSENTER:
  DAMN AGENCY BREAKIN MY STUFF
  HANK DOESN'T EVEN LIVE HERE ANYMORE
• Tear Jerker:
  • Most of the ordeals Deimos goes through in the Dedmos Adventures series. From being Forced to Watch a vision of his friend Sanford being murdered in front of him, to reliving a nightmarish parody of his own death, it's really hard to not feel bad for him.
  • Incident: 101a has a courier making a delivery that turns out to be a surprise birthday party for himself, which is promptly ruined by Tricky jumping out of the cake and killing everybody. The inhabitants of Nevada can't have one genuinely peaceful and wholesome moment without it going messily awry.
  • According to Krinkels, the reason that Antipathy!Hank in Episode 9.5 is the most aggressive version of Hank is because he's in constant pain from his injuries, and the reason he kills is so he can try to move on and continue, unlike the other versions, that kill to survive.
• Visual Effects of Awesome: Krinkels spent half a year working on the first minute or so of Abrogation, and good lord does it show.
  • Most of the series has a level of quality to its animations and detail that is a step above most other Flash animated movies on Newgrounds. The result is that the series can communicate body language and emotions without even having faces on their characters for the most part.
• What Do You Mean, It's Not Political?: On Krinkels' Curiouscat page, one fan asked him if the Auditor was based off of Haitian dictator Francois "Papa Doc" Duvalier and noted several parallels between them. Krinkels rebutted it, but admitted that would have been cooler.
  Krinkels: Man, Madness would probably be cooler if I based it on history instead of 90s action movies.
• The Woobie:
  • The sheer amount of crap Deimos goes through in his own sub-series led to a lot of viewers expressing sympathy for him.
  • It's also hard not to feel sorry for Sanford either. He lost his friend, had to continue fighting with a cold killer and was repeatedly tossed around. It all comes down to a point in which he screams out of all of it in Expurgation.

Madness: Project Nexus (Classic)

For YMMV items related to Project Nexus' sequel, go here.

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• Anti-Climax Boss: Mag Agent: N, the Final Boss of Episode 1. While he can take a lot of hits, he's an easy target due to being large and slow, and his attacks are very predictable and easy to dodge, while his backup serves more as a source of ammo than an actual threat. Especially notable in that the boss just before him is arguably harder.
• Complete Monster: See here.
• Death of the Author: For years, fans assumed that the Project Nexus games were an alternate continuity to the main Madness Combat animated series. However, shortly before Project Nexus 2 came out, Krinkels said that everything is canon, implying that the animation series and the games are a single continuity. Some fans preferred to ignore this information because of some contradictions between the animated series and video games such as Hank and Deimos being back in their normal forms or the lack of references to the video games in the animated series until Madness Combat 9.5.
• Demonic Spiders:
  • The. Fucking. Zombies. They're a newbie trap in every way. They're very durable, can put on surprising bursts of speed if aggroed, can rip weapons out of your hands if they get close, and getting sandwiched between two is certain death as they can just grab you over and over until your Tac-Bar is drained and you die. To make things worse, human enemies killed by a Zombie will turn into a new Zombie, meaning three-way fights involving Zombies tend to get messy very quickly.
  • ATP Soldats will dodge all your attacks unless you fire fast enough and will fire at you in small squads, easily decimating your Tac-Bar.
  • The G03LM units can only be defeated by knocking their mask off with a melee attack, then firing at their exposed heads until their faces crack and die, which wouldn't be terrible except their melee attacks ignore your Tac-Bar and deplete your health directly, and they're not averse to packing melee weapons. Even the ones with guns can knock you over with their weapons, making you drop whatever you're holding. And that's only the regular ones. The worst are the G03LM Mk4/G04LM variants in red and black armor, which carry miniguns as standard issue; and to get to their heads first, you have to hit them hard enough to crack their mask open, then shoot them, which can take a very long time, since their masks are over twice as tough as that of a normal G03LM.
  • Abominations. They're fast, have plenty of health, completely ignore your TAC (shield) bar, and can start a Cycle of Hurting very easily. The Muto-Lab isn't afraid to throw groups of them at you a lot, and they make up most of that level's difficulty because of this. The best way to defeat them? Pack a Hand Cannon (e.g. the Colt Revolver or Desert Eagle), Punch-Packing Pistol (e.g. the M1911A1 or Glock 20), accurate SMG (e.g. the Thompson or HK MP5), a powerful Assault Rifle (e.g. the AK-74 or FN FAL) or a Shotgun (e.g. the Norinco 97k) — you'll need it.
• Goddamned Bats:
  • Sleepwalkers are relatively weak, lack a Tac-Bar, and tend to not have any weapons. However, they can steal your weapons. They have to be killed three times before they stay dead, and they explode on their third death. This doesn't do too much damage, but does knock you back and make you drop your weapon, which will most likely be picked up by another Sleepwalker due to their tendency to spawn in groups. Fortunately, decapitating them will prevent them from reviving/exploding, so pack a big gun and aim for the head - you'll need it.
  • Riot Guards have extremely long Tac-Bars (even moreso than Soldats), so if you're running a gun build then pick your poison: wasting ammunition on copious amounts of nothing, or lots and lots of frustrating pistol-whipping. Melee weapons drain their Tac-Bar fairly quickly, but running melee in Chapter 1.5 is a very easy way to get killed by Zombies or Abominations. Fortunately, Nexus Bolts kill them instantly (if you can even land a hit because their stupidly fast reflexes allow them to avoid those with dodge rolls), and they tend to spend more time dodging than actually trying to shoot you (which makes them even harder and more annoying to kill, but also makes them less of a threat than Zombies and Abominations).
• Sequel Difficulty Spike: The jump in difficulty from Episode 1 to Episode 1.5 isn't so much a spike as it is a sheer cliff. The enemies are much more dangerous (every single enemy variant encountered is either stupidly annoying or downright lethal aside from the Agents), the levels are much longer, and the number of enemies you have to deal with is borderline unfair at times. Additionally, unlike the Episode 1 levels which have Sanford and Deimos as a team and therefore giving you an extra body or two to draw enemies' attention, Christoff has to go almost the entire chapter solo.
• That One Achievement: "Do What Comes Natural" on the Newgrounds version of the game requires you to beat chapter 1-G without playing as Hank on Hard. While the level is perfectly manageable (if long) with Hank because he has great proficiency with melee weapons and guns alike and a long Tac-Bar, it becomes much more brutal when playing as Sanford or Deimos as they're much less resilient in terms of Tac-Bar and HP, and the level spawns a generous number of heavily-armed Soldats and Engineers that can easily drain their Tac-Bar and kill them in 2 hits.
• That One Boss:
  • The G03LM Mk 2 in the campaign. As mentioned above, you have to go up to him and knock his helmet off with melee attacks, in order to expose his head and allow you to damage him. Problem is, this guy's packing a giant axe that can kill you in two hits on Normal difficulty, which also ignores your Tac-Bar and cannot be blocked. Enjoy.
  • MAG Agent: Gestalt, the boss of the Muto-Lab in Episode 1.5. You have to shoot through his armor in order to actually damage him, but he'll constantly be throwing out punches and body-slams that will disarm you and knock you down, making it very possible for him to put you in a Cycle of Hurting as you try to retrieve your weapon. It doesn't help that Abominations spawn continuously throughout the fight and can easily finish you off after Gestalt knocks you down.
• That One Level: Really, the entirety of Episode 1.5 could count, but the Muto-Lab is where the game really starts getting frustratingly hard. Most of the enemies are Abominations, and there are a lot of them; if you run out of ammo at any point (which is very probable), you're dead. Riot Cops also appear throughout the level just to drain more of your precious ammo, but at least the Abominations target them as much as they would you. The pressure never lets up, and this is capped off with the boss fight against MAG Agent: Gestalt.
• Viewer Name Confusion: The G03LM units are sometimes written as "G0L3M" by fans, reading it as "golem" mostly because of the confusing acronym and Leet Lingo used in the name.

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