Critical Existence Failure / Video Games

• Averted in the PC Flight Simulator, A-10 Cuba! where your fighter among other things, under fire could have its systems disabled, from engine fires to breach in fuel tanks, to having landing gear and HUD malfunction. Somehow the system that displayed this damage never failed though...
• In Abuse, as you lose health, a heartbeat sound plays that gets faster and louder, although, playing this trope straight, you don't slow down or anything. When you reach critical existence failure, you explode into bloody kibbles, as do enemies.
• Ace Online: There is no penalty for simply having damage, so the trope applies normally. However, while receiving damage, the player's craft loses speed.
• Addams Family Values averts with Fester's main weapon, a lightning attack. The lower your health, the less damage the lightning does and the shorter its range is.
• Throughout the Nintendo Wars series, every unit's base damage and damage reduction from terrain are proportional to health, rounded up to the nearest tenth (displayed as having 1-10 HP, though damage is tracked to the percentage). For units composed of groups, this is shown by having more of its members missing when called to fire or be fired at. For units composed of a single large vehicle, this is shown by having it fire less ordinance in a single volley (presumably because of the structural damage having disabled parts of it).
• The Adventures of Rad Gravity: Rad Gravity explodes when he is killed in space, perhaps due to the Hollywood physics of explosive decompression caused by rupture of his suit.
• In Agarest Senki, there's the skill called Unleash All where at 25% of your HP, you get an immense increase in attack, defense, and accuracy. There's also Parry and Magic Barrier that makes any Physical or Magic attack miss its target.
• In Age of Mythology damaged buildings produce units slower.
• In Age of Empires, damaged buildings catch on fire, but continue working throught the whole match (like units). But if they lose that one hp remaining, the unit dies, and in the case of the older games (original I and II) they literally dissapear into ruins.
• In Airfix Dogfighter, when your health is low, your plane starts being seemingly on fire, but this doesn't hinder your flight or combat abilities in any way. When your health drops to zero, however, you'll immediately plummet down and crash.
• Air Force Delta Strike uses a hit point system with regards to aircraft damage. Though it shows damage when your hitpoints go below a certain percentage, your plane will start smoking, this is only a cosmetic effect. You can take repeated missile shots to the same engine(s) and your plane will keep turning and burning, but if you take one last AA bullet that just barely glances the wingtip...fireball.
• Inverted in American Racing. When your car is damaged, its damage bar depletes and its speed goes down by up to 15%. However, fully draining the bar doesn't result in it exploding or getting destroyed. It can get spun out by other cars or explode when it hits a billboard just once, though.
• Ancient Empires averts this, with units dealing less damage as their health decreases. This gives a distinct advantage to the unit that attacks first in a battle, as it will receive less damage from its opponent's counterattack. Additionally, for units that are represented by multiple people/animals in battle (which applies to most units), taking damage causes some of these to die off. For example, the basic Soldier consists of 5 swordsmen, one of whom dies for each 20 health the Soldier loses.
• Averted and played straight in Apex Legends. Legends who have their health depleted drop into a weakened "downed" state where they can't do anything but limply crawl around and hold up an energy shield to protect themselves; however, if an entire team gets downed and nobody is being auto-revived nor has a gold knockdown shield, this gets played straight and they die on the spot regardless of how wounded they are in said downed state.
• Arcanum: Of Steamworks & Magick Obscura plays this straight but has a small subversion: certain wounds can leave nasty scars, which can reduce your stats (usually Beauty). The scar can be removed magically and this restores the lost Beauty points.
• Played straight and averted in Armored Core: Last Raven. An AC will operate at optimal capacity even at ridiculously low amounts of AP, but that will only happen if the AC in question is only hit in the chest. If it's hit anywhere else, the arms, legs, or head can break off and really hamper your AC's ability to do things.
• In Atomic Robo-Kid, when the player character loses a life, fragments of his sprite fly off in several directions. (Losing the last life in the arcade version instead produces UPL's trademark sprite-trail effect that fills the screen up with colored balls.)
• Played straight in Baldur's Gate, in that the only penalties to taking damage are a penalty to morale checks. A few spells require that the target be below a certain number of hit points, but these are rare.
• Averted with The Banner Saga. Your attack strength is tied directly to your health bar. As a character takes more health damage, they in turn deal less and less damage out. At critical health, a character will be basicaly worthless in combat.
• Baten Kaitos has a variation of this trope. Even when enemy health is reduced to zero, the enemies don't disappear until the player's turn is finished, flinching/spasming/flailing violently after the last hit in the player's combo. The thing is, though, players can end the turn with non-damaging attacks, such as a camera shot or a taunt. This leads to scenes of monsters flinching only mildly after taking punch after punch, and then exploding after having their pictures taken.
• The Battlefield series plays this straight while on foot. You can be down to literally one HP, but you will be able to function perfectly until you fall two feet and die. The vehicles on the other hand play this mostly straight, although damaged vehicles will smoke as they take more damage. If they catch on fire, they will only function for about ten more seconds before exploding.
  • The Project Reality mod averts this; damaged vehicles won't function well and infantry will start to bleed out after taking so much damage. After bleeding out enough or taking a lot of damage, your character's vision will blur and you have about a minute or so before becoming incapacitated.
  • Battlefield 3 averts this with vehicles, as they become disabled before being destroyed; this can happen even at relatively high HP values. Slight aversion for infantry too, as the vision of players at low health becomes black and white, making it harder to see, and that you lose accuracy... Though you still run just as fast with three bullets in the gut.
  • The aversion of this trope continues with vehicles in Battlefield 4, as now, not only do you still get disabled and catch fire after a certain amount of damage (albeit much closer to vehicle destruction than in BF3, around 10-15% armour), but if you take at least 30% damage from a single attack, you suffer a Mobility Hit which makes you move much slower and lose your tail rotor/afterburners (with helicopters/planes) for 5-10 seconds. Or, worse, if you take 40% or more from a single attack, you get a Mobility Kill, which completely stalls your engines for 5-10 seconds.
  • Battlefield 1 takes it even further as vehicles are composed of modules that take damage independent of the main body, meaning that assault players with good aim can disable a tank's engines, treads, and gun ports. Vehicles will still be completely disabled below a certain threshold, though they no longer burn down.
• Averted in Battle Realms, units with very low health slow down to a slouch and can't run.
• Averted in Betrayal at Krondor and its Creator-Driven Successor Betrayal in Antara. In those games, characters have stamina points and health points (Which cannot be reduced until all stamina points are gone). Once a character starts losing health points, their base statistics for all skills drop proportionately to simulate the character being wounded. This means that the lower your HP gets in a fight, the less likely that you will be able to defeat your opponents unless you take some action to treat your injuries.
• Blade Runner plays this straight. There is no noticeable or lasting damage from gunshots, but take too many hits in one sitting and you'll drop like a sack of potatoes.
• Justified in Bloodborne: Your regeneration powers work by expending eldritch blood coursing through your body, which you can revitalize by bathing in your enemies' blood^note only while you have HP scratch damage that hasn't been made permanent or by injecting yourself with plasma syringes. You can recover from practically anything in seconds, but if your HP reaches 0, you instantly die from severe blood loss.
• Blue Max also avoids this. Unlike the usual game of its type from its era, a direct hit would—rather than simply blowing you up—instead damage your gun or controls, or cause fuel to leak.
• Borderlands 2 averts the trope for both the player and enemies. Most enemies will limp and attack slower when their health is low. Players can keep fighting, even at one hit point, until they lose all their health and go into "Fight For Your Life" (aka bleeding out) mode where they can no longer use special abilities or grenades, and all weapons will fire and reload slower than normal.
  • The Borderlands series has a weird relationship with this trope. Players have both a shield and a health bar, meaning they basically have two health limits, one which always regenerates (shields) and one which only regenerates with specific skills or setups (health). When being shot and your shield is active, your character doesn't grunt or respond which makes perfect sense since they're basically science fiction styled energy shields that stop bullets, explosions, and cars, but when you run out then you start taking health damage and despite the rabid grunting from the character who's being shot, taking several dozens of bullets to the torso doesn't down you until you run out of HP, and even then your character forgets they were dying and heals somewhat by killing someone while they're dying.
• Averted in Bushido Blade. Only a deep wound to the head or torso will kill you. A deep wound to a limb will disable it; shallow wounds anywhere will only slow you down no matter how many you take (although it gets wonky after a while, because you start looking overcranked rather than staggered with pain and bloodloss).
• Exaggerated in Cabal and its followup Blood Bros. Aside from each enemy's individual health, there is also an Enemy Power meter that depletes as enemies, objects, and buildings are destroyed. Once that meter depletes, everything remaining onscreen that's destructible immediately dies.
• Averted in Call of Cthulhu: Dark Corners of the Earth. Specific injury to body parts needs specific treatment, and does have effect on your character.
• The Call of Duty franchise plays this trope amazingly straight. Players can take bullets and explosives every which way and still run about without penalty. However, if you so much as tap them when they're at their limit they keel over. This gets especially ridiculous with the combination of Regenerating Health and Arbitrary Gun Power, where a man over the course of 45 seconds can take ten shots from a 7.62mm light machine gun or even a .50 BMG sniper rifle to the stomach and be perfectly fine afterwards, but a light smack to the ankle from a thrown knife or tomahawk will drop them like a sack of potatoes.
• Averted in the Carmageddon series, where the damage system indicates damage on different parts of the car - the chassis, engine, drive shaft etc. A critical level of damage to the engine would cause the car to explode, while damage on the drive shaft would cause the vehicle to simply stall. At the same time the vehicle gets visibly and functionally shaken up starting with the bodywork and windows, and with the help of only a few land-mines it will become so mangled up the only direction you will be able to drive in will be a circle. How a vehicle takes damage also depends on the shape of the car. A long and narrow vehicle like a drag racer is less likely to survive a high speed head on collision as the damage would directly transfer along the body to the engine. It doesn't help that naturally the drag-racer in the game has the highest acceleration stat and even the slightest mistake will cause its front wheels to lift off the ground rendering it uncontrollable. Also if pushed into a sharp edge like the corner of a building an opponent's vehicle can be split in half.
• Particularly humorous in later 2D Castlevania games, which generally have a 0 HP character reduced to a spray of blood, even if they just lost their last 2 HP to a flying femur to the forehead. Although such an attack will cause Shanoa to simply drop dead — if she's standing on the ground at the time.
• In Castlevania: Aria of Sorrow, the Rubicant (Lubicant in-game due to a silly translation error) soul increases your stats the fewer hit points you have. One of the best ways to speed through the Boss Rush mode is to deplete HP to 1 and equip the soul, thus doing ridiculous amounts of damage.
• In Castlevania: Order of Ecclesia, the Arma Custos back glyph fuels your STR stat with Cerberus, increasing it as you lose HP (as long as the glyph is active, of course). At around 1 HP, you gain a STR boost equal to your maximum non-boosted STR plus one. Oh, and you can activate the Dominus Agony back glyph to drain your HP, or you can use some items. Also, the Ring of the Devil increases status as HP lowers, and the Ring of Death grants you insane power in return for being reduced to a One-Hit-Point Wonder.
• Averted in Cataclysm. Injured body parts can be used just fine as long as they have one health point left. However, taking hits increases your character's pain, which reduces your character's movement speed and stats - bad news in a zombie game where one of the advantages the player has over the hordes is that living humans are faster. Extended combat, running into zombies with high-pain attacks, or a few unlucky hits from a basic zombie can lead to a downward spiral where your character becomes too injured to fight and is overwhelmed.
• While all RPGs with Hit Points feature this, Chrono Trigger has a particularly amusing example with a certain enemy, the Nu, who only has two moves: one which reduces a character's HP to One, and one which does exactly 1 HP damage. Basically, the RPG equivalent of almost beating you to death and then killing you with a finger poke.
  • Even more hilarious, there's actually two different versions of that enemy (the Nu). The first has the "all but 1 HP" attack, the second has the "only 1 HP" attack. For shits and giggles, you only encounter the "only 1 HP" version with the "all but 1 HP" version twice. But you encounter the "all but 1 HP" version many, many more times throughout the game, essentially making it an impossible to lose battle.
• The Chzo Mythos game Trilby's Notes, by Yahtzee Croshaw, gives a nod to this at the end when the Big Bad tells a mortally wounded Trilby that he won't die from a mere stab wound because "Men like [Trilby] live by pure will."
  • Double spoiler: The Big Bad's goading is a hint to the now incapacitated player, who will invariably try every command he can think of to foil the plot. Turns out, all you can do (and all you have to do) is make the decision to "die".
• In The Citadel, killing an enemy results in them exploding into chunks of gore and bio-mechanical parts, and this also applies to the player as well should their Blood Meter (health) reach 0.
• In City of Heroes, taking damage does not impair your character's ability to fight at all. In fact, one of the previous incarnations of the Blaster archetype's inherent ability Defiance, a Blaster would actually do more damage the closer they were to being defeated. The game is also hard-coded with a function that prevents an uninjured character from being one-shotted; the maximum amount of damage a player can take is one point less than their total hit points. You can fall from the maximum height, or take the biggest hit from the most powerful NPC in the game, and you'll be left with one hit point. However, as soon as you take even a single point of damage, you're no longer protected from going down from a single massive hit. This can create some interesting accidental vulnerabilities, as it is possible to take damage running down stairs or a ramp too fast, or even (on occasion) running off a curb onto the street.
• Civilization (as well as Creator-Driven Successor Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri) has a peculiar history with this trope. Civilization 1-3 and SMAC justifiably play it straight in that units with reduced health continue to have the same attack and defense values: hit points are independent of attack/defense value. However, because each unit typically represents at least a division, it makes sense that it would still have the same attack/defense values: the imaginary soldiers on the field are just as healthy, and the difficulty that a half-strength division (for instance) would have fighting is adequately represented by the loss of hit points. However, Civilization IV ran into some serious problems when it combined the previously-independent attack, defense, and hit point systems into a single system of "strength." This implementation required various patches: because "strength" was reduced by taking damage during battle, the developers found it difficult to decide whether to assume that the strength used in determining battle probabilities was the nominal (full) strength of the unit (deemed unrealistic) or the current strength (deemed too disadvantageous to the one with the far-more-weakened unit, and besides, it led to a resurgence of Spearmen Defeating Tanks). In the end, the developers split the difference. It also led to "spearmen defeats tank" becoming much more common, as both hit points and combat strength were reduced together, late game units would get closer and closer to early game strength, and could often be defeated by 2-3 early game units.
  • Civilization V continues with the Civ IV 'strength' mechanic, except bringing hit points back (Advance Wars style). The Japanese national bonus is specifically to use pre-IV mechanics: their units do not become weaker as they lose Hit Points.
• In Clock Tower, in the third game, Alyssa's Health and Panic are merged into one stat. This means that anything from a vase falling over to having her face smashed in by an 8 foot man with a sledgehammer to tripping over to having her spine snapped by a vengeful spirit will raise it. None of this has any effect on her at all, until she starts panicking, in which she becomes a One-Hit-Point Wonder. Consider the game's tone and theme, this makes the whole thing more ridiculous. Averted in the other games, in which losing your health gradually makes you more likely to injure yourself further.
• Clonk plays this completely straight. Animals and clonks will go from fully-functional to corpse in a blink, buildings and vehicles will catch fire.
• Command & Conquer actually averts this with most units, which both move and fire slower the more damaged they are. It's Zig-Zagged with buildings, however. Power plants do provide less power as their health is depleted, but defensive and production structures always operate at full efficiency.
  • Command & Conquer: Tiberian Sun also has the Nod Cyborgs, who were able to lose their legs when taking enough damage. Oddly enough, they can regenerate back to full health in tiberium fields (since they are mutants) without regaining them.
• Company of Heroes also averts this with their infantry squads like World in Conflict, but also can have certain areas of vehicles get damaged, such as the main gun being disabled, the gunner getting killed, etc., disabling that specific area on account of the damage to that area. However, a vehicle with a engine explicitly stated to be destroyed can still move, though a very slow pace, and it is still possible for the vehicle to be damaged in a way in which it has had no functions disabled, meaning Critical Existence Failure is in full effect when it goes down. It's rather impossible to fully avoid such a thing happening though, and it doesn't happen very often on its own, especially since the game encourages flanking the back of armoured vehicles.
• Averted in COPS 2170: The Power of Law where injuries will reduce the accuracy of the injured unit, hindering their ability to return fire at range.
• In Crimson Skies, your plane's "health" is split into 4 parts (engine, cockpit, and both wings), and the plane shows damage as it took hit (the engine sputters, your wings smoke). The parts being Color-Coded for Your Convenience, if all parts of the plane turn red (critical damage) and you keep taking hits, you'll be shot down - but this only applies if all of your parts are critically damaged. As long as you have one part that isn't red, you can keep flying just fine.
• Played straight in the Crusader games by Origin, where it states right in the manual under the description of your health bar, "As a Silencer he can continue at peak efficiency up to the point of collapse and death." You're just that badass.
• Crysis averts this with vehicles; a number of vehicles can have their windows shot out and through, and may have means of movement which can be specifically damaged and hampered.
  • Averted with a fan-made "Ultra Realism" Mod. Take a bullet in the leg? You will limp on that leg. Take one to the other leg? You now slow to a literal crawl. Shot in the arm? Reduced accuracy. Low health? Reduced vision, accuracy, mobility... You're fucked.
• Mythic's MMORPGs Dark Age of Camelot and Warhammer Online: Age of Reckoning both have you start to limp once your health gets to critical, hampering any chance of fleeing...
• Dark Souls II subverts this trope in a way. While you don't lose any fighting ability, even at 1 hp remaining, every time you die and resurrect you lose a percent of your maximum hp, up to a cap of 50% (and also become more and more visibly decayed). So while you still suddenly keel over at that last hp, your defensive capabilities slowly decline with each failure unless you use an uncommon item to restore your "humanity", which brings the cap back up to 100%.
• In Darkest Dungeon, characters will be fine as long as they stay above 0 HP. If their health is completely depleted, they won't collapse; instead, they will gain the "Death's Door" status, which severely debuffs them. Being hit while in Death's Door has a chance of killing the character for real. Recovering even just 1 HP replaces Death's Door with "Death's Door Recovery", which is less severe but lasts for the rest of the level regardless of HP.
• Dawn of War subverts this; not surprising given it's a Relic creations. As your squads get hit, the individual troopers die, and they can take their heavy weapons with them, meaning you need to retrain them and requisition more heavy weapons. On the other hand, up until they die, they will still fight at full power, and neither buildings nor vehicles lose power as they get hit.
• In Valve's Day of Defeat: Source, you can fall exactly with no penalties whatsoever. If you fall 1 extra inch,you suffer an abrupt death.
• Zigzagged in Dead In Vinland. The more damage characters have taken to their Multiple Life Bars, the more severe a penalty they suffer to tasks such as harvesting fruit, hunting, and crafting; this penalty also applies to skill checks during dialogue and exploration scenes. However, it oddly doesn't affect combat at all, though many of the Status Effects do.
• Dead Space to a degree. It doesn't affect your speed too much but a game like this warrants not moving too quickly anyway.
  • In the First game there is a rare bug at the start of the game where your Health May not fill when Kendra does her RIG Sync for the Repair Crew. The end result being after the cutscene finishes Isaac is amusingly being flung to the ground and dies and having the game start over since you haven't reached a proper save yet.
• Dwarves in Deep Rock Galactic can run around in heavy armor, wielding big guns, and carry heavy objects without any hinderance even if their health is at a sliver. Once that last sliver is gone from even the lightest of attacks, that dwarf will collapse and can't move until they're revived by a fellow dwarf. Enemies will also swarm and attack you no matter how hurt they are until that last bit of health is depleted and they promptly ragdoll upon death.
• Defend Your Castle:
  • The castle shows no visible damage until its health bar is drained, at which point you cut to a black game over screen.
  • Giant Mooks only stumble slightly and then keep running when you click on them, but do it a few more times and they collapse into a puddle of blood.
• Deltarune downplays this. Party members are able to keep on fighting until they are knocked out, going into negative HP. That character then spends their turns healing back up to positive health, with more regeneration needed for greater amounts of negative health. Meanwhile, enemies will fight at full strength until either their mercy meter is filled or their health bar is depleted.
• In Descent, once your shields are down, one tiny ding causes your ship to explode. That includes being hit by a flare (which always does 1 damage) or running into a wall while moving too fast. One of the most anoying ways to die is to be bumped by the Guidebot when shields are low.
• Averted in Desert Assault, where your character moves more slowly when low on health. In a multiplayer session, you can be carried around by a teammate but can do nothing but shoot
• Desert Strike plays this straight with your chopper's hitpoints. It can take massive damage from all manner of SAMs, rockets and AA Guns and keep on fighting, but one last stray bullet from a rifle and you instantly crash to the ground in a big fireball.
• Deus Ex averts the trope. You can be damaged in the arms, head, legs, and chest. Enough head and chest damage kills you, arm damage affects accuracy which prevents you from using weapons or equipment that require both arms, and leg damage slows you. If both of your legs are reduced to black, you have to crawl, although you are strangely in no danger of bleeding to death. If you've taken enough damage to lose both legs though, you're probably gonna be killed soon anyway.
  • The lack of risk of bleeding to death could easily be explained with a bit of handwavium to which the player is exposed to early on. JC Denton, like his brother Paul, is one of about three people possessing nano-augmentations, which would logically be engineered to keep the user alive to the best extent possible. Since one of the installable augmentations is one that replenishes health (at the cost of gradual consumption of the player's finite bioelectrical energy), this theory gains more weight. It's not a huge stretch to assume that even the most basic level of augmentations is made to eject foreign bodies and seal wounds, even if bloodloss could only be catered for by a more specific augmentation.
  • The implementation is not quite ... perfect, which (given enough effort) can lead to such wonders as a head hopping around without the rest of the body.
  • A slightly disturbing example of this being played straight is how post-incapacitation gibbing works. Hack up an unconscious person and they'll slowly darken, but still be considered alive before suddenly hitting the threshold where they explode into dogfood. There is no way to go from "unconscious" to "dead but intact".
    • This is averted in the sequel. Beating on unconscious bodies will kill them. A bug in the game engine for Deus Ex can kill bodies that have a door close on them. This can be annoying in the DXE mission from The Nameless Mod. You cannot kill anyone in the mission, and if you knock a guard out in a doorway while the door closes on them, it kills them and causes you to fail the mission.
• Justified in Disco Elysium. Your player character is an Addled Addict coming down off a three-day bender, and one of the many results of his alcohol addiction is that it has made him both mentally unstable and a massive heart attack risk. Therefore, anything that can cause him pain (either physical, in the case of Health damage, or mental, in the case of Morale damage) can kill him instantly or drive him to resign from the force in despair, respectively. These range from obvious risks like getting shot with a gun to less obvious ones like turning on the light with a hangover, sitting in an uncomfortable chair, reading a book so boring it causes both physical and mental pain, or getting insulted by children.
• In Die by the Sword, you won't lose efficiency from damage, but can lose your limbs before going. Losing a shield arm could be bad, losing a weapon arm is worse. Still, the legs don't seem to affect you until you lose both of them.
• Lower-level mooks in the Doom series explode into gory chunks if their HP goes a certain amount below zero from a single hit, which means something as casual as a punch can trigger it if you have a berserk pack. In Doom³, their corpses quickly disintegrate and disappear.
  • In the PSX version of Doom, the Doomguy's head explodes when he is killed with explosives or his health goes a certain amount below zero.
• Dragon Age:
  • Dragon Age: Origins plays the trope mostly straight. So long as your characters have at least 1 HP left, they fight on without penalty, and even if they are taken out, they get right back up once the fight's over. However, those that have recovered from a KO retain injuries that give penalties to the character's stats until they're treated.
  • Dragon Age II has this in spades, with enemies often exploding in a shower of Ludicrous Gibs even if plugged by an arrow for their last hit points...
• Averted in one of the Dragon Ball GT licensed game Dragon Ball GT: Final Bout. The characters will have different stances and victory quotes depending on how much damage they had taken. Characters with wounded/low HP tend to get tired more often than those in fine condition. One notable example is Son Gohan (Ultimate form), as he will mock his opponent for "being too slow" if he wins with HP above 80%, be surprised by his own increased power if he wins with moderate HP, and be tired but glad that he managed to grab a victory if he wins with wounded/low HP condition.
• Drakengard. Sometimes the life meter serves other purposes under specific circumstances. Whenever a party member is summoned to take your place, it instead becomes a time meter. When fighting the final boss it seems to just be insane.
• Averted in Drop Team, which has 3D armor maps (which allows objects to have more armour on the front than on the back, for instance), and a complete physics model especially for modelling what happens when that armor gets penetrated. Munitions can overpenetrate (fly in one side, and out the other... oops! ), damage subsystems, light an AFV on fire, or cause a catastrophic explosion on the first hit; all depending on the exact munition type, flight distance, angle of impact on armor, etc.
• One of the loading screens from Duels of the Planeswalkers says "Having one life is fine… as long as your opponent has zero!"
• Averted in Dwarf Fortress, as every creature works off a surprisingly complex wound-handling system, in that every hit does a certain amount of damage to a certain part of the body. Many of the kills are done with blood loss, usually either from severed limbs or hacked out chunks. This means that even if the creature is comparatively healthy, it could take a random gash and die rather slowly, or that a creature missing most of its limbs, eyes, and internal organs can still take a few hits if it hadn't bled out already. Not to mention (most) creatures feel pain, and thus a single wound in the right spot (like a broken leg) can effectively cripple a creature and make it almost completely defenseless in a fight. Played straight in an odd way with temperature and materials, however, with the most visible example being ice. Perfect zero Celsius? The ice is as solid as ever, not an ounce of liquid water to be seen. Just one degree more? It all melts instantly (in game time, your computer might choke on it for a minute or so), letting everything on top collapse into the water, sink and drown. One degree back down? All the water freezes just as instantly, encasing everything and everyone drowning or swimming normally (like the fish) in an insta-kill icy tomb.
• Downplayed in Dystopia, where getting hurt does not affect you performance at all until you lose all your armor. At that point, any damage results in significant knockback.
• The Earthworm Jim games justified this by establishing that Jim himself never takes any damage, but his suit does, and his health is represented by how much energy his suit has (which goes all the way up to 200%). If the suit runs out of energy, it suddenly malfunctions and fries Jim as he sits inside it, even though the suit itself is virtually indestructible. The second game's "life lost" screen has the suit short out and violently eject Jim from it, leaving him laying helpless on the ground. (He is a worm.)
• Edge of Eternity (a deliberately traditional RPG) plays it straight: in the absence of status effects, party members and enemies will both be fully effective as long as their HP are above zero.
• The Elder Scrolls series play this straight, although Skyrim averts it by rendering certain enemies (like humanoid races, Draugr, trolls, giants and the like) immobile and kneeling on the ground when low on health, which makes them regain hit points faster. Dragons are more affected, as when 2/3 of their health are removed, they can no longer fly, leaving them vulnerable on the ground.
• Both used and averted in Empire at War and its expansion. Infantry are always in squads or platoons, and lose members as damage is taken, reducing firepower. Fighter and bomber squadrons also do this. Frigates, Space Stations, and Cruisers/Star Destroyers also have various bits and pieces of them that have to be destroyed individually before the rest of the ship is destroyed. Destroying the engines, for example, slows the ship and prevents it from Hyperspacing away if it tries to retreat, destroying the shield generator permanently disables shields, and so on. Corvettes, land vehicles, and most buildings play this straight, however.
  • Also, the Death Star cannot be destroyed (or even targeted) by conventional means. The only to destroy it is to win the space battle with the Rebels with the Red Squadron (Rogue Squadron in the expansion) still intact. Then the Death Star automatically experiences Critical Existence Failure.
  • Standard ship-to-ship (not that kind) tactics usually involve wings of bombers using shield-penetrating torpedoes to take out the large ships' shield generators. This can't be done with the Mon Calamari cruisers, as the shield generator simply doesn't appear as a hardpoint, which is used to balance is out the superior firepower of the Star Destroyers. However, Admiral Akhbar's flagship Home One does have a destroyable shield generator.
• Averted in EndWar, where units are generally groups of four (four squads in the case of engineers and riflemen). After shields are lost, individual vehicles/squads begin to take damage and explode/die, causing the unit to decline in effectiveness. When the unit has lost 3/4 of its vehicles/squads, it will send up a flare, recharge its shields, stop fighting and call for evacuation. As keeping your men alive for the next mission is a very, very important part of the game, it's generally a good idea to try to cover their evacuation.
• Subversion in Escape Velocity. Ships work just fine no matter how much hull integrity they have left ... until they hit either 1/3 or 1/10 max armor (depending on the ship), at which point the ship is disabled and everything stops working at once.
• Etrian Odyssey: Hexers have a spell called Revenge. The lower their HP, the stronger it becomes, and a high HP hexer with a single digit of health and a boosted up agility stat can blow through everything. Justified in that it's Blood Magic.
• Played straight in EVE Online. You can have no shields, armour, only 1 hp in hull and a ship with an impressive fire trailing out the back but as long as you have that 1hp you're still useful. Averted and played straight with 'overheating' that slowly damages a module for an extra boost in effectiveness. The module is still fully effective until it loses all of its HP, though on the ship as a whole you only lose that module and whatever advantage it was giving you. According to the manual, your last structure hit point going represents the point where your volatile warp engine loses power and promptly implodes, taking the rest of the ship with it.
• Get knocked down to less than about 15% health in The Evil Within will cause you to start to slouch and be unable to sprint, making you much more likely to be killed. Holding still for a few seconds will bring you back to good standing, though. If you take more damage than that, it will kill you outright.
• In Fairune, the protagonist Hope Girl doesn't really react to taking damage beyond possibly some knockback when struck back from a foe too strong to defeat, but goes from standing to gravestone in about half a second when her health is depleted.
• Averted in the Fallout series of RPGs. One can target various locations on the enemy's body (such as the eyes and the groin), and crippling one of these areas has a direct and notable impact on gameplay. NPCs are also capable of getting scared and running away. Their deaths are still incredibly violent, though.
  • The Bloody Mess trait can be seen as a straight example of this trope, as it ensures everyone around you dies in the most gory way possible (technically speaking, every single death executes the animation for death by extreme overkill via that source). You know, just for fun. It's especially applicable in the more recent releases. Your enemy is about to die, you shoot them in the shoulder with a pistol or hit them in the face with a shaving blade and their limbs/head will violently explode into giblets (potentially the torso as well for absolute giblets). This is a great way to loot their bodies from even an eyeball if they're in inaccessible areas but bad if you have a head collection bounty.
    • The newer games mostly avert this trope, but it still takes a ridiculous amount of punishment to have a tangible affect. Your pip-boy has a screen that displays the condition of your limbs. If one limb’s percentage drops to zero, it is crippled, and has an affect on gameplay. Break your legs by misjudging the distance from the top of a tall rock to the ground? You move slower. Take too many bullets to the shoulder? Your weapon sway is dramatically increased. Get bonked in the head by a super mutant wielding a wooden board? Your screen goes blurry.
  • In Fallout 2 and Fallout Tactics there is a Perk called Adrenaline Rush which increases your Strength by 1 when you drop below 50% of your max hit points.
  • In Fallout 3 there is a Perk called Nerd Rage. When your health drops below 20%, your Strength is raised to 10, and your Damage Resistance increases by 50% (to a maximum of 85%).
  • By Fallout: New Vegas you can be (deep breath) on your last hit point, absorbed 999 rads of radation, starving, massively dehydrated, have all five body sections crippled, concussed, suffering from withdrawal symptoms from several different drugs and be really tired without dying, for a few minutes at least.
• Fighting Force has your character doing just fine until that last hitpoint goes away.
• The majority of Final Fantasy games has characters kneeling down if their HP is low.
  • Actually worked into the plot and played for tragedy in Final Fantasy V. When he confronts Exdeath, Galuf refuses to stop fighting, even at 0 HP — and since you can't go below 0 HP, he is more or less invincible. Once he drives the Big Bad back, the fact that he's taken several apocalyptically powerful spells to the face suddenly catches up to him, and he dies; until he collapses, however, he is able to fight at full capacity.
  • Both played straight and inverted in Final Fantasy X - your party's effectiveness doesn't decrease with damage, but some armours have "SOS" abilities - abilities that only come into effect if you are in a "critical" state (i.e. less than 50% HP)
  • Played straight in Final Fantasy XI: During Wings of the Goddess, turns out Atomos couldn't swallow both futures without suffering one. It seems it bit off more than he could chew.
  • In Final Fantasy XIV your character will look no worse for wear until their HP hits zero where they will promptly collapse.
  • Averted in Final Fantasy XV, as Noctis and co. will begin limping if they reach critical damage levels.
• The Fire Emblem franchise plays this trope straight the majority of the time; the rest have it like this section: When at a low enough level of health, specific skills, if possessed, will come into play, with them being a variety of abilities: increased evasion, increased critical hit ratio, or being able to attack first no matter what, in one case. The only pking where this could come close to being averted is in FE4's Chapter 5, with a heavily injured unit possessing low in-game stats to show how injured he is. This trope is also somewhat averted in Fire Emblem Heroes, as some skills won't activate should the unit's HP be too low.
• Averted in the Forza Motorsport series, where cars take realistic damage that decreases performance.
• FreeSpace:
  • While your Hull strength has no direct bearing on the capabilities of your ship, by the time it gets dangerously low chances are you're going to have lost a subsystem. And individual subsystems do gradually degrade as they're damaged (the more damage your Weapons system takes, for example, the greater the odds are of a weapon failing to fire when you pull the trigger). All systems can be repaired automatically from anything down to 1%, but once it hits 0 it's gone until the end of the mission. Assuming you can still finish the mission in that state.
  • In the first game, this applies to capital ships: they will remain fully functional and intact no matter how low their hull integrity falls, but once it hits zero, the entire thing will explode spectacularly, even if it was a fighter-equipped pea shooter grazing an antenna that dealt the finishing blow. The second game tries to mitigate this: once their hull integrity hits 10%, capital ships become immune to all weapons that are not explicitly designed to destroy a very large ship (bombs, kamikaze attacks, giant energy beams, asteroid impacts, etc).
• Outside of the icons, the Boyfriend from Friday Night Funkin' will appear okay as ever, even at low health. Once his health gets depleted, however, he does suffer damage in the form of having his skeleton cracked by blue balls.
• Averted in the Front Mission series (with the exception of Front Mission: Gun Hazard): damage can fall on one of four parts of the unit—left arm, right arm, legs, and body—each with its own hitpoints. Losing an arm will remove your ability to use weapons or items on that arm, losing your legs reduces you to one square movement per turn (Your legs aren't truly destroyed, but ripped to skeletal structure) and loss of the body itself kills the unit. However until a part is destroyed it works perfectly. Also, simpler units like tanks and attack choppers have only one "body part.
• Averted in the original F-Zero. If your racer has less than 1/3 of its HP left, it starts going more slowly.
• Gears of War plays this incredibly straight with its health system, in which you accumulate detail to a center red skull-and-gear icon, and at critical you will sometimes explode in showers of abrupt gore. You can also regenerate damage over time. Before you get to critical, however, you can take ten thousand rifle bullets, so long as you space it out so you have time to regenerate.
  • However, after reaching that critical state, you will frequently go into a 'downed' state if not gibbed or headshotted, similar to the Dungeons And Dragons' 3rd edition '0 hp' state, as your character is not yet dead at that point, but essentially incapacitated and will bleed to death without aid.
  • In Gears of War 2, some will drop dead instantly, others will drop to the dirt and start crawling away or toward friendlies—who can and will revive them back to full HP.
• Averted in The Getaway. Cars that take enough damage will have handling and performance problems, and taking too much damage will cause your character to start limping.
• In God Eater series, God Eaters won't slow down at all even at brink of incapacitation, with some skills even makes them stronger at lower health. Downplayed by the Aragamis however, as they become visibly damaged over time during battle, and show signs that they are about to go down.
• In The Godfather: The Game, you as Aldo Trapani can still run around gunning down enemy gangsters and doing other stuff when your health is low enough to be in the red.
• Goldeneye 007: Played with. On one hand, people will often react to getting shot. Weaker enemies on most difficulty levels will respond to locational damage: if they get shot in the arm or leg, they may stop what they are doing and clutch at the affected area for a bit. After a few seconds however, they would return to normal, without any indication that they were ever injured other than a bloodstain. This is almost completely played straight with Elite Mooks and other characters with absurdly high hitpoints, who can take up to several dozen bullets while barely flinching. In addition, because of how explosions work in the game,^note essentially a localized fireball emitting pulses of damage over a few seconds a sufficiently-durable enemy standing at the edge of a fireball may show no signs of taking any damage — until their HP count hits 0, at which point they may suddenly go flying.
• In Grand Theft Auto IV, due to a better damage modeling system than its predecessors, it is possible for the body of the car to come into contact with the wheels (hampering performance) or for the axles to become bent (ditto). Also, cars with a damaged engine become slower (more noticeable by entering a health cheat, which also repairs the car, in a very damaged car) and might take more time to start, even getting to the point of not starting anymore, but without exploding.
  • GTA IV is also the first game in the series where a car, any car, regardless of condition, won't explode just because it is flipped over. Apparently a collapsed roof meant self destruct in the older games.
  • And, at least in Grand Theft Auto: Vice City, you can die from tripping on the curb if your health is low enough.
  • In some versions of Grand Theft Auto III, there's a glitch where it's possible to die from walking on the sidewalk.
  • Cops and pedestrians usually won't die unless they are shot in the head or repeatedly beaten/shot after they lose all their health. They will remain unconscious on the ground for a while until the paramedics arrive or they get up and limp away.
  • It applies to your character too. Even if you had just raided a mob hideout alone, got caught in a crossfire against about 20-30 enemies and your health meter is now flashing red after one too many shots, you can still run around and hang on to things like it was nothing.
  • In Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas, you can extend your HP so high, that you can fall from any height (without a using parachute) and survive perfectly intact, but with only 1% of your HP left. Get punched by an angry pedestrian afterwards, and you're dead.
  • Sadly, Grand Theft Auto V plays it almost entirely straight. A fair amount of the realism that was added in Grand Theft Auto IV was dummied out as of V, because Reality Is Unrealistic and GTA IV and its multiplayer was often negatively reviewed on that basis. Peds will almost never be successfully revived by paramedics and cars can no longer suffer critical deformations that render them completely undriveable until they explode. Most unrealistic of all is the ability to roll a car over from inside, even if it has landed on its roof, just by holding a directional button; only cars that are wedged between scenery objects can't be uprighted through magical physics.
• Gratuitous Space Battles averts this due to a ship's health bar being composed of the combined HP of its individual modules. As such, a ship's components will fail as it takes damage, causing it to lose its weapons and engines over time before the whole thing explodes, and it's not uncommon to see frigates and fighters with nearly full HP fleeing from battle because all their weapon systems were destroyed. This also applies to armor, as the ship's armor resistance (which allows the ship to No-Sell hits from weapons with insufficient armor penetration, barring lucky shots) is dependent on the actual amount of armor the ship has remaining; once the armor starts being worn down, it gradually loses the ability to block weapons that it could at full integrity.
• GreedFall doesn't even show injuries or any effects to the character models unless it's part of the game's narrative. It doesn't effect your companions AI either, so long as there's some red in their health bar, they'll keep fighting. Although, they will let you know they need healing, regardless of whether or not De Sardet can actually heal them.
• The Gundam game Crossfire averts this. When you get hit, a diagram of your MS in the corner changes color, e.g when you get hit in the arm, it changes from Blue-Green-Orange-Red-Flashin-Destroyed. The effects are quite noticable. For example, if your head is destoryed, you can't use your radar. If your leg is destoryed, you limp or die if both legs are gone. Arms are very important as you lose your weapon and even resort to kicking if both are destroyed. If your main body gets hit, you die.
• Guns of Icarus: If the health meter for either the zeppelin or the rigging reaches zero, the Icarus will be destroyed, but aside from some fire graphics, there won't be any effect until then.
• Half-Life: You can leap off cliffs, walk through corrosive agents, withstand nuclear fire, and take enough bullets that the lead alone should have rendered you immobile, but you can run around with 1hp left without penalty. Should you then walk through a puddle of too-hot coffee, you die a horrible death. Another example is that anybody who dies from crushing damage explodes spectacularly, even if the "crushing damage" is from a ceiling dropping to the point where even hunching slightly would have rendered it a non-issue.
  • Justified with Gordon's HEV suit, which administers morphine if he takes critical damage and allows him to keep going. The developers went the extra mile by having the morphine only apply between 30 minute intervals so that Gordon can't overdose on it by constantly taking damage.
  • A clearer example might be that if a living entity and a dead entity are equally distant from an explosion, then the living one will be flung backwards injured but completely intact, while the dead one will be gibbed.
    • This is even more jarring with Half-Life 2's ragdoll physics: if a rebel is being fired at by a gunship's high-powered machine gun, they will simply absorb the bullets until their health hits 0, at which point they die and are suddenly sent flying several dozen feet. This was fixed in Team Fortress 2, where things like turrets, explosives, and the Heavy's minigun among others all have a great deal of force and will punt around living players about the same as they will corpses and the occasional physics objects.
  • One example which isn't really as extreme but nonetheless especially noticeable would be the Hunters from Half-Life 2 Episode Two, because their health is such that they have exactly enough to just barely survive being hit by an RPG. Once they are hit by one, they can be killed by a single shot from the magnum.
  • A non-living example, both in the original and in Half-Life 2: Explosive crates and barrels, like many other destructible objects, have hit points. You can inflict all sorts of damage on them, and as long as their HP doesn't reach zero, they remain completely intact aside from looking a little marred. But so much as scratch one that's too close to zero and it suddenly explodes. They did, however, make it slightly more realistic in Half-Life 2 by allowing the barrels to catch on fire (usually from a nearby explosion) by taking damage past a certain threshold and explode in a delayed manner. Of course, seeing a barrel made of metal catch fire on its own raises another issue, but that's a different trope.
• Halo:
  • Halo: Combat Evolved has a rather amusing exception for Flood Combat Forms. Shooting their infection form in their chest will destroy them, but they can get their arms shot off and rise again. With a bit of creative shooting, you can create a "pet Flood"—a Combat Form missing both its arms, which can't hurt you but just follows you incessantly, gleefully becoming a flesh shield. Also, the sniper rifle cannot kill or injure a Flood at all unless you hit the Infection form (the reason given in the novelization Halo: The Flood is that the bullet goes straight through the flesh without damaging the one important part of the Combat Form). The pistol is highly effective though.
  • In Halo 2 and Halo 3, all the vehicles use the player's own shields as their own life meter; even if they're on fire, they'll last as long as your shields are up. On the other hand, if your own health bar hits zero and you die, the vehicle explodes as well, no matter what shape it is in.
  • In 2 and 3, if an Infection Form touches you with your shields down, you die instantly, unlike in the first game where they only drained your health and you could shake them off before they killed you. This is semi-justified by Infection Forms being canonically shown to infect their targets very quickly, but even then, the games' NPCs will at least struggle for a bit before finally dying, unlike you.
  • Averted for basic infantry units in Halo Wars; since each one is an entire squad, their members fall one by one as the unit's health depletes. Interestingly, the Covenant Grunt squads are led by an Elite who always dies last; apparently, it's much easier to shoot at a small two-foot target than an 7-foot guy who doesn't bother hiding. This is done for the sake of not having the Grunt squads disperse as soon as their leader is dead (which they are known to do in the FPS games).
• Haunting Ground features a similar mechanic to Clock Tower, where main character Fiona grows more distressed the more damage she takes. When she takes enough, Fiona will enter Panic Mode. She moves much faster, but she barely responds to control inputs, the screen goes entirely black and white, and one hit from anything kills her.
• In H.A.W.X. and its sequel, your fighter jet can shrug off missiles without any hydraulic problems or loss of control, as long as your health gauge is above 1%. After that, pray that you do not even get tapped by a single bullet from a weak little AA gun, or your plane will violently explode.
• In Hearthstone: Heroes of Warcraft, like in the CCGs it immitates, a player only loses when his hero's life hits 0. When it does the hero explodes. One card does avert this, specifically the Lightspawn. Its attack is always equal to its health, so dealing damage to it makes it weaker. However, this also leads to it becoming notably stronger if you can boost its health.
• In Hexen 2, when a certain type of enemy hacks at you, chunks of flesh are actually seen flying away. No effect on combat ability.
• In IL-2 Sturmovik, this is averted. Bullets can hit controls, lines, or other components, causing them to not function properly or not at all. Losing a wing would cause your plane to not be aerodynamic, leading to problems. Shooting a fuel line will cause you to leak fuel, or possibly, set it ablaze. Even a shot to the engine will probably set it ablaze, eventually engulfing the entire plane. You will not die, however. Even if your plane is in 3 different pieces, as long as the cockpit is in one piece, you can still pilot the plane, although you can't do much. The only way you can insta-die is if you crash high speed into the ground, shattering your plane like a coffee mug, or similarly, by the rare engine explosion, or crashing headfirst into another plane. You can also, technically die by the pilot being fatally shot (it's important to note that the pilot can be shot and not die, it depends on the severity of the wound, and being wounded but not dead will cause your performance to decrease), although the plane continues to operate, although you can't pilot it, obviously, as you're dead. You can also die from your pilot hitting the ground too hard after ejecting.
• Averted in the Independence War space sim where the ship has dozens of onboard systems. Each and any of them can (and will) be damaged by enemy fire, with corresponding effects on the ship's handling and fighting abilities. There's an entire control screen dedicated solely to prioritization of inflight repairs.
• Averted in Jagged Alliance. The more injured you are, the faster you tire and the worse you get at everything. Additionally, if you're not wearing enough body armor there's a good chance of bullets or explosives inflicting critical damage to a body part, causing a massive permanent reduction to the appropriate stats.
  • Untreated wounds would case the merc to bleed out and lose health. In Jagged Alliance 2, if the merc's health decrease to under 15, s/he loses consciousness and becomes unable to perform any actions. If this happens, you have less than 15 turns to treat his/her wound by ordering another merc, otherwise s/he bleeds to death, and since there is no respawn in the game, it's game over.
  • Even if the victim takes no permanent HP damage from attacks(i.e. plated EOD/Spectra vests against hollow point ammo), repeated hits cause the victim's stamina to decrease, making the victim less effective in combat. If stamina drops to zero, the victim falls to the ground and cannot do anything.
  • Most deaths in Jagged Alliance 2 consist of the unfortunate victim simply slumping over to lie in a pool of blood. However, if you shoot someone in the head at close range, there's a good chance of their skull exploding. This can be awkward if you're trying to retrieve their head for the local bounty hunter.
  • Averted in the Creator-Driven Successor to Jagged Alliance, 7.62mm High Caliber. Wounds and nearby explosions will put a character into shock, which can delay them for as long as ten seconds, and even the weakest gun in the game can cause a fatal wound to a merc loaded down with armor as long as it hits the right spot. Characters can quite rapidly bleed out without immediate medical attention and injuries to limbs can slow their movement speed or prevent them from using their weapons.
• Averted with vehicles in Just Cause 2. Tires can get blown if shot making a vehicle hard to control or crash, damage can cause your steering to pull to one side, and other performance issues happen. Although the vehicle is still drivable until it explodes. Played straight with people.
  • Played straight with taking over enemy bases and territories. You can destroy every important government object in the area, but leaving one stray fuel tank or radio mast intact is enough for military goons to consider it wholly their territory. Destroy that last object, however, and they abandon the place pretty much immediately.
• Averted in KanColle. At medium damage your shipgirls can't launch torpedoes or, with one exception, planes. They also experience a large drop in damage-dealing ability. At large damage they can't take part in night battles any more.
• Averted in Kartia, where attack strength is directly tied to HP.
• In Keith Courage in Alpha Zones, if Keith dies while in the Nova Suit Powered Armor, it explodes.
• Kingdom Hearts has the Defender and Striker abilities that boost defense and attack respectively, when in critical health.
• Kingdom of Loathing has an unusual example in the form of "drunkenness." Drinking up to one point below your limit changes almost nothing. Add one more point of drunkenness, and you become completely unable to adventure in most places (attempting to go anywhere makes you wander randomly and lose money or stat points). There are a few ways to get in battles while overly-drunk, though, and you somehow fight just as well as ever no matter how drunk you are.
• Knights of the Old Republic:
  • Sufficiently wounded characters have an "injured" pose and walking animation, lasting until they are healed. The trope is still played fully straight: even low-health combatants are still capable of fighting at full strength.
  • Knights of the Old Republic II: The Sith Lords has an in-universe example: Darth Sion holds his body together with the Force, and so is literally willing himself to stay alive long past when his body should have naturally given out. It's mentioned that he's got thousands of fractures throughout his body, and his skin is one mass of scar tissue. As such, the only way to permanently defeat him is to undermine his will, so that he will finally give up and die.
• In League of Legends, the Champion Tryndamere will have his Attack Damage increase the lower his health is. His ultimate ability allows him to live through anything with 1 HP for several seconds, allowing a capable Tryndamere player to initiate a suicide dive, amplify his Attack Damage, cleave his target to death and then attempt an unlikely escape. Played straighter than straight in that as long as you are invulnerable during the ult's duration, you cannot die. The instant it goes down, you need to heal or the slightest tick (often a spite-driven Ignite spell) of damage will kill you.
  • Olaf's entire strategy is almost based around this. He gains more attack speed the lower his health is. A good Olaf will let you lower his health a bit before popping his abilities and chopping you to bits.
• Left 4 Dead averts this. As you lose health your character is noticeably clumsier and slower, with their remaining health beginning to bleed out while downed or after being picked up. If you run out of health you go into an incapacitated state where you can do nothing but fire your sidearm and must be helped by another player before you die from bleeding out or enemies pounding on your incapacitated form in order to finish you off. If you're downed twice, the next time will kill you unless you get first aid. Getting hurt after taking painkillers or adrenaline (temporary health boosts) damages your regular health first as well.
  • However, played straight by the special zombies who go from trying to kill you to flying off the moment they lose their last hit point.
  • Adrenaline also temporarily removes the speed loss from health loss when used, along with a general speed boost.
• Early The Legend of Zelda games. Link could be down to half a heart and be walking along fine, but if he accidentally bumps into an Octorok, he twirls around and blinks out of existence.
  • In the 3D games, losing health does not impede your movement, but standing still does show Link bending over and panting.
  • The Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword where Link won't pant from exhaustion in a critical state and is quite capable of doing many amazing feats. Should he get smacked by a cactus that takes off his remaining energy, he keels over and dies.
  • The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild implements this for its Breakable Weapons mechanic. In addition, setting a wooden weapon on fire doesn't actually inflict damage to it, instead destroying it instantly it its stays aflame for one consecutive minute.
• Averted in The Long Dark. Your physical condition is measured in Condition, and it is always damaged over time by extreme coldness, exhaustion, starvation, dehydration, and bleeding - these stack additively, so you'll die a lot faster if you're unlucky enough to be freezing, starving and exhausted at once. You'll find doing just about anything a lot harder if you have low Condition. Even worse, there's a first aid system where you can receive a number of injuries from falls, animal attacks, etc. All of these are debilitating and require the use of medical supplies to treat. Fortunately, you naturally recover Condition over time if you're not under duress (basically, not freezing, starving, exhausted, dehydrated or injured) and not in need for first aid, and the stacking works the other way as well - if you put a door and four walls between yourself and the howling elements, get a nice warm fire going, and get plenty of food and water in you, a good night's rest will do you a world of good.
• The Lord of the Rings Online has at least one ability where shouting at your enemies damages them very slightly, debuffs them and buffs you. It's fun shouting wounded wargs to death...
• Averted in the card-based Lost Kingdoms series for the GameCube, where the protagonist (in each case, a mage-princess) would noticeably start limping, slowing down, and otherwise losing efficiency as her HP went lower. So, then, when you happened to get down to that 1 HP, your character was visibly on the edge of death and could barely move. Death was not so much exploding as collapsing from the sheer wound trauma and blood loss.
• Lunia does this in an interesting way. You can actually go down to 0 HP, but won't die until you receive a knockdown attack. Your mana stops regenerating (and you can't use potions) at 0 HP so your usefulness is greatly reduced but certain monsters or bosses can be beaten by ignoring their (non knockdown) attacks to you and just hitting them over and over again till they die. It also makes for possibly very annoying PvP fights if the loser decides to just run, not allowing you to deal the finishing blow. And of course, once you're down with 0 HP, a healer can still heal you provided they get to you within a few seconds. However, you are still extremely far from invincible.
• Marathon is an interesting case. For both the player and enemies, certain types of damage, such as explosive or crushing, would always trigger a hard (read: messy) death (unless the enemy was set so that they only had a soft/hard death sequence available to them). Most of the other types would cause a soft death, with some exceptions: 1. If the player took enough fatal damage (such as a charged fusion bolt) they would undergo a hard death. 2. If a creature died from a damage type that they were marked as vulnerable to (e.g. a hunter being killed by fusion energy). 3. If the creature had the "die in flames" setting enabled and was killed by lava, fire, or the alien weapon.
• Mass Effect averts this for the player character, but not for the NPCs. When Shepard gets down to critical health, he/she can't aim, can't sprint, and the screen turns pulsating red with an ominous heartbeat sound effect. Your other party members, however, can keep fighting at 100% efficiency with only the barest sliver of health. Go figure.
  • Played beyond straight for the player's squad if Shepard bites the bullet. While teammates can go down on their own, and pop back up with a sliver of health the moment a fight ends, Shepard's death will immediately have the squad drop dead with him.
• Max Payne suffers this like nobody else. See, Max doesn't ever actually heal himself in any way whatsoever, he just keeps taking painkillers. By the end of the game he could easily have taken enough damage to empty his life bar a hundred times over and be full of so many bullets you'd have trouble finding something to shoot at that was still him, but as long as he can't feel it, he's fine and dandy. But should he suddenly be in a position where he feels actual pain, he falls over in slow motion.
• While generally averted in the MechWarrior series due to its Subsystem Damage, critical existence failure sometimes creeps up. In all the games, it doesn't matter how healthy the rest of your Humongous Mecha is if someone destroys your Center Torso, the location of the fusion reactor. In Mechwarrior 3, mechs would spontaneously fall over dead if one of their legs was destroyed, which quickly became a massive Game-Breaker. In Mechwarrior Living Legends, aerospace fighters and aVTOLs function 100% until their fuselage is destroyed, though they can more quickly be eliminated by destroying their engines. Tanks, likewise, are unaffected by subsystem damage from their front or side armor; only turret or rear damage weakens them.
• Mega Man is completely fine with only one hit point left, even though the next hit will cause him to explode violently.
  • Note that in later series, the characters (who are robots) actually show that they are injured while standing still if they are low on health, usually in the form of holding one arm as if it were injured and breathing heavily. This doesn't make them perform any worse, of course.
  • Can make some sense if you look at health as the containment field integrity for his power source.
  • In an in-game mix of this and being Stalked by the Bell, Grey/Ashe in Mega Man ZX Advent comes across a pair of capsules with associated timers - these are Prometheus and Pandora's capsules. The two are set to die if they aren't maintained at regular intervals within their personal capsules, and Albert uses this as a sort of blackmail to keep them in line with his plot. The two are still standing seemingly without struggle despite the abuse Grey/Ashe give them after the fight against them, but Prometheus barely has enough time to voice how he'll resort to omnicide before he and Pandora are suddenly wiped out and knocked cold not by their timers running out, but by the excess amount of their negative emotions being devoured by the hundreds of Model Ws around them to fuel their awakening. Just as Planned by Master Albert himself. They're widely speculated to have survived the encounter since the game doesn't reveal their fates afterwards, but this trope might still be in effect assuming they didn't get to their capsules in time.
  • In the Battle Network games that had the Navi Customizer, you were always given a program called Under Shirt that would let you survive one fatal hit, leaving you with 1 HP. Get hit after that before you're able to bring your health back up and you're instantly deleted.
• Mercenaries 2 has Mooks which are easy to kill and that have very enthusiastic death animations. Sometimes, if shooting at them with a weak machine gun, they will flinch slightly after the first 9 shots and then scream, throw their arms in the air and leap backwards.
• Played straight with the title character of Metal Arms: Glitch in the System, but done to hilarious effect with the enemy Mooks. While enemy robots only die (explosively) when they take maximum damage, their bodies become increasingly damaged if you fire at specific limbs, often flailing about uselessly; you can even sever arms or decapitate them, and they'll keep running around helplessly until you deliver the final blow. Justified by the fact that they are robots (the fact that Glitch remains fine until out of energy can be explained by the fact that it is implied he is a piece of Lost Technology left behind by Ancient Precursors).
• Metal Gear Solid is legendary for a particular use of this — Solid Snake has cigarettes, which allow him to see hidden laser traps and keep his hands steady while sniping, at the cost of his HP bleeding down slowly. It's impossible for Snake to smoke himself to death — a small blip of health will always remain — but then, if he gets so much as touched, he dies (presumably of spontaneous lung cancer).
  • Downplayed in Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty: when your health dips below a certain point, you'll start slowly bleeding out and losing the remainder, with the health bar turning orange to signify this. This doesn't affect physical performance however, and just applying a bandage or even crouching in place for a few seconds is enough to stymie the bleeding, the latter allowing you to even recover health past the point where it started.
  • In Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater, one of the big promoted features was that Snake could be injured, and would have to patch himself up to continue, with such injuries including bleeding and broken limbs. However, as far as gameplay went, the injuries only impacted a minor penalty to Snake's maximum health until treated, so theoretically Snake could still run and fight as normal even if all four of his limbs were broken, there were bullets, bees and arrows lodged in his head, and he was poisoned. He'll limp if he gets a broken leg, but that's about it.
  • Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriots uses this for a plot point later in the game. Naomi Hunter uses nanomachines to keep her cancer from progressing, but it doesn't appear to impair her ability to function in the slightest. She 'kills' herself late in the game by repeatedly injecting herself with an agent that temporarily neutralizes the nanomachines... allowing her cancer to continue as normal, which kills her in the span of about two minutes. Considering that the injections only last for a few hours, the cancer would have to be explosively violent in order to kill her before the agent wore off. There is an attempt to handwave it, as she does mention on at least one occasion that she's essentially already dead and that the nanomachines are all that are keeping her up and breathing, but she is nevertheless by all means acting and appearing perfectly normal and healthy before deactivating the nanomachines.
  • Averted in the final battle of MGS4. Solid Snake and Liquid Ocelot face off in hand-to-hand combat atop Outer Haven. As the fight progresses, two of the greatest warriors the world has ever seen get slower and slower, until they're just two old men, barely able to stand. It's scripted rather than based on actual damage, but it's certainly an effective conclusion.
• Metal Warriors: Oddly enough, your mech and that of others will start deteriorating as it loses (invisible) hit points, first losing its luster and taking cosmetic damage before its ability to use accessories is lost (signified by sparking from the shoulders) and, soon before it explodes, loses its arms and/or the ability to use its built-in weapons anymore.
• Metroid:
  • Metroid: Getting to zero health results in Samus's entire body exploding instantly. Same goes for Ridley and Kraid, who show no sign of injury before suddenly exploding the instant they are defeated; at least Mother Brain starts pulsating more frequently as she takes more and more damage.
  • Samus Aran can stand in molten lava without permanent harm as long as she has energy left (and with the proper suit upgrade, without any harm), and can suffer shocks that would kill an ordinary woman... but once she's down to one point, bumping into a little spiked bug is lethal. This is possibly justified, however, as her health seems to equate to the life of her suit — in Super Metroid and Metroid Fusion, it explodes when she runs out of health, and in every game it starts beeping an alarm when she's in critical condition. Given the environments she traverses in most of the games, losing her suit would be fatal (if not instantly so).
  • Note that the Captain N: The Game Master comics hang a lampshade on this. Samus gets damaged, and explains that her suit's power core has been breached, and it is about to explode.
  • Metroid: Other M is the first to not have the suit explode if it runs out of energy. Instead, Samus simply falls over as the suit vanishes and leaves Samus' exposed body to her killers or environment. You can hear Samus breathing heavily if her energy is low but she can still perform lots of amazing feats, even with one energy point left.
• Might and Magic series: played straight. However, the characters' gear can break down with enough abuse (dangerous, as the gear makes the man) and hitting zero HP only causes unconsciousness, allowing a quick cleric to Heal the poor saps back on their feet and into the battle. Death occurs only when the counter goes too far into the negatives, but this can be temporarily averted with a soul-binding spell.
• Minecraft essentially plays this straight. Your character can fall many meters to the point where your legs would be shattered and you're fine, but a single punch and you die. The same goes for mobs, even the bosses. The Wither plays a variation of this; when it gets to half of its health, it's immune to ranged weaponry.
  • There is a gif◊ of someone who barely survives a creeper explosion, and then dies by accidentally touching a cactus.
  • Tools, weapons, and armor all work this way. They will continue to work with 100% effectiveness even with one durability left, but once that last point is gone, they're completely destroyed.
• In Mini Metro, the rest of your subway network can be running perfectly fine, but if a single station becomes overcrowded for too long, the entire subway will shut down for a Game Over. Averted in Endless mode, where overcrowding will simply cause a decline in metro efficiency.
  • In its sequel, Mini Motorways, your city shuts down and the game is over if one building can't get traffic flowing to it within a period of time.
• In Monster Hunter, there is an armor skill called Adrenaline that increases attack and defense when your health falls below a certain point. Often used as a strategy against bosses that will kill you in one hit anyway, such as the Fatalis family.
• While Mortal Kombat wasn't any worse at this than most fighting games for most of the series, Mortal Kombat 9 takes this to ridiculous extremes with its X-Ray Moves, special moves that display an x-ray image of the opponent to show how they're being impacted by the hit. Apparently, in the Mortal Kombat multiverse, people can have their skulls shattered and still not die until the opponent performs the Finishing Move.
  • Taken to the extreme in Baraka and Kitana's X-Ray moves, the first involving stabbing the opponent through the neck and head, and the second involving stabbing up to four times through the head: two in the back, and two in the front THROUGH THE EYES, with you being able to watch how both fighters' weapons pierce the opponent's head from side to side. Watching this instantly leads to wonder what are these guys made of...
  • Lampshaded in the Two Best Friends Play episode:
  Shouldn't my head just fall off with how hard you're hitting my neck?
  Yeah, let's talk about logic in Mortal Kombat. Let's do that.
  • Played with with the reintroduction of Brutalities in Mortal Kombat X where a special move can go from simply pushing a character back to reducing them to a spectacle of viscera.
• In N, the game's 90 second time limit actually represents the ninja's natural lifespan, which is quite short due to the ninja's inhumanly fast metabolism. In spite of this, the ninja's running and jumping abilities never waver no matter how close to death they are. As soon as the timer reaches zero, though, the ninja explodes.
• The Naval Ops series was a particularly bad offender. Though it did have potentials for critical hits to rudder, engines, fire, and bilge, your ship can still take loads of hits from artillery shells, missile swarms, laser blasts, torpedoes, etc... and will have nothing more than a purely cosmetic flame image that is roughly in the middle of the ship. However, one little bullet from even the smallest machine-gun will send you to meet Davy Jones.
• In New Horizons, every ship will be perfectly able to stay afloat and keep fighting as long as it has one HP left. One more hit, and they sink like a stone.
• Nexus War games work this way, and as long as player characters or summons have one point of HP left they're just as functional as if they were perfectly healthy. However, some demon abilities do more damage to wounded enemies, and classes that Cast from Hit Points might not think this trope helps them very much.
  • Zig-zagged in Nexus: The Jupiter Incident. While the game has Subsystem Damage, that can only be done by lasers, which generally do very little damage to the hull (not counting the siege laser, which does a lot of hull damage but doesn't affect subsystems). Railguns damage the hull, but will never result in subsystem damage or a decrease in performance, even if striking the same spots where lasers are hitting. Interestingly, if a ship's HP gets too low (maybe 20%), its captain will always order the crew to Abandon Ship, resulting in a swarm of Escape Pods leaving the hulk. Generally, the hulk can be left to drift, although it's also possible to finish it off and blow it up.
• Not the Robots: Until the robot’s hit points reach zero, it is just as fast and mobile as when it starts.
• Aversion: In Outlive nuclear power plants and uranium mines will begin to release radiation, damaging themselves and their surroundings until repaired or totally destroyed.
• Mostly played straight in Pacific Fleet. Ships tend to have just as much firepower and accuracy at 100% as they do when they're about to explode and/or sink. The aversions include speed (some hits can damage the engines and/or screws) and plane-launching capability (for carriers, which can't launch if the flight deck is on fire or has been rendered out of commission). It is also possible to damage the enemy ship enough to get it to sink a few turns later (usually requires plunging strikes with armor-piercing ammo and/or hits below the waterline).
  • Averted in the sequel Atlantic Fleet. Ships now have Subsystem Damage, and powerful/lucky hits on a particular section can damage or destroy that section's functionality. The most obvious targets are turrets, which can be disabled or destroyed with good hits, rendering the ship impotent. Carriers can be less affected by flight deck damage, although only after fighters and/or bombers have been launched. Once they're in the air, carrier damage does not affect air operations (at least until they have to land to re-arm). Steering can also be damaged by hits to the stern, which will keep the ship turning if it happened to be already doing that until the damage is repaired. Ships will only sink when the game's buoyancy calculations determine that it should, although this can be sped up by magazine explosions, which can happen either as a direct result of a hit or as secondary explosion in case of fire.
• One popular strategy in the Paper Mario is called Danger Mario, which has the player lower his HP to 1 and equip many badges that increase attack and defence when your HP is critical.
• Enemies in Parasite Eve melt into puddles of goo upon death. Nobody in game seems to realize the implications of this, as they're caught completely off-guard whenever a very non-melted boss gets back up. This could have been explained away by invoking Everything Fades for technical reasons, had it not been clearly visible in cutscenes, causing a Plot Hole.
• PAYDAY: The Heist has you being shot by hordes of SWAT and cops, but you will still be able to run and jump without hindrance, even if your health is on a sliver. However, if you are taken down and then revived, you start out with less health and you lose even more health if you keep going down and getting revived. This also reduces the amount of time you can bleed out.
• Averted by Penumbra; when Philip's health gets too low he'll begin to limp and become unable to run.
• The Persistence: No amount of bullets, fire, or psychic screams will slow Zimri down or break her striking arm unless they kill her dead.
• Persona 3 averts this by blending it with a form of Anti-Grinding. The more fights your team is in the more tired they get and the more likely they become to take serious damage from the next fight. Over time this becomes less of an issue.
• Pea-nut from Plants vs. Zombies 2: It's About Time has two halves which shoot peas as zombies. As he gets eaten his top half is damaged, which means he can only fire peas half as fast.
• Pokémon:
  • The player character will "black out" the moment their last Pokémon; faints, even if it fainted from poison damage in the middle of town, right in front of a Pokémon Center.
  • Averted with Archeops. Most Pokémon either maintain full strength until loosing that hit point, or ever get stronger, as shown above. But Archeops has the Defeatist ability; when its HP drops below 50%, its attack and special attack stats get cut in half.
  • Several Pokémon abilities and berries that activate when a Pokemon of a certain type is damaged to a certain point. The anime has shown Overgrow, Blaze, and Torrent.
  • Also in Pokemon, there are several attacks that increase in power at lower HP. There are a few that decrease.
• In the NES adaptation of Predator, Arnold explodes into smithereens when his life meter runs out.
• Played straight in Project Blackout, both with player characters and their guns.
• The Punch-Out!! games on the NES and Wii offer a slight correlation between Little Mac's ability to keep standing and his ability to fight back — taking or blocking an opponent's hits will reduce both his stamina and his heart count, and running out of hearts means he can't punch or block. Therefore, it's possible to take a few blows and suddenly be unable to retaliate. Dodge a punch or two, though, and Little Mac is ready to strike back, even if one more hit would knock him down.
• Averted in Raft. If your character is badly wounded or suffering from extreme hunger or thirst, you'll slow down and your vision will get all blurry.
• Averted in the Rainbow Six series, where one well placed shot (e.g. head or center mass) instantly kills your teammates(and in the first three games, they're gone for the rest of the campaign), and even nonlethal hits will slow your down (causing you to limp) and make your shots less accurate. Teammates can also sometimes be nonfatally incapacitated. Needless to say, enemies tend to aim for your head.
  • In Rainbow Six 3: Raven Shield, health is shown abstractly by a circle — either filled (healthy), half-filled (injured), or empty (incapacitated or dead). When "injured", your accuracy is much worse and you walk more loudly and with a limp. The game doesn't make any distinction on where that bullet landed, or if you got hurt because of fall damage.
• Raptor: Call of the Shadows has a partial aversion. While your ship still has hit points and you'll go down in flames only when the last one is chipped away, every single hit you take below 15% hull integrity knocks out one of your precious, precious weapons. Forever. With horrible warning claxons howling all the while.
• The Ratchet & Clank games avert this. When Ratchet is low on nanotech, his ears will droop and (when standing still) he will pant with exhaustion. Some robotic enemies also have armored panels blown off of them as they take damage. In both cases, however, the effect is purely cosmetic and does not materially affect the characters' performance. The series also plays the trope straight with bosses, which show no signs of damage until they die.
• Resident Evil:
  • Resident Evil plays the trope straight. You can run at full speed, even when your health is in the red, but the minute a zombie bird pecks at your last sliver of health, you die. Later games and remakes started averting this: when your health is in "Caution" level your character starts clutching their abdomen, and in "Danger" level you move slower as well. All of the games in the franchise still allow you to move heavy objects or jump across gaps regardless of your health.
  • Averted in Resident Evil 2, which instead use Game-Breaking Injury. When your health is about halfway depleted, your character will slow down slightly and start clutching his/her ribs or arm, when it gets a certain amount lower, they will be reduced to limping, and in the similar Dino Crisis, Regina starts losing blood and can bleed to death.
  • Averted and played straight in Resident Evil 4. Getting to low health causes Leon to clutch his abdomen, moving slower and have a harder time aiming. At the same time, however, Leon is capable of being knocked down for a moment by several attacks, such as explosives going off within a short range, but how he reacts to them depends solely on whether they killed him or not - if his health is completely drained by the hit, he ragdolls from the hit and dies. If he has even a sliver of health left, he quickly jumps back to his feet as if he's at top condition and then starts hunching over like he's injured. That said, there are a few attacks, most infamously those of the chainsaw users (which come in both male "Dr. Salvador" and female "Bella Sisters" flavors) which can instantly kill him regardless of health (in the case of the chainsaw users, having more health simply means the user has to push for an extra few moments to get the chainsaw to take Leon's head off). Also, like Parasite Eve, enemies melt when they die, yet everybody finds it strange when an enemy that didn't melt gets back up.
  • Resident Evil 6 plays with this. For the most part it averts this; any character whose health is completely depleted goes into a "dying" state, whether it is a zombie bite or an explosive round going off point blank (they automatically recover to standing in about 15 seconds, though not in good shape unless they heal). Then there are some attacks that can bypass the dying state and instantly kill no matter how much health the character had, such as the Ubistvo's moveset in general (chainsaws strike again!) and the Rasklapanje's grab. It also plays with this in vehicle sections, most notably in Chris's campaign. Chapter 3 ends with him riding a jeep hot in pursuit of a target. It plays out like a standard chase: if the vehicle is shot up by enemies rockets or bullets, it goes up in a blaze of glory; however, the vehicle never takes any visible damage until it goes up. Scraping against walls depletes the gauge too, so there's nothing quite as hilarious as gently bumping a wall at 5 mph while navigating through a dark garage and seeing the pristine vehicle flip and explode.
  • The aversion becomes even more obvious (though still not perfectly realistic) in Resident Evil: Outbreak, where your characters can be so crippled that they can't do anything except crawl feebly on the ground, only able to move properly once picked up by a teammate and healed up; they can't defend themselves when grounded, and the virus gauge sees a big jump in accelerated effect.
• Zig-Zagged in Ring of Red. While the walkers themselves will look perfectly fine right up until they go boom and can be repaired from 1 HP to full health with field repairs, their crews will give damage reports that make it clear that damage is being done on the inside, with the AFW's felt weight increasing. It also combines this with Sub System Damage, with the legs having two section HP ("currently on fire" and "totaled")and the gun having one. Both subsystems are technically immortal, though. Infantry squads will also loose soldiers as the units HP goes down.
• Averted in Rule of Rose since Jennifer can get stabbed, slashed, beaten up with mops by demonic imps, and have creepy children do gross things to her. As a result, she will become slower and do less damage the more she gets injured. The same goes for Brown.
• In RuneScape, wearing the complete "Dharok the Wretched" armour set provides you with magical strength the lower your hitpoints get. A common PvP strategy is to deliberately damage oneself by drinking evil potions, allowing monsters to pummel oneself, or dropping nitroglycerin at one's own feet - and then going on a Wretched Strength rampage.
• San Francisco Rush series: Normal shunts and bumps only cause cosmetic damage, but with high-speed crashes or rollovers, Every Car Is a Pinto.
• Played straight in Scaler, where Scaler can be trundling along merrily with a single hit point, but will fall over and die if he so much as gets jabbed by a cactus, or brushes against one of the (otherwise harmless) fish/snake like enemies that trundle over climb paths.
• In the RPG Shining Force characters would fight fine upto 1 HP, but when killed would spin around and explode. Though in this case they did no damage to nearby characters.
• Silent Hill series: your character can get sliced and diced by demon children or bludgeoned or shot by demon nurses many times without external injury or disability, but when you're low on health, they keel over and die from being bitten by a bug or flicked by a mannequin. Pyramid Head has his One-Hit Kill overhand knife attack, which just has to miss James by a few inches to register (bad collision detection programming). And when James' health is low, PH just needs to administer a Touch of Death (which is normally a stranglehold attack).
  • In Silent Hill 4, Eileen will become slower, show more injuries and will walk faster into the giant blood blender at the end when she's injured by enemies.
• In The Simpsons Hit & Run, all vehicles explode violently when destroyed, but function normally until that happens. Given that this is a Simpsons game, it makes sense. Oddly enough, you can then get back in the exploded car and drive it (albeit slowly).
• In the first two Soldier of Fortune games, most irritatingly in the second, where The Computer Is a Cheating Bastard, explosives instantly gibbed the player if he was in the blast radius. Oddly, in Pay Back, even on Hard difficulty getting hit directly by a rocket is not always lethal. Poor damage randomization programming, I guess? This game was thrown together in only three or so months, shovelware style. So unless it causes your life bar to go below zero and therefore Critical Existence Failure, you'll be mostly unfazed (other than the obligatory Interface Screw which tints the screen redder as your Walk It Off health gets lower).
  • Mullins does seem to suffer true Ludicrous Gibs critical existence failure in the first game if so much as being bitten by a dog causes his life to hit zero. If he shoots a civilian in 2, even accidentally, he'll respond to his act of evil by spontaneously yelling 'WLAAAAAARGH' and falling over backwards, dead. Now that's a guilt trip.
  • There's a glitch in the second game that sometimes causes otherwise fatally wounded enemies to continue fighting, like zombies.
• A notable example of this trope can be seen in the Sonic the Hedgehog series of games, where Sonic's health is dictated not by a health meter, but by having rings (assumed to have some sort of protective energy, but this being a classic game series the details aren't terribly important) on hand. When he is hit, all the rings go flying, disappearing after a few seconds if they're not picked up; another hit kills him. However — and this scenario comes up much more often than you might think—no matter how many times he is hit, as long as Sonic can keep recovering that one ring, he is safe.
• Soul Nomad & the World Eaters plays this somewhat straight and inverts it as well. While it is true that your unit can keep going until they lose their last health point, your unit is part of a squad, so, for example, say the enemy squad knocks out your healer. Your squad's potential goes down, loses its ability to heal, and thus slowly chips down as it takes hit. let's say a frontrunner with powerful damage is killed. Now your strongest attacker is down, lowering your unit's ability. Let's say every unit except the best unit and the healer die. You're still in trouble because now the enemy squad has less targets. Since targets are chosen by the games RNG for both players and enemies, the less units on your squad, the more likely you'll get blasted apart. This leads to the scenario where you have a much harder time surviving as you take damage and progressively become less and less powerful.
• Averted in Space Station 13. The more damage you take, the slower you start to go. In fact, if you take enough damage (Especially toxic/radiation damage) you'll start to randomly pass out. Taken enough burn or bashing damage to your face? Your very identity could be mangled, a very annoying (Or beneficial, if you want to disappear) thing to have happen in a usually very paranoia driven game. Finally, if you hit 100% damage you go unconscious and suffocate for the last 100% until death finally occurs. In addition to that, you might suffer from bleeding, requiring you to apply some gauze to avoid death. And depending on the codebase, the bleeding might be internal and require surgery, or you can suffer from dismemberment and fractures.
• Averted in the food fight themed Arcade Game SPLAT! by Williams Electronics. Taking one hit knocks your head clean off — and as the game helpfully reminds you at the start of the first few waves, you need a head to throw food. Taking another hit before you recover your head will finish you off. [1]
• The S.T.A.L.K.E.R. series plays it straight, with some occasional lapses. Regardless of where an enemy is hit, they will continue to function as normal until their health drops to zero. If the player pushes them over the edge, the killing shot will usually throw the enemy across the room and send up a cloud of blood.
  • Sometimes, though rarely, averted in that the victim will instead collapse on the ground in the fetal position, whimpering and begging for his life (a possible source of Fridge Horror). He will do this despite the fact he was just running around lobbing grenades like a maniac, shouting profanity and curses like a highschool jock.
  • Anomalies are a perfect example of Critical Existence Failure. Stalkers can and will approach them, even trigger them, without showing any kind of ill effects until their health drops to 0, at which point they might be melted, electrocuted, incinerated, tossed around like a ragdoll, sucked into a gravitational vortex, or explode into a grisly shower of gore and viscera. In later games, it is occasionally all of the above.
  • The occasional Emissions are also an example of this. If you get on a shelter that has windows or allows you to see Outside, you'll see how the unlucky Stalkers that couldn't take shelter die. They'll run around trying to find some shelter only to suddenly collapse when the emission begins.
    • This happens even when they DO find a shelter (But too late), they'll open the door and feel a false sense of security just to drop dead on the spot because they were only halfway in.
• Star Command both plays it straight and averts it. Your ship can be hit in random locations, usually damaging the hull or even causing hull breaches it hit near a wall. A hit can also land in a room and, if powerful enough, can render that room useless until repaired. This includes the bridge, engineering, weapons, sick bay, shield booster, and dodge rooms. The enemy will also often send boarding parties that attack your crew and the rooms. Played straight for enemy ships. They're just as effective with full hull and shield points as they are with no shields and 1 HP. However, unlike yours, enemy shields don't regenerate. Also played straigh for your crew. They function normally until their lifebar runs out (or they get sucked out through a nearby hull breach).
• Played straight in Star Control, where the ship's crew is used to represent its hit points. The ship is fine and fully-functional (barring some special abilities that drain crew) until you have one crewmember left. Lose that crewmember, and the ship explodes spectacularly. The Syreen in the first game actually start battles with a half-empty HP bar (justified in-verse due to the Syreen having an extremely low population thanks to their planet being destroyed). During the battle, you can use their special ability to steal crewmembers from the other ship. The Mycon (being fungal lifeforms) can regenerate crew. The top of the ridiculousness of the crew-hitpoint analogy is reflected in the Pkunk ability for their destroyed ships (which are pretty flimsy) to be resurrected 50% of the time thanks to the Pkunk believing in reincarnation (i.e. their crew is resurrected; therefore, the ship must be too).
• There is an aversion for Terran structures in StarCraft. After taking enough damage to turn their hit point counter red, Terran structures slowly lose health, even if they are no longer under attack. This health loss will continue until the structure either destroys itself or is repaired. This is explained in the manual that due to the relatively haphazard, ramshackle, and—this is both the strength and weakness of the faction—interconnected nature of Terran structures, they are susceptible to internal damage like fires and malfunctioning machinery.
  • Reversed in the campaign of StarCraft II, where you can buy an upgrade that always auto-repairs buildings to half of their max HP.
  • But still played straight with all units and structures, which once complete function at perfect efficiency until they lose their very last real hit point, at which point they explode spectacularly whether they were killed by a Hydralisk's spines or a Probe's cutting laser or a Battlecruiser's laser batteries. Is the reason for the most basic and important micro trick of moving damaged units away from the battle and sending them back in once they aren't targetted.
  • Don't forget the Zerg Plague ability. Though it will not outright kill enemy units, it will often reduce them to 1 HP, so you can kill a battlecruiser or carrier by shooting one bullet at it.
  • Also kind of adverted/inverted with the Zerg and Protoss factions. With the zerg, damaged units and buildings will gradually heal themselves due to being strictly biological. The shields for Protoss buildings and units gradually recharge, but not the health.
• In Star Raiders, your ship could endure multiple hits... at least until your shields were destroyed.
• Star Trek: Bridge Commander is one of the best aversions: you can shoot different subsystems of the enemy ships with different and realistic effects: shooting the weapons will lower the damage output (until they get destroyed), shooting the engines slows down the ship, and shooting the reactor takes away the power from every system. Still, the reactor or the hull are the only "instant-kill" systems: you can easily paralyse and disarm a ship (in some missions, you have to), without destroying it. This also applies to your ship.
  • Destroying the warp core blows up the ship, which goes in line with the series, as it means all those antimatter particles are suddenly free to roam around the ship, destroying any matter on contact.
  • One tactic that almost always works involves going for the sensors first. With sensors disabled or destroyed, the enemy is unable to target or even see you, so they won't fire back. However, in some cases, the blinded enemy can run.
• Star Trek Online has this for both space and ground. While in space, there are abilities that can disable your ship's subsystems or reduce their effectiveness, but subsystem effectiveness is independent from your ship's hull integrity. This means that you don't suffer the downward spiral of failing subsystems as you ship gets destroyed that is depicted in the TV episodes. The exact same thing occurs on ground maps. As long as your character still has some health left, you can still fight at full effectiveness unless you have any impairing effects on you.
• Averted in Star Wars: The Force Unleashed, the penultimate boss is Vader, who slowly becomes more damaged appearing, losing chunks of his suit and helmet as you whittle away at his health bar, to the point where he is actually limping around, throwing off sparks and missing large chunks of life-support armour.
  • In addition, the LEGO set for the spaceship in Force Unleashed includes a little Vader with a broken helmet piece, just like in the video game.
• Strife has a minor aversion; critical players lose the run ability.
• Inordinately common in Super Robot Wars with the Prevail skill. In most games nearly all the pilots learn it at a certain level & in games that use the Pilot Points system it's possible to give it to anyone, which makes a bit of sense, considering most Humongous Mecha pilots are Hot-Blooded Determinators. In practice it usually isn't all that useful for most characters aside from those who come equipped with it from the start, as by the time most pilots earn it their ability to evade is already high enough that they won't be taking much damage anyway.
• Super Smash Bros. is a partial example, in that increasing the characters' damage "percentages" doesn't affect their speed, power, or any other abilities, but does make it easier for other characters to smack them off the screen. The trope is played completely straight in the Stamina mode from Melee and Brawl, as well as for Master Hand and some other bosses.
  • Also, at low percentages, when your character is dangling from a ledge, their 'Climb back up' animation is quick and fluid. At higher percentages, they struggle as they try to climb back up (but always manage to), and it takes slightly longer. Except for Mewtwo, who, while taking longer, doesn't struggle, and he instead chooses to calmly walk up the ledge, standing perfectly horizontally.
  • In Super Smash Bros. Brawl, Lucario also gets stronger as it becomes more damaged, 200% at the limit. One of the Events focuses on this.
• Surgeon Simulator 2013 has a lot of fun with this. Your patient's "life bar", so to speak, is the amount of blood left in their body. Though doing any kind of damage causes them to start bleeding and causes it to drain down by itself, as long as the procedure is completed, it counts as a win—even if the patient has lost 5.5 liters (a little under 1.5 gallons) of blood and is going to finish bleeding out in one second. And that's ignoring that finishing the surgery also usually requires pulling out half the patient's vital organs. Naturally, this is all Played for Laughs, as the protagonist shrugs it off with "Looks fine to me!"
• Sword of the Stars averts this on a few levels — individual weapon mounts can be destroyed, and Destroyers and Cruisers can still barely function if they lose a ship section (to a degree - lose the engine and they're dead in space, lose the mission section and they lose special abilities ect.). This trope is then invoked with the Dreadnoughts, which are described as having so much armor and system redundancy that they remain completely functional until they explode, making them difficult to destroy.
  • The sequel averts this. Ship's armor is now no longer just extra hit points. Each shot whittles away the armor (depending on the spot hit and the type of weapon) until the hull is exposed, at which point shots deal critical damage. A key system can be damaged, and each critical hit also kills crewmembers. Kill enough crew, and the ship's effectiveness is drastically reduced. Hit the reactor, and the trope is invoked but justified.
• In the Syphon Filter series, the character has both armor and health. Certain enemies can One-Hit Kill with headshots regardless of the player's armor level, and although the health bar depletes much faster than the armor, it still suffers from the Critical Existence Failure syndrome, in that it doesn't affect the player's mobility.
• Justified in TAGAP. Normally, enemies invariably inflict fatal damage - but the titular drug in your body allows you to instantly nullify any injury, at the cost of depleting an amount of TAGAP proportional to the damage you just nullified. If you're hit but have enough TAGAP to resist the damage, you're perfectly fine; otherwise, you die.
• Tales of Honor: The Secret Fleet: The standard Hull Penetrator missiles deal no system damage and simply reduce the ship's HP. However, they may cause casualties among the crew, reducing repair times. Additionally, Hull Penetrators can be enhanced with either a one-battle bonus or certain pieces of equipment to deal damage to ship's systems as well as the hull. Ditto for the NX-2 Nukes, which are the exaggerated version of the Hull Penetrators, although limited by supplies and slower in flight. Averted for the other missile types, which are specifically designed to deal damage to particular systems.
• In Team Fortress 2, the Soldier's Equalizer gives him damage buffs as his health goes down. At one hit point, the Equalizer is twice as strong as any other melee weapon.
  • It also used to give him a speed boost, but this was removed and put into a different weapon called the "Escape Plan". This weapon retains the ability to make you almost as fast as a scout at 1 hp.
• In Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Turtles in Time, your character has 16 hit points, and when down to one, even a stubbed toe is fatal. Fortunately, Death Is a Slap on the Wrist thanks to extra lives and continues reviving you on the spot like in most beat-em'ups and he's back up with full hit points in seconds.
• A bit of both in the old DOS game Terra Nova: Strike Force Centauri. You and your Powered Armor had three health meters: Armour, which would recover over time when not getting horribly shot, suit systems which could be damaged or destroyed under heavy fire, resulting in effects like your weapons no longer functioning, your sensors or video display glitching out, and health, which generally only took damage in the same way as your suit systems, i.e, if you sustained several hits. Only by losing all your health would you die; the suit was seemingly able to survive the most unholy poundings. It wasn't totally averting the trope however: Certain teammates carried an ASF (auxilliary suit function, basically a special weapon or device) called the PBA Repair Kit which allowed them to fix up your suit systems but not your health. You could be down to your last hit point but have your suit repaired good as new, but one bad hit and you die (and dying always equals your suit exploding and roasting you alive inside regardless of how damaged it itself was). The only way to recover health was through a different ASF called the aptly-named Auto-Doc.
• Thrillville averts this in RC Wars, cars that are damaged are harder to control.
• Averted in the TOCA Race Driver games, where cars will take damage realistically, suffering performance hits with increased damage.
• Lara in the Tomb Raider games can take all sorts of damage and can do her acrobatics and combat without hinderance, but if she's on the last sliver of health, even the smallest damage from sources like a rat's bite or being a bit too close to fire will have her keel over and die.
• Handwaved in the Total Annihilation manual by the introduction of "Heavy Armor" that makes the unit behave like one giant molecule.
• Treasure Planet: Battle at Procyon averts this. Ships that take enough damage can have their sails, engines, rudders, weapon banks and even sections of the hull destroyed, depending on what part of the ship receives enough damage.
• Undertale plays this straight for the player character, but averts this for monsters who get lower defences as their health lowers. Unfortunately for Pacifist players, this makes it harder and sometimes even impossible to spare monsters via Cherry Tapping.
• Averted in UnReal World. If you are hurt, you'll take penalty to skill checks, and the worse you are injured, the higher the penalty is.
• In the SNES version of U.N. Squadron, taking a hit causes your ship to go into Danger mode, at which point one more hit will kill you. After a little while, your ship would repair itself, albeit with some life lost, and be able to take another hit. But if your life meter gets too low, your ship will permanently remain in Danger mode until you either die or get a health refill.
• In Vagrant Story the different areas of your body all have different health bars (in addition to your overall HP), and when, for example, your arms take too much damage, your strength begins to drop. With your shield arm, you're less likely to block. The torso, you take more damage. The head, you're magic abilities and defense decrease. The legs, you move at 1/2 speed.
• Used to an absurd degree in Valkyrie Profile. As the dead spirits accompanying Lenneth are actually animated in the real world by her divine power (she only has enough to summon three, explaining the Arbitrary Headcount Limit), not only did each character reach Critical Existence Failure at 0 hit points, but neglecting to revive Lenneth in three turns upon her death caused Critical Existence Failure for the entire party.
  • Averted but not for you in Valkyrie Profile 2: Silmeria. The PCs can keep fighting without penalty as long as they have that one hitpoint, but enemies are composed of different parts, and on some enemies breaking a piece off will render them immobile for the rest of the battle (for example, slicing the wing off a bird leaves it laying on the ground, still alive, but unable to move or attack). Some enemies, if you remove their main attacking limb, will even retreat. And with nearly all living monsters, breaking the Head part results in an instant kill, regardless of their total HP.
• Vector Thrust plays this one straight. While you might take additional damage (up to a One-Hit Kill) if different parts of your aircraft take hits, but as long as you have that one crucial point of HP left, you'll be able to fly and fight as if nothing had happened.
• In Vindictus, there is a mild aversion with some of the boss fights, as some bosses will occasionally go into a stun state for no apparent reason by a chance improved by having low health. It is mainly played straight though, and there is actually a bonus in one battle for finishing the first area's That One Boss using kicks.
• Almost always played straight in Warcraft. However, Protection-specialized paladins invert this trope with the "Ardent Defender" cooldown, which grants a significant heal instead of damage if the blow would have killed the paladin while the effect is active. Without the effect active, however, this is played straight. Rogues also have Cheat Death, and Mages have Cauterize which function similarly.
  • A few bosses avert this trope as well. For example, the usual way of defeating Kologarn in Ulduar is to attack his arms until they're destroyed, not only removing a chunk of the boss' hit points but depriving him of some of his best attacks as well.
  • Inverted by Brewmaster monks. If they fall below 35% their instant, resource building, self heal gets its cooldown removed for easy spamming back to a safe health range. A glyph in the upcoming Warlords of Draenor even drops its energy cost if in that health range, and another glyph also automatically summons a big healing sphere beside them if they fall in a dangerous health range, which grants a substantial heal when absorbed (by quickly strafing within its hitbox).
  • Trinkets for tank-specialized characters with a "below 35% health" effect also invert this, many of them providing defensive buffs when falling into a dangerous range.
  • The tank-specialized legendary cloak in Mists of Pandaria grants a heal much like a passive version of the Paladin's Ardent Defender.
  • The Death Knight talent "Purgatory's Grasp" exists much like the Tryndamere example below, only as a passive effect.
• Subverted in Warlock: Master of the Arcane, units deal less damage more wounded they are. Some units have more than one unit in them and damage is indicated by these units dying out.
• We Who Are About to Die: All damage slowly cuts down your Stamina bar, capping it out lower and lower as you're more injured. Heavily injured gladiators stumble around barely able to swing more often than they can fight properly, so injuries are very costly. You can still fight if you're good enough, but it's in your best interest to keep yourself in top shape no matter how much you need to spend on medical attention between fights.
• The Wing Commander series averts this: Once your shields are gone, different ship systems can take damage, and will affect things such as navigation, gun recharge rate, and of course exploded/non-exploded state of said ship.
  • Especially hilarious where your communications could become so damaged you could no longer transmit landing requests, essentially meaning you could never land, in the games that didn't just automatically land you (like Privateer). With patience (and not being in a timed retreat mission, like for example the last Loki IV mission in Wing Commander III) one can wait for the auto-repair to fix the comm system, so they can request landing clearance.
    • Of course, if the auto-repair system is also dead, you're kinda hosed.
• Crashing the player ship in WipEout XL and 2097 causes the message "Critical Shield Failure" to appear. Also, the ship explodes, even if it was only grazing the wall at the time.
• Any installment of the Wizardry series averts this trope. The damage dealt by the breath attacks of certain enemies is based on their current HP, so there is a reason to wound them without killing them. However when dealing with anything else it's played straight as an enemy is just as deadly with 1 HP left as fully healthy.
  • In Wizardry 8, if you hit an enemy with 1 HP left even with the weakest weapons in the game they will explode spectacularly in a shower of gibs. Finishing off a group of wounded enemies with your bard's bagpipes at the lowest power level is hilarious.
• Wolf (DOS) averts it. While you only have one health meter, it governs your physical abilities. If you are injured, you will be unable to sprint and can only limp along at a pace about as fast as a trot.
• Played more than straight in The World Ends with You. The way HP works allows a partner to have less than 0 HP but all they'll do is complain and change their idle animation. Furthermore, some threads will even give you hefty stat bonuses while in this state. However, take enough damage and you lose the right to exist.
• World in Conflict's infantry squads subvert this: As the squad loses health, its members die one by one and the squad loses firepower accordingly. Since each member of a squad has a specific role to play, loss of certain members can lessen or eliminate the squad's ability to attack certain types of units (eg. a regular infantry squad cannot attack helicopters if it loses its AA soldier). The trope is still played straight for all other types of units and buildings.
• World of Warships manages to both have Critical Existence Failure and Subsystem Damage in the same game. Hits to various subsystems will in fact disable them, but this is tracked separately from the ship's overall hitpoints. Damage control parties will fix subsystem damage (to a point), put out fires, and stop flooding. Repair parties will restore some HP, but neither will effect the other's damage. So it is more than possible to see a ship steaming around with 1 HP left and all subsystems operational, and then watch it burst into flames, break in half, and sink from little more than a random piece of shrapnel.
• If you don't fall into water when you die in Worms, worms reduced to zero health blow themselves up. The death explosion can even harm other worms to the point of death too, or otherwise set off a hilarious chain of Stuff Blowing Up.
  • But at the same time faux-averted in the game, as when a worm starts to run low on health, they will cough, moan, have trouble breathing, and other extreme pain symptoms. This has no impact on their performance however.
• Wreckfest from Bugbear Entertainment downplays this trope; your car's performance suffers when taking damage but as long as you have at least 1 HP the car still drives moderately well. When your car's health gets low enough you cease taking damage from small hits to avoid 'love taps' completely wrecking your ride. Because the game engine deals less damage to the aggressor you can still push other cars off the road even at low health without crippling your car but ramming someone too hard will still wreck you.
• Averted in X2: The Threat and later games in the X-Universe. Once the shields go down, the ship starts taking damage to the hull. When hull integrity goes below ~85%, the ship starts to lose speed, and upgrades and weapons randomly break.
  • The Boron-designed Ion Disruptor takes advantage of this mechanic, using its single point of hull damage to maximize the time to strip equipment from the target to clear the way for boarding parties.
• Averted in X-COM: UFO Defense. There is not only limb damage that affects stats, but any hit can inflict Fatal Wounds that drain the hit points of units hit every turn (which doesn't affect aliens), and a stun meter that causes the target to faint should it ever exceed that unit's HP (which does affect aliens, and is in fact required to beat the game). Early-game, if a shot doesn't kill a soldier, they'll probably fall unconscious within a few turns and then just bleed to death. Played straight with Cyberdisks. When they die, they promptly blow up real good, taking out anything in roughly a 10-square radius... potentially even other Cyberdisks!
  • Sometimes a group of cyberdisks gets destroyed because the one in the back shoots one in the front, which promptly causes a chain reaction destroying the whole group and pretty much everything in quite a large radius.
• In XCOM: Enemy Unknown, the game is immediately over if you eight nations withdraw from the project. Regardless of if you're winning every battle you go into, if you don't keep enough countries' panic levels in check, you may well find yourself facing the project being immediately shut down.
• In X-Wing and TIE Fighter, once you started taking hits to your hull, various systems would fail or short out, including targeting, sensors, power management, and even weapons, shields, and more rarely, flight control or engine power. Oddly, though, never life support.
  • On the first B-Wing simulation mission, enemies actually attacked you with Ion cannons, disabling your craft without destroying it.
  • TIE fighter pilots wear fully sealed space suits. X-Wing pilots, on the other hand (and all Rebel pilots, really) wear something called a "Magcon" suit—a smaller version of the magnetic containment convenient energy shield that contains atmosphere and some body heat, which activates if the pilot encounters vacuum. It's the kind of shield you see on those big docking bays that are open to vacuum. The X-wings do have life support, because the suit can only shield them for so long, but life support is probably ignored in the game because given the game's repair time scales (about 5 minutes for your R2 to fully patch up your nonfunctioning engines), the Magcon would invariably keep the pilot alive until the life support was repaired.

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