Surveyor bots repair injured Hyperion loaders. You will learn to hate them.
— A Borderlands 2 loading screen.
- Dead Trigger: The red-eyed zombies from the second game are faster, stronger, and more aggresive than their green-eyed counterparts, on top of being still intelligent enough to wield pipes as melee weapons. That said, they are a pain on the rear to fight, especially when the player is in a closed space where there are multiple openings for them to leap over or crawl under. This is especially true when a Special Zombie appears, since its presence causes even more zombies to spawn and you have to kill them or ignore them and run (and pray the SZ is not surrounded by Red-Eyed Zombies). Even worse, weapon-wielding ones cause even more damage on top of having a range advantage.
- Death in the Water, an underwater FPS, have sea snakes. They die in one hit unlike sharks or octopi, but tends to swim circles around you at rapid speed and repeatedly potshot you from the side or behind. You'll likely miss a few shots with your Harpoon Gun before finally killing it.
- Far Cry 4:
- Eagles swoop down to attack the player at random times. These are almost impossible to avoid since they come down from the sky and their attack animation starts from about 20 feet away, making it very difficult to line up a shot in time.
- Demon Fish inhabit just about every large body of water in the game; if you're swimming across a lake or pond, you can usually expect them to take a bite out of you at least once. What makes them annoying isn't that they're particularly dangerous (although they can be if you're not careful), but that their skins are required for crafting upgrades; they're extremely difficult to kill with conventional weapons. Your best bet is to provoke them into attacking you so that they trigger a quick-time event that will allow you to stab them to death, since they're the only animal in the game other than crocodiles which surviving the QTE means death for them. An upside is that one of the first Kyrat Fashion Weekly quests the player is likely to come across requires hunting a rare "Black Water Dragon" with explosives to increase your capacity for throwable weapons, not only ensuring that you can get the M79 grenade launcher much earlier than intended for free, but also allowing you to exact your revenge with it and get an easy source of regular skins if you don't have every one you need.
- Serious Sam's kleers. Not only are they obnoxiously numbered - far outnumbering anything else in the game, even any of the beheaded soldiers that are weak enough to justify such numbers - they perform a heavily damaging lunge attack (enough to kill in three or four hits on medium difficult) that is hard to dodge - and even harder to dodge when the five kleer behind the first one launch at you immediately afterwards. Worse is that they soak up a ton of damage - requiring a point-blank double-barrel shotgun blast to kill, a maneuver not advised.
- Many flying enemies in Serious Sam 2, especially small floaters and witches. In multiplayer it's more apparent.
- Serious Sam 3 has the aurigan cave demons, aka "space monkeys", which are usually fought in areas with lots of pillars. They jump from pillar to pillar and hide behind them, occasionally lunging at player when their back is turned.
- Pretty much every cop in Mirror's Edge exists solely for the purpose of interrupting some otherwise fun parkour platforming. This applies especially to the ones that you have to kill to move on, despite the fact that you have no body armour and are totally unarmed. And they have fucking machine guns.
- Unreal has several. The most widespread are probably the pupae, four-legged spiderlike critters (actually embrionic Skaarj) who don't do any significant damage with their lunge attack and are slow, weak and easily targetable to boot, but make an extremely irritating hissing/tapping sound that'll have most players instantly go "OHMYGODWHEREISIT DIEDIEDIE!!". A similar effect is caused by the flies, as their threat level is practically insignificant but their flying noise is scarily reminiscent of actual insects.
- Unreal: Return to Na Pali features 1-foot tall creatures called "predators". They always attack in groups, run at least as fast as the player, and have a tendency to appear out of nowhere. On top of this, their hit-boxes are far smaller than their actual models, so things that should hit them end up missing entirely. They also have a full 100 Hit Points despite being only a little bigger than the Nali Rabbit, which dies in one shot from anything.
- The Quake series has quite a few, monster and alien alike:
- In the first game, you have Scrags and Grunts, enemies that are relatively small and often use the cover of other enemies to get in a potshot at you. Knights are relatively weak, but take enough time to kill that it's likely that they'll get at least a bit of damage in with their running attacks when you encounter them.
- Quake II has the Fliers, small gunships that are pretty hard to hit, fire off a rather damaging laser stream, and make an ear-splitting sound as they hover. They share these traits with the Technician, which is only different in that it's larger and has way too much health for an enemy of its caliber (almost the same of the genuinely threatening Gunner). One of its melee attacks, an electric prod, hurts you even if you run far away from it. Barracuda Sharks distract you when you're in the water, often making you lose at least a few hit points by drowning, and have quite the damaging bite. Shotgun Guards are another Glass Cannon kind of foe, especially in groups, made worse by their unusually accurate shots.
- The Reckoning has Ripper Guards, who fire a three-shot burst of projectiles that can bounce off walls, and Laser Guards, whose beams distort your vision and lower your accuracy. Enforcers also get promoted to this, as they don't have to cock their guns before firing. And finally, the Gekks, who do as much damage with their ranged attacks as the pitifully weak Light Guards, but have the health of a Gunner and the behavior of a mix between the Berserker and the Mutant (they can get in close pretty quickly and dish out lots of pain witth their claws). The worst offense about them is that you meet these buggers almost exclusively in dark caves, where you'll often be using your Blaster as a flare gun to light the way.
- The Doom series has Lost Souls, Ticks/Trites, and Forgotten Ones *
- The Lost Souls in Doom and Doom II. These nasty little flying skulls are even more of a pain in the original because your main weapon for close-up killing, the shotgun, takes two blasts instead of one to kill each one, which doesn't exactly help when you're wall to wall in with them - the only upside is, assuming the shot doesn't make them flinch, they'll be slowed down or even sent slowly floating backwards by the force of the shot, but there's rarely enough space to really take advantage of this. In the latter, they could be more-or-less infinitely produced from a Mook Maker aptly called the Pain Elemental,note but at least you have a double-barreled shotgun that can kill the little buggers in one blast now.
- The Lost Souls in Doom³ are even worse, as they tend to fly in random directions when not charging at you, making them a pain to shoot down. Their ram has a ton of knockback too, so you might find yourself plummeting to your doom if you don't watch the ledges when fighting these guys... which leads us to their finest bat moment: in the Hell level of Doom 3, where they get lots of chances to knock you off of the floating platforms into a Bottomless Pit. Fortunately they won't show up if you avoid jumping on the platforms that trigger them.
- Doom³ added Ticks/Trites. Individually, they're a matter of two or three pistol bullets to kill, but in large numbers and tight spaces (such as That One Corridor in post-Hell Delta Labs), they are an absolute nightmare.
- Because of the way the game works, pretty much all lesser demons in Doom Eternal can fall into this. Unlike Doom (2016), which had a hard enemy limit in every encounter, Doom Eternal has any foe that isn't a Heavy or Super Heavy demon endlessly respawn into the arena until you've eliminated all the major enemies. This is because ammo and health are earned by Glory Killing enemies and the game drops these lesser enemies into the foray to keep you supplied to do battle with the bigger ones. Unfortunately they are still enemies and thus your focus can never 100% be on the big game targets since these guys are going to be taking potshots at you if you let them be. During fights with a Marauder this can be especially punishing because you generally need to keep your eyes locked on the Marauder to know when you've got the opportunity to attack or respond to it as its movement and combative ability is pretty much a match for your own. With these less threatening enemies constantly respawning into the fight they'll always be in your periphery and chipping away at you, giving the Marauder the right opening to land a killing blow if you are forced to deal with a lesser demon at the wrong time.
- Mechsects in Ion Fury are severed heads with mechanical spider legs attached. Though the weakest enemy in the game, they are small and are thus hard to hit, and they tend to come in packs.
- The Halo series has many examples.
- First, of course, are The Flood. On Legendary, they cross into Demonic Spiders territory.
- The Drones, which are swarms of annoying flying bug-things that fly over your cover and won't die. On Legendary, they also cross into Demonic territory.
- The worst is basically EVERYTHING in the Library level of Halo: Combat Evolved. There's goddamned millions of Flood forms and you have to kill every. Single. Last. One. Meanwhile, 343 Guilty Spark annoys the hell out of you. They come from freaking everywhere, making it difficult to put your back to a wall and nigh-impossible to avoid getting blindsided. Add in the fact that every part of the level looks the same and it's very easy to get lost.
- Halo 4 introduces two other types of Promethean battle droids to complement the Knights. The first are Crawlers, fast little buggers who love to attack in swarms, and can easily wolf-pack you to death on higher difficulties. Also, a few of them have Binary Rifles. The others are Watchers, airborne enemies who are small and fairly agile. They can summon Crawler packs or heavy autoturrets, can throw grenades back at you, can form hardlight shields to protect Knights, and in 4 can even resurrect freshly-killed Knights. It's in a player's best interest to always kill Watchers first... which can be tough, as they will start flitting around once you open fire on them, leaving you frantically trying to track them and deal enough damage to destroy them while Crawlers swarm you and/or Knights gun you down.
- The Dark Forces Saga game series:
- Seeker remotes. The thingy Luke practices lightsaber skills with in the first movie. They weren't powerful, they weren't tough, and they would require a day or two to actually kill you, but not with a blaster pistol, a lightsaber, a rocket launcher, or a plasma cannon was there an efficient way to destroy those little bastards. It took either a lot of time, ammo, or luck to take them down, even with the games' auto-aim feature turned on. Probably the only efficient way of killing them is blasting them with full-power Force lightning, but damn near every game in the series that actually gives you that ability stops spawning the buggers by the point you actually get it. Thank the Force they were rare after the first game (and that you could use them as weapons yourself in the second).
- Dark Forces also had bats in another form: mines. Innocuous little disks, they had a proximity sensor and left off a boom bigger than a thermal detonator when you got close enough. A clever player could turn this against his enemies... when he knew the mines were there.
- Jedi Knight II: Jedi Outcast also deserves a special mention for a few... inspired inventions. First, the little critters with teeth in the Artus missions, which were tiny and so hard to hit with anything approaching accuracy, especially at one point where you have to defend an Imperial officer from a group of them. Thankfully, the stun baton was efficient at dealing with them. Second, the Rodian snipers in the Nar Shadaa and Cloud City missions. You'd think after the game gave you the lightsaber and Force powers it would let you cut loose with them, right? Nope! The snipers' shots can't be blocked. There is an automatic Force-dodge, but it's too unreliable to rely on and eats up massive sections of the Force gauge for just a single dodge, which means you're fucked if it happens when you're trying to jump over a gap of any variety - and that's assuming as well that the bastards don't just cheat by firing two shots in far quicker succession than you can to ensure you take the hit anyway.
- The thermal-detonator-tossing Grans that show up in several of the Dark Forces games. They have perfect throwing aim from absurd distances, never run out of grenades, and (in both Jedi Knight: Dark Forces II and Jedi Knight: Jedi Academy) they appear as early as the second level and are completely indistinguishable from their rifle-wielding and fistfighting brethren until they start chucking explosives at you.
- Heretic II featured heavily annoying "Harpies," essentially gigantic bat things. It wouldn't be so bad if it weren't a third-person game and therefore featured imprecise aiming, and even your most powerful spell could be easily avoided, as they could strafe in mid-air.
- Every House of the Dead game has zombie bats as enemies, but House of the Dead 2 adds to the madness by having the even harder to hit zombie owls, which fly on screen and then automatically head straight for the player in a kamikaze rush.
- Half-Life 2's Antlions. Especially in Chapter 8: Sandtraps, where they love to push you onto the sand to summon even more of them. They make getting the achievements "Stay Off The Sand" and "Lambda Locator" a real challenge.
- The Scanners also definitely fall into this category, as they have an annoying habit of flying in your face and blinding you. They have an uncanny knack for doing this exactly when you really need to focus. Worse is that late-game varieties trade off the ability to blind you with a camera flash... in return for seeking out targets for Striders. Dammit.
- The regular and fast Headcrabs, which jump all over the place and frequently end up behind you, often behind furniture. They don't do much damage or have much health, but they are very hard to hit. The poison headcrabs, however...
- The original Half-Life and the Alien Controllers. Little guys with big heads that fly around flinging electricity orbs with great accuracy and screeching creepily. They're much harder to take down than they appear at first. Thankfully, they only show up during the final levels of the game.
- In the Source version they do literal strafing runs, flying so much into your face their model clips through the camera.
- Also, Barnacles. Game: original Half-Life. Part: "Forget About Freeman", swimming stretch. After you finally get through the game's last leeches, you pop up to take a breather... RIGHT INTO A FUCKING TENTACLE HANGING FROM THE CEILING. Source games are even worse since Barnacles can now drop their tentacles into the water and deep water is always murky. Face it, Valve mastered Paranoia Fuel up to eleven.
- Manhacks certainly qualifiy: small? check. flying? check. minimal damage? check. attack in swarms? check. Fortunately, they don't show up very often.
- Hell, you know what? Original Half-Life had those FUCKING LEECHES. Why? Their small damage quickly adds up (in the original, one point per bite; in the Source version, five points per second), they instantly swarm you AND the fact that their hitboxes physically block your way which is an utter bitch during long swimming sessions. And their wriggling is just plain creepy. Most of your weapons don't work underwater either. It is said that by the time of HL2, leeches spread out into the ocean and bred to the millions, eating all marine life. Thank God we don't have to go in...
- Half-Life also had the snark nestings. Small, fast, noisy and exploding.
- S.T.A.L.K.E.R.'s hound-like enemies epitomize the Goddamned Bats. They are extremely difficult to hit due to their random movement, small size, and instantaneous 180-degree direction-change; travel in swarms; offer absolutely no reward upon their deaths; block your movement by swarming around you; and, worst of all, frequently appear at a bottleneck between you and a place you really need to be, most often when enemies are already at your back.
- The worst of the lot are the Psy-dogs: extremely fast, agile Mook Maker pseudodogs that generally hang back, spawning an infinite number of illusionary copies of itself that are very hard to tell from the real thing, charge you in packs, and can still hurt you despite being illusions/hallucinations. Incredibly irritating, forces you to waste ammo that's often already in short supply. The only redeeming quality is that all the "projections" die when the real one does.
- Bandits are also extremely annoying. While their body armor consists of little more than a black jacket and ski mask, and their weapons are hands-down the worst in the game, they can be found in virtually every single area, are always hostile except when in the second game (and even then, you'll run into groups that randomly shoot at you, when the "neutral" ones aren't mugging you of course), and they always manage to hit you with at least one bullet. Sure, their Makarovs do about as much damage as a kitten once you get a decent set of body armor, but when there's five of them at once...
- Not to mention that as noted their gear ninety-nine percent of the time is merely substandard at best, and you'll rarely be carrying weapons that use the same ammo as their weapons (with the exception of any shotguns). So the most you'll usually get off one of the bodies of an entire group is a few bandages or medkits, and most of the hardware is left right where it is due to weight concerns. To sum up - you've probably wasted a few magazine's worth of ammunition and a couple bandages and/or medkits, and even with whatever you manage to yank off the bodes, you're still looking at a net loss.
- System Shock 2 The Goddamned Monkeys. They start out shooting Cryokinesis bursts at you, which then turn into Pyrokinesis bursts that do more damage. They're so small that they're a real pain to hit with your wrench, and they scratch when you get close, dealing a surprising amount of damage for tiny monkey hands. They're everywhere, and you can hear them chattering a mile away. Unlike the spiders, they can shoot you from across a huge hallway...or that section of cargo bay filled with them.
- Hope you saved enough bullets to deal with Protocol Droids. Wrench combat being annoyingly risky and slow, you're going to be using ammo... and then these guys come along, who explode upon entering melee range.
- Dead Space: Extraction includes inch-high swarms of Goddamned Bugs. They have no annoying qualities (other than being small and in groups), but can be dangerous if a bunch of them manages to latch on a player.
- In the original Descent series, there was the Thiefbot. This nasty little creature would come sneaking up on an unsuspecting player (typically in the middle of a fight with other enemies), zap you with a special shot that made your view go all wonky, steal some powerups, and then zip off to the furthest corners of the level in an erratic evasion pattern.
- The Thiefbot has the distinction of being the one enemy in the game who can't actually physically damage you at all, but also probably the one you'll be expending most of your firepower (and profanity allowance) on, as it's among the fastest and most heavily-armored robots in the game. Normal enemies you target and hit smartly while trying to be efficient with ammo/energy usage and to stay behind cover, but a Thiefbot generates such hatred that most players will drop whatever they're doing and initiate a wild chase through half of any given level to get a vital weapon back, making desperate potshots, indiscriminately firing anything available and chasing it into minefields.
- What's worst about the Thiefbot is that if it managed to steal from you more than once, the weapons it first stole will most likely not be returned to you when you destroy the bot.
- And there were the ITDs (which can summon larger robots), Sidearm Modula (blinding flash missiles), Hornets, ITSC, Seekers (outright Demonic Spiders, in fact), etc.
- The Internal Tactical Droids are a particularly clear case of this trope. Their weaponry was incapable of inflicting much damage per hit, but they consistently employed the tactic of sneaking up, hitting you once, and then fleeing evasively to the uttermost parts of the level. Thing is, you had to hunt down, corner, and kill every single one of them (and lo, there were many), because otherwise they'd open some door at an inconvenient time when you had your back to it and expose you to heavy fire from who knows what. On some levels picking up the yellow or red key when there were still ITDs loose could actually be suicidal due to this phenomenon.
- Descent 3 pits you against little purple shark shaped robots that only deal melee damage. Their primary source of nutrition must be your ships shields because they eat right through them. And did I mention they are only about a quarter the size of your ship, move very fast, and have a tendency to come running from three rooms away?
- To sum it up: The line separating this trope from Demonic Spiders does not exist in this game series.
- The Thiefbot has the distinction of being the one enemy in the game who can't actually physically damage you at all, but also probably the one you'll be expending most of your firepower (and profanity allowance) on, as it's among the fastest and most heavily-armored robots in the game. Normal enemies you target and hit smartly while trying to be efficient with ammo/energy usage and to stay behind cover, but a Thiefbot generates such hatred that most players will drop whatever they're doing and initiate a wild chase through half of any given level to get a vital weapon back, making desperate potshots, indiscriminately firing anything available and chasing it into minefields.
- Resistance 2 has the Chimeran drones, which are really annoying - they fly about and are hard to hit, distract you when there are worse enemies around, and can't be dodged. Some of the other bots listed here.
- Return to Castle Wolfenstein: Those damned Femme-Nazi Elite Mooks in the church mission. On the "Death Incarnate" difficulty, they become outright Demonic Spiders.
- Marathon has the Wasps, which come in enormous packs, hide around corners, and fling corrosive spit at you from huge distances for minor but irritating damage. They tend to lurk in niches not at eye level, and they take three shots from a handgun to kill. The Fusion Pistol can dispatch these in one shot, but they have a silver form that takes two hits even from that gun to kill.
- The common infected in Left 4 Dead have this wonderful ability to slow your movement speed when they hit you, which is so effective that if two of them are attacking you at once you're practically immobilized. It makes it great fun when you're trying to run away, or heck, even just walk across the room, when you CAN'T FREAKING MOVE because no matter how many you kill, more of the bastards keep trickling in and slowing you down or just physically blocking your path.
- The sequel makes this even worse where the AI for the common infected are smarter by running to your side or behind you as the rush to you and attack while you flail or shoot like mad and miss because the infected just practically slide around you and flank you on all sides.
- The sequel also introduces uncommon common infected, which are common infected with a gimmick. Hazmat infected are immune to fire, but are not a big deal. Clown infected attracts nearby infected do you with its squeaking shoes if it spots you, making it almost like a mini Boomer. Mudmen infected are one of the most annoying ones where they run on all fours to run faster and are not slowed down by water, plus when they hit you, they splash your screen with mud. Worker infected wear headphones that block out noise so they can't hear a Pipe Bomb (because of lazy coding, they will also ignore Bile Bombs due to it using the same attraction script as a Pipe Bomb). The Riot infected is one of the more annoying ones where they wear body armor and are almost unkillable in the front but are weak in the backside. Most players will shove a Riot infected to stumble them so that they can run to their backs and kill them, but if you are in a narrow hall or push the zombie into a corner, you are going to have a hell of a time trying to kill them.
- Will Rock has Goddamned Rats... Explosive rats. Small, blazing fast, hard to hit, and chase you relentlessly. There's a level where you are assaulted by dozens of them, but thankfully it's in a wide, open space; much worse when it happens again, in a much smaller circular hall.
- Also the basic axe-throwing enemies. Not so much because they deal much damage (they don't), or because they're hard to kill (they aren't), but because when they die they go through an animation that eventually causes two lesser enemies to spawn from their remains. You can't ignore them or they'll start chipping away at your health when you turn your back, and you can't kill them before they spawn, so every one of the original baddies you kill requires you to wait a good few seconds for the split/spawn animation to finish.
- Speaking of Goddamn Rats, Blood has these... and the peculiar quirks of the Build Engine make them especially hard to hit without crouching.
- Lurkers, for those who have played Metro 2033. They're fast, take out a good chunk of a clip, and can dissapear into their little rat-holes at any moment after gnawing the protagonist's kneecaps off. Add to that the fact that they tend to respawn endlessly and their rat-holes double as instant-kill deathtraps and you have goddamn mutant Russian rats.
- Borderlands Goddamn Rakks. Spiderants and the Bandits probably count too.
- Don't forget the Skags and Scythids. In fact anything in that game that isn't a Demonic Spider or That One Boss.
- Spiderants deserve a little more explanation: Where there's one, there's fifteen others ready to ruin your day, and you better hope none of them are elemental badasses which are downright Demonic Spiders (no pun intended). The major problem with Spiderants is the fact their front is covered by a very thick shell that render most of your weapons nearly useless and trying to go around it to Attack Its Weak Point tends to be problematic since there are variants of Spiderants that a) try to sneak on you or b) shoot you from afar.
- Defilers are the only zombies who operate solely at range, spitting bile at you that obscures your vision and slows your movement, making you a sitting duck for their zombie pals. Corpse Eaters are even worse than Rakks who will attack, retreat and give you some room to line up a few shots. These bastards will swarm twelve at a time, continuously circle, locking you in place and pick players apart. This is all assuming you don't have a Tankenstein breathing down on your head.
- Borderlands 2 adds Stalkers, stinging lizardlike creatures that go obnoxiously invisible.
- Stalkers, and really, most enemies, become Demonic Spiders in True Vault Hunter Mode. Rabid Stalkers and Skag in particular move obscenely fast, hit like tanks, and take a crazy amount of damage to kill.
- Also Surveyors: while they don't have much HP and can't deal as enormous amounts of damage as many other enemies, they have a few traits that really make them annoying: 1. They're small, flying targets, which make them incredibly aggravating to shoot down 2. they have the ability to repair and/or create shields for robotic enemies, which can drag out many fights longer than you'd want them to be. The developers were well aware of this; one of the loading screen tips is "Surveyor bots repair injured Hyperion loaders. You will learn to hate them."
- Operation Body Count has the goddamn rats that make up the majority of the first 5 levels and continue to appear throughout the rest of the game. one or two aren't an issue. 4 or 5 might make you worry. 10 to 20 of them coming at you at the same time is when you start bringing out the uzi and doing the old "Spray 'n' Pray". Oh, and they come in to sizes: Small minor nuisance and Giant notable nuisance. And since the annoying parts of the rats carry over to those shock drones...
- Duke Nukem 3D has its fair share, but the little oozes that grab your face (blocking the screen doing so) and the self-destructing kamikaze drones stand out the most. The drone even has an appropriately nerve-wracking noise that'll have you jumping on your seat and then searching the entire level until you find and destroy the bastard, just because you know if you don't it'll smash in your face and explode when you're least expecting it.
- In most Call of Duty games the most irritating enemy you would have to face are dogs, they easy to kill but they run fast, and almost hard to hit. When they get to you, you have a small chance of stopping them from ripping out your throat.
- In Black Ops II, enemy Quad drones can be a huge nuisance, on account of being small, nimble targets that flit around and pelt you with machine gun fire from all angles while most likely dodging your attacks. It's especially bad in Strike Force missions, wherein swarms of them can show up more than once in a given level. ASD's and CLAW's, at least, are obvious threats that you can single out and destroy as soon as they show up. Quads, on the other hand, can and will hang around for quite a while and harass you while you try to fulfill your objectives.
- Star Wars: Republic Commando's second level introduced Scavenger Droids, little flying metal droids that filled the player's screen with static as they drew nearer, moved constantly to avoid being shot, and whose favorite form of attack was to attach themselves to the player's helmet and carve through it to attack the player's head.
- Also the Magna Guards that showed up towards the end of the game who would jump, flip, and dodge all over the screen and could take quite a few hits before going down.
- In Killing Floor, the crawlers aren't very difficult to kill, and they don't do very much damage alone. The only problems is that they attack in swarms of 4-6 at a time, and they jump, and they're about a foot-and-a-half tall. They're also textured black, so in the dark they're difficult to spot. They have the annoying habit of blocking your way when running from fleshpounds or improbable swarms of enemies, and if you encounter them on stairs expect to bounce around like a goddamn rubber ball. They're the absolute worst for the melee class, as berserkers often have to crouch and ignore every other enemy just to have a chance of hitting them.
- Singularity has the goddamned Phase Ticks. Not only do they inflict high damage, but they also inflict fear on the player. These things are like suicide bombers and you are the towers. If that's not enough, they appear in huge swarms and are COMMON. Consider yourself cornered having 5 of these near your vicinity.
- Sniper Elite: Enemy snipers. They have a nasty habit of taking potshots at you and hiding before you're able to target them.
- Carnivorous fishes in general often seem to be this in First Person Shooters, since they're usually small, tend to come in swarms, and are fought underwater - an environment ill-suited for classic FPS fighting (since they can come at you from up and below, and you need to mind the oxygen running out).
- The Rotfish from Quake.
- The Bone Eels from Blood.
- The Electro-fish in Serious Sam
- The Koi from Shadow Warrior.
- And speaking of Shadow Warrior: the original game has wasps which sting quite a bit, are really tiny and move in a fast, erratic pattern that makes them damn near impossible to hit. The best weapon to deal with these tiny, pesky insects? The rocket launcher - fired somewhere close to where they're swarming so the splash damage takes care of their risible hitpoints. Any other weapon will have you expend hundreds of bullets shooting the air (though the shotgun is mildly less bad due to having a cone of fire that helps counter the damned things' speed). For bonus points, turn up the difficulty and they turn into Demonic Spiders, as their damage goes up and well into killing capacity.
- The red ghosts. They float around, throw bloody projectiles at you that hurt quite a bit, and will often cloak and float off before you can deal enough damage to kill them - requiring you to stand around waiting for them to uncloak so you can finish the job.
- The SWAT team in PAYDAY: The Heist whenever they use their smoke grenades. Creates a huge cloud of smoke you can't see through, but the cops can see through them perfectly, even if they are not a cloaker. The smoke lasts for several minutes and can cause slowdown if your computer isn't strong enough to handle all the particle effects. Just for fun, watch the enemies use another smoke grenade right after their first one fizzles out.
- E.Y.E: Divine Cybermancy has the Perigrum Forma, small leaping things that look vaguely like Aliens. They are rather weak, but they are hard to hit and spawn en masse.
- Mecha levels in Shogo: Mobile Armor Division have human enemies. They're pathetically weak and have no armor whatsoever, so any weapon at all will kill them in one shot - as will simply stomping them flat. Good luck finding them, though, as their minuscule size, dark clothing and trailless weapons allow them surprisingly good camouflage. They are little more than an annoyance singularily, but as you laboriously find the little buggers they'll whittle down your health enough that the next mecha you meet will have a rather higher chance of smacking you down.
- Commandos, Ravens, and Cicadas in MechWarrior: Online that are equipped with the ECM upgrade went from laughably bad models of mech to just plain mean. It turns a poorly armored little cannon-fodder mech into a monster that can make a team of Humongous Mecha disappear, due to the fact that ECM interferes with the ability to lock on to mechs with homing weapons, gauge their health, spot them on radar or map functions or even SEE them at a distance. This, coupled with the mech's relatively high speed and agility makes it tough to take them out to stop the ECM's jamming effect. The only other mech capable of equiping ECM is the Atlas, which turns it from a Mighty Glacier into a Demonic Spider thanks to the Atlas's large number of weapons and thick armor that are now under a cloaking field.
- The regular splicers in BioShock games, specifically those armed with melee weapons and light guns.
- Nosferatu: The Wrath of Malachi:
- There are literal goddamned Bats that fly around the roofs of the Castle, which can be annoying as they hurt you if they touch you and are really hard to hit.
- Another literal goddamned Bat would be the Demodus. They're much smaller targets than any of the other enemies, and they move very fast. They also take quite a bit to bring down.
- Devil Dogs could also count, since they're among the weakest enemies, but are very fast and often appear alongside other enemies.
- Let's just say that any enemy can be a goddamned bat in some situation.
- The mammoth birds of Evolve. Fast enough to be hard to hit but too slow to outrun you. They have enough health to survive attacks that should kill them while packing an AOE electrical attack. They are on every map, spawn often, and travel in groups. Their AI makes them shock you if you get too close, while occasionally making them charge players and attack rather than flee. For these reasons they are the most hated wildlife in the game, to the point where a community challenge allowed Monster and Hunter players to team up against them.
- Rolling Smiles and Broken Smiles in Killer7. Both move in erratic ways, making it hard to hit them at all, let alone in their weak spots. Rolling Smiles roll at you and their weak spot is on their chest, and Broken Smiles move VERY fast in a zigzag pattern.
- In Tribes 2, the "Annoying Bastard" playstyle/loadout is designed specifically to goad the enemy base defenders into a rage-fueled and ultimately pointless chase across the map. Durable medium armor, long range weapons, a Heal Thyself Magic Tool repair pack, and hidden resupply stations allow them to constantly provoke and distract enemy flag defenders, such as sitting on a mountain and shining a laser pointer at the defender's eyes, or poking them with the exploding blue frisbee launcher before using the same gun to Rocket Jump away when attacked. The goal of the Bastard isn't to get kills, it's to piss off the enemy so much that they drop whatever they're doing to kill the Bastard, all while the Bastard's team is actually winning the match.
- Deep Rock Galactic
- The game features the Glyphid swarmers, the only ones that aren't Giant Spiders. They never come in groups of less than 15, and the periodically triggered swarm waves can sometimes consist of nothing but these. At lower difficulty levels they aren't too problematic but at difficulty 4 or 5 they becomes a serious issue.
- There's also two flavors of Naedocytes, tiny flying jellyfish that act like Glyphid Swarmers but with flight and shock-induced slow effects. Getting surrounded by them will make sure all you see is electricity everywhere as you flail around swatting them. Fortunately, the Thorns perk is effective enough both Swarmers and Naedocytes will instantly die as soon as they hit you once, reducing the problem.
- Glyphid Stingtails have a difficult-to-dodge attack in which they snag the player with their tail from afar with the purpose of bringing them in melee range. Although attacks like the pickaxe power attack can help take them down with ease, they become infinitely more annoying when their hook attack leads into you getting thrown right in the middle of a horde or hurtling down a large drop.
- Shredders are a small drone enemy that only deal damage through melee attacks and are typically spawned in groups or occasionally summoned by The Caretaker boss. They're never seen alone; always spawning in groups; and made slightly more obnoxious by having a higher health pool than the other swarming enemies.
- Forgive Me Father has the Children of Ygolak. They are one of the faster enemies, have a painful melee attack, will explode on dying, and tend to come in large packs. Their small size and drab coloring can make them harder to spot in a hectic fight. And most annoyingly, they lack heads or any other weak spot so the only counter is just pumping them full of lead.
- Turbo Overkill has hordes of low-tier enemies interspersed with the occasional Demonic Spiders you'll curse at. They aren't really dangerous: you're well armed with weapons that have large area effects, group targeting and fast firing rates, not to mention a chainsaw that'll propel you through whole groups of cannon fodder almost effortlessly. However, at higher difficulties it's easy to end up surrounded, and some enemies can pepper you from a distance while you're busy fighting something else, so the Bats aren't entirely harmless either.
