Line #6 NightmareFuel/GearsOfWar


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5	[[quoteright:350:https://static.tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pub/images/img_0253.JPG]]
6	[[caption-width-right:350: "Die, hominid!"]]
7
8	!Gears of War
9	* [[TheBerserker Berserkers]]. 7 foot 3 inch-tall armour-plated monstrosities that makes a high-pitched scream as it charges; it's totally blind so it has to sniff you out. And sometimes you have to lure it towards you by shooting it, and watching the bullets bounce off, only for it to shriek towards you once more, and then diving just out of the way so she (yes, she) smashes a door down or something. Then you have to run past her through a tiny gap, while she flails wildly in all directions.
10	** You think the normal Berserkers are bad, wait until you see the [[FromBadToWorse Lambent Berserker]] in ''Gears of War 3''. Picture it: you just saved Anya and Sam from being overrun by Lambent Locusts. As you make your way back to the fort, you see a rather large Lambent stalk appear in front of you. Then, it pops out screaming and instantly killing the COG in front of it before tossing the jeep in your direction. Surely the Hammer of Dawn can kill this thing right? So you make your way back inside the fort and watch it get nuked via satellite, only to find out that it survived. And is ''very'' pissed off.
11	** Oh, and the way you're introduced to them? One of your random AI partners completely loses his shit, says "ScrewThisImOuttaHere" and runs into a convenient hallway, only to get pounced upon by the Berserker and get torn to pieces. All that remains of him when you go into the hallway is a bloody mass of leftover flesh and bones. [[https://youtu.be/aeWejVSDYl0?t=12 The scene in question]] is effective enough that it's one of the rare occasions on which the spilling of way more blood than could possibly fit in a human body is [[AvertedTrope not in any way]] [[{{Narm}} narmful]].
12	*** The Ultimate Edition makes use of the shadows to show us exactly what's happening. You see every detail of the Berserker tearing apart every inch of the soldier's body.
13	*** The doomed soldier's screams will haunt your nightmares for one simple reason, he barely gets ''any.'' One shout when the Berserker finds him, a good deal of muffled screams as it tears him limb from limb, one final cry as it rips his head off and then nothing as it hurls said head back on screen. The whole horrifying affair lasts roughly ''six seconds''. If that thing can reduce a SpaceMarine in PowerArmor to ''paste'' in six seconds ''imagine what it could do to you''.
14	** Even while playing as one in the Beast multiplayer mode, you still can't help but consider the opposing side's perspective as you completely annihilate every Stranded and COG soldier. Oh, and you can break through barricades with complete ease. Bad news for any human in your path.
15	* [[DemonicSpiders The Kryll]]. Swarms of small, flying carnivores that can only be found at night, or at the command of General RAAM. They're essentially the aerial equivalent of piranhas with a nocturnal hunting cycle. When the sun goes down, the Kryll appear, and they're feared for a very good reason - if you so much as stick a toe out into any space that isn't illuminated, these monsters descend from the skies to tear you to shreds. There's nothing you can do except stay in the light to avoid being eviscerated.
16
17	!Gears of War 2
18	* ''Gears 2'' has the [[AbandonedLaboratory New Hope Outpost]]. It can be jarring, to say the least, to be playing ''Gears of War'' and suddenly walk right into something out of ''Franchise/ResidentEvil''. The old, decaying research facility is creepy enough, but then you reach the basement, and there are things in giant stasis tubes, and when you throw a lever to access the facility's computer, it trips some sort of failsafe on the tubes, and they start waking up.
19	-->'''[[AIIsACrapshoot Niles]]:''' "I would begin exiting the facility if I were you."
20	* [[SandWorm The Riftworm]]. A monolithic monster that has been lying dormant beneath the earth undetected for perhaps centuries, and once its awakened leads the Locust's charge to destroy Jacinto by ''sinking entire cities'' as it devours the earth beneath them. As if the Corpsers weren't bad enough, now there's a creature that can do ten times the work in less than half the time, spelling certain doom for the thousands of survivors still seeking refuge in what little remains of human civilization.
21	** And then there's Delta Squad being ''swallowed alive'' by said Riftworm, forced to cut their way out the creature as anyone unfortunate enough to be alive within its bowels are mercilessly ripped to shreds by the parasites residing within.
22	** And how do they kill it? [[{{Gorn}} By cutting out its three beating hearts within,]] narrowly avoiding drowning a horrible death in a river of the creature's blood.
23	* The final boss of ''Gears of War 2'': a Brumak that gets overdosed on Imulsion, and when it mutates its head violently deforms, with a second head bursting from its mouth, which is followed by the creature going berserk and growing tentacles from its body.
24	* It doubles as a TearJerker, but imagine being in Dom's place for a second. His ''entire'' family is dead, and the only part of it that could still be alive is his wife, the only woman in his life he's ''ever'' loved up to that point. She is [[DamselInDistress missing]], possibly [[NeverFoundTheBody dead]], and he's been on a crusade to find her, or at least her fate, for years. And then in ''2,'' he finds out that the Locust have [[POWCamp taken prisoners]], which they [[LeaveNoSurvivors never do]], and via [[DrivenToSuicide Tai]], he finds out ''[[ColdBloodedTorture why.]]'' None of this points to a happy ending, but he keeps up [[HopeSpot hope]] despite that. And then he finds her. His [[DownerEnding wife]] has been lobotomized, malnourished, and tortured into insanity, and she's been like this for ''years.'' The damage is clearly irreparable, and Dom has to MercyKill her. Dom is ''broken'' after this. DespairEventHorizon doesn't even begin to describe what happens to him.
25	* ''Raam's Shadow.'' Right before a child is about to evacuate Ilima City on an APC full of civilians, Tai gives him encouraging words to help him survive the days to come. A cute, hopeful moment that is brutally cut short. Not thirty seconds later he and you are forced to watch as that APC and everyone in it is pulled underground by a Corpser, spelling certain death for said child.
26	* Tai is stated to be virtually unkillable. [[NoOneCouldSurviveThat He is shown to have survived many things that should've straight up killed him]], and [[HoldTheLine he got in a direct chainsaw duel with Skorge to give you time to make it to your objective.]] Turns out, he's not dead, and when you rescue him from the Locust, Marcus tosses him a shotgun. And Tai, who is visibly ''broken'' after only a few hours in Locust custody, [[AteHisGun blows his own head off without so much as a word]]. Which leaves you to question - ''what the fuck did the Locust [[FridgeHorror do to him]] to cause [[DrivenToSuicide that]]? What did they make him see?''
27	** When you see the deep, bloody gashes all across his back, and the hooks embedded into his skin, one can only imagine the living hell Tai must've endured under his torture and the desperation he felt to end his own anguish.
28	** According to the comic that follows him during his capture, they tortured him so thoroughly that ''his soul felt the need to [[ScrewThisImOuttaHere escape from his body]]''. Since his religion considers a body with no soul to be little more than a useless pile of meat, well... there's no point in keeping a useless pile of meat alive, is there?
29	** From the moment you release him from his cell, you can hear Tai ''quivering'' and breathing heavily, especially when he eyes the Gnasher you gave him...It's pretty goddamn terrifying seeing how a MadeOfIron ProudWarriorRaceGuy got reduced to an empty husk that's completely lost the will to live.
30	** What Baird says immediately afterwards ''really'' doesn't help. Additional [[FridgeHorror Fridge Horror]] when you realize that could have happened to Baird, if you didn't get to him in time. Then consider the sheer number of the cages you can find in the docks. ''How many people have the Locust already done this to?''
31	--->'''Baird''': I told you, they're breaking people! I could hear 'em screaming from the docks!
32	** When we see what happens to people captured by the Locust in the long run later on in the same game, it's somewhere between this and a Tearjerker; Dom finally finds his wife Maria, who has been held captive by the Horde for several ''years'' rather than just a few hours. [[BodyHorror She's emaciated to the point of looking like a living skeleton and her entire body is covered with scars]]. That she can't recognize anyone she knew during her life on the surface or even really react to the world around her is partly due to a sort of lobotomy that she received during final processing in the Nexus, but it seems like it might have been an inadvertent act of mercy by that point. Recognizing that there's no real chance of recovery, Dom performs a MercyKill to end what's left of her life.
33
34	!Gears of War 3
35	* The first time you meet [[BodyHorror Lambent Humans]] in ''Gears of War 3''. Marcus and Anya are in the sewers under the town of Mercy, and they spot a woman huddling in a corner, crying for some reason. They get closer, and Marcus asks if the woman's okay, and every viewer knows damn well what's about to happen, but somehow it's still chilling. Marcus reaches out to touch her, and the woman whips around to face him, and in that instant we see that not only is her flesh practically liquefying, but that horrible [[SicklyGreenGlow lambent light]] is shining out of her mouth and the gaping holes where her eyes should be. And she screams as she rushes at you. Anya shouts that the woman isn't human anymore and that Marcus should just open fire, but most players won't need any encouragement to gun that thing down.
36	** The entire lead-up to that moment is more and more unnerving. Marcus, Dom and Company are clueless about what's going on, but to most every viewer, the signs of the ZombieApocalypse will be all too clear: the seemingly abandoned town, the crazed survivor shouting about some kind of disease, the locked doors with giant red X's painted on them, and the fact that those doors are barricaded from the outside.
37	** The Lambent Humans shows up again with the same creepy suspense and tension in ''Aftermath''. Especially unnerving when you hear them whisper ''die!''.
38	*** Sometimes they scream "[[AFateWorseThanDeath Kill me]]!"
39	** The scene in Mercy where they are trying to break though the church. The battlehardened gears have no reaction, but viewers might be unnerved.
40	** Also in Mercy, the scene where they kill two Stranded.
41	* [[SeaMonster Leviathans]], and not just the Lambent ones either. Imagine the shark from ''Film/{{Jaws}}'', but three times bigger with massive teeth. Leviathans also have pretty creepy eyes, either the pure blue ''Vampyroteuthis'' [[http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/wp-content/blogs.dir/470/files/2012/04/i-6ccf90c0455b735133f92f0aa1685bc4-vamp_open.jpg eyes]], or the Lambent Leviathan's GlowingEyesOfDoom.
42	* One word: ''Char''. An entire city completely razed by the Hammer of Dawn, with the ashen remains of thousands of slaughtered civilians frozen in the moments when the beams flash-fried their bodies, many still running, crying or huddling in fear with their loved ones. It's an especially haunting reminder of how truly vicious the war is, and that it was not the Locust but the ''Coalition'' that condemned them to their fates in a horrific ShootTheDog moment.
43	** Even worse, some of said victims are clearly ''children'', with at least a couple seemingly being carried away by their families in a desperate attempt to escape the Hammer of Dawn.
44	* In Anvil Gate, after reaching Anya and Sam but crashing the truck, there's a moment where we see a Locust soldier execute a downed gear. By ripping off his arm and beating him with it. We even get the ''pleasure'' of seeing this up close and personal.
45	* The Berserkers are back, and they're worse than ever now that they're going Lambent. One of them casually shrugs off a goddamn Hammer of Dawn strike and ''leaps over Anvil Gate's walls'', forcing you to engage in a close-range gun battle against an enemy who can ignore bullets with ease and pulverize tanks at a blow. If all that wasn't enough, her heart is visibly exposed and flapping about in her open ribcage, which you have to constantly shoot.
46
47	!Gears of War 4
48	* Gears 4 introduces windflares, a new form of deadly weather. The opening non-prologue cutscene of the game makes for an appropriately-startling introduction to this phenomenon; Kaite blasts a recon drone, Del remarks that there's surprisingly no alarm, only for a low, air-raid-style siren to start blaring in the nearby COG outpost... and then your squadmates notice the massive ''wall'' of shredding wind and rabid lightning rolling in from the left, ''consuming'' the forest in its path and heading for the COG base... and ''you''.
49	-->'''Oscar''': [[OhCrap That's not the security alarm]]!
50	* The Swarm. Seriously, [[https://i.ytimg.com/vi/EQTS2yoWzr8/maxresdefault.jpg this]] is ''NOT'' the face of mercy. Know what it ''is'' the face of? A ''baby''. That thing ''just'' hatched from its pod and it already wants to tear your head off.
51	** Making this all the more horrifying is that they repopulate by kidnapping humans and putting them in pods that turn them to their ranks.
52	** On top of all this there's the horrifying truth behind their origin: they're not a new species. They're The Locust reborn and modified from when the device from Gears of War 3 supposedly killed them.
53	** It is implied that there are dozens of sites where Locust bodies were buried. Given how large the one at the dam is, the insinuation is that there could be hundreds of thousands of Swarm out there.
54	* What happened to Reyna when she is pinned into the hive mind. Her skin is turning grey and her eyes are deformed, and the only way to end it is to cut her free.
55	* Fort Reval is very much part horror movie, given that it is an abandoned castle, you constantly get jump scared, and then you finally meet the Swarm. Not to mention, it is night, and the rain and thunder does not help with the tension.
56
57	!Gears 5
58	* The nightmares Kait has in Gears 5 are downright apocalyptic, and while the Locust and Swarm were bad, in her nightmares, they look demonic. Oh, and then there is Kait's personality change. Kait becomes stubborn, mistrusting of her comrades, and increasingly violent. And the necklace she got from her mom that was her grandmother is a Locust symbol, which along with Myyrah having a clear flashback, gives the strong message MYRRAH was Kait's grandmother. And the final scene of the trailer has Kait holding Del at gunpoint demanding to know what JD told him, regarding his belief Kait could become an enemy.
59	* The Flock, an aerial swarm of leech-like creatures that are the new Kryll. Except not only can they reside in any location regardless of the time of day, but they're incredibly hardy as a group and eat people alive by viscerally tearing them limb from limb[[note]]as shown with a MOST unfortunate Gear[[/note]] much more violently than the razor-blade esque Kryll. Even worse, they can possess technology- which turns Baird's [=DeeBees=] into robotic, zombie-like "Rejects" wherever the Flock appears, some of which killed more people than the Swarm personally managed.
60	** This gets followed up by the introduction of the Stump, the result of Leeches taking over a ''DR-1''. What seems like a civilian evacuation of a play theater quickly falls apart upon seeing this transformed abomination sitting idle before a packed house of corpses it subsequently proliferated with excess lead. A few people tried to escape, and they didn't even make it to the exits. [[MoodWhiplash Then the play stage automatically boots up and plays a rocking theatrical version of the Gears theme as it gets alerted to your presence.]]
61	* You get to briefly control the Swarm not too far into the campaign - via Kait, who is being contained inside of a Snatcher. While she's freaking the hell out amidst the player slaughtering Swarm and Outsider alike, culminating in losing her control over a Warden and turning her uncle Oscar's head into a bloody pulp and a rare GoryDiscretionShot.
62	* Remember the Berserkers? Well, you get to meet the Matriarch, ''the'' original Berserker. And it still not only kills in one solid hit, but is upwards to ''twice'' the size and has projectile attacks. Naturally you have to deal with her in a facility filled to the brim with the damnable Sires once more.
63	** Speaking of the facility, the revelation that the HiveMind of the Locust / Swarm effectively means that to some degree, Myrrah still ''lives'' in Kait's subconscious - and, when she opts to sever herself from it, the whole thing has the capability to [[CameBackWrong reanimate her mother]] just to harness a Queen of some sort for their continued genocidal conquest.
64	** Myrrah's taunts to Kait as she travels through Mount Kedar. The visions get more intense and blood soaked, culminating in Kait bowing before an illusion of the deceased Locust Queen. Kait proceeds to try to stab the illusion (in the exact same place Marcus stabbed the real Myrrah, no less), but Myrrah laughs it off. Carolyn Seymour's terrifying voice work really nails it.
65	* By the end of the campaign, Jinn has become [[DespairEventHorizon so utterly broken]] by the war against the Swarm that she's willing to subject Kait to a horrific FateWorseThanDeath just for the ''possibility'' of humanity gaining ''some'' advantage over them.
66	* The Swarm invasion of New Ephyra in the final Act, enough said. Imagine being a standard Gear trooper and being thrown alongside others in the COG military forces against the Swarm, and they ''just keep on coming no matter how many bullets you fire in their direction''.
67	* In the Hivebuster DLC, Pahanu Island tells you everything you need that this island is not safe for Humans, Locusts or the ''Swarm''. When one of the first things you see in the early game, is the skull of a giant unknown mamallian carnivore, being killed by [[AlwaysaBiggerFish ''something bigger'']], than you know why this island was uninhabited for centuries. Than after being ambushed by the Swarm and being picked up by a King Raven, you see the Swarm themselves is trying to escape from something worse. All of this culminates with the encounter of the Wakaatu, ''THE'' apex predator on a island filled with apex predators; the most dangerous piece of avian to ever grace the Gears of War universe.
68
69	!Gameplay-related
70	* Several of the weapon executions are pretty brutal but the Lancer and Scorcher executions take the cake. To wit,
71	** Lancer: The downed player is kicked over onto their back, then the chainsaw bayonet of the Lancer is thrust onto the downed player's chest at an angle and activated, resulting in blood and small chunks of flesh being thrown into the executioner's face.
72	** Scorcher: The player can jab the Scorcher's nozzle into a downed enemy and shoot fire into their body, which causes flames to erupt from their eyes and mouth. If this isn't enough, there's also screams of pain from the victim as well.
73	*** Honestly, both the COG and Locust characters scream horribly when being hit from an incendiary weapon on their own. And if they die to one? All they can do is let out a long, painful shriek that sounds like they’re in ''pure agony'' while they writhe on the ground at your feet. [[FridgeHorror All that metallic armor must conduct heat like crazy]]...
74	** Gears 4's introduction of the Enforcer results in an execution in which the attacker chokes out the downed player with the gun as they writhe and try to escape, ending as the attacker rips the downed player's head off.

Context NightmareFuel / GearsOfWar