Multi-Directional Barrage

aka: Death In All Directions

Yuri: You know how some guns have red lasers that indicate where they're aiming? Watch this.
Marina: Is it broken? You glowed red and the whole room lit up.
Yuri: Exactly.

— Spacetrawler

It's generally a good tactic to surround an opponent. It cuts off their avenues of escape, limits their options, and altogether makes your life much easier.

Unless, of course, they have the ability to shoot everything around them at once.

Generally reserved for ships with lots of guns pointed in every direction, the Multi-Directional Barrage is a common last resort move to escape a trap.

An extreme variant of the Spread Shot if used with projectiles. May involve various types of Spam Attacks. Contrast Alpha Strike, which has every available gun pointed at a single target. Compare Spin Attack, which is about melee weapons instead of guns.

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Examples:

Anime & Manga

• Black Clover: Mereoleona's spell Calidos Brachium Barrage. She uses Mana Zone to control the mana in her surrounding environment, using it to pummel Rhya with flame blasts from many directions, so much that he doesn't have enough time to use his copied recovery spells and gets burnt alive.

Fan Works

• In The Witch of the Everfree, when a pack of timberwolves surrounds Sunset Shimmer, she's perfectly fine with it, labeling it as a "target-rich environment" rather than the ambush it was intended to be. Then she proceeds to drive almost the whole pack away with a single spell.

Films — Animation

• Toy Story 2: In the beginning, when Buzz first lands on a seemingly deserted planet, he finds himself surrounded by Zurg's Mecha-Mooks. He fires his laser into a crystal formation which refracts it in every direction, destroying them all at once.

Films — Live-Action

• The original Gun Kata from Equilibrium is all about this.
• Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2: When the Sovereign track the Guardians down at Ego's Planet, they surround the laser drill with their drone fleet. Nebula is able to use her own cybernetics to re-power the lasers, which can be positioned in almost any orientation, and they fire them in every direction, destroying the entire Sovereign fleet.

• The "Death Blossom" attack in The Last Starfighter is this. The weapons are all forward mounted, but the ship gimbals like crazy.
• The robot near the end of Men in Black II does this with what appear to be submachine guns.

Literature

• In The Dreamside Road, Tucker issues several multi-directional attacks of his Cobalt Nine hailing mortar attack, in his attempt to kill Orson Gregory.
• The New Jedi Order novel Enemy Lines I: Rebel Dream has the SSD Lusankya foul up a hyperjump and emerge inside a Yuuzhan Vong warfleet. Commander Eldo Davip frantically orders the ship to Beam Spam the vicinity and inflicts some pretty serious damage, killing the Vong commander, even before reinforcements arrive to extricate him.

Live-Action TV

• Star Trek: Though they prefer to fire single, precise shots, most large starships in the franchise have weapons on all sides and fast-working targeting computers, granting them the ability to do this when surrounded. Some demonstrations: NX Class starship, Enterprise-D, Enterprise-E, and the Voyager. Additionally, this trope is maintained in the videogame media.

Video Games

• The Bangai-O games give your ship the ability to fire missiles in all directions. The more under pressure you are, the more (and sometimes bigger and more powerful) missiles you can shoot.
• Some of the grenade mods in Borderlands 2 do this by shooting flechettes all over the place for a while rather than exploding.
• Bounty of One: The Mezcal Defiance item allows you to fire a multi-directional spray of cactus spines after a cooldown which only decreases if you're standing still. The Mezcal Mantle item fires a similar spread but with even more cactus spines, but only activates when you take damage.
• In Brood Star, there is a module which upgrades your primary weapon's firing pattern to a hexagonal six-way spread, letting you hit enemies beside or behind you. Other modules can give you additional weapons that fire in such a spread automatically under certain circumstances.
• In Deep Rock Galactic, one of the throwables added in season 3 is the Tactical Leadburster for the Gunner. It sticks into whatever surface it lands on and proceeds to unload three barrages into the area around it.
• Deus Ex: Human Revolution: The Typhoon augmentation is a military-grade implant that spews out a hailstorm of explosive ball-bearings in a 360º radius around the user.
• Dragon Age: Origins: A bonus ability possibly gained in the "Warden's Keep" DLC allows the Warden to blast any nearby foes with an upwelling of High-Pressure Blood.
• Every melee class in Guild Wars has a skill that does this: Aura of Holy Might for Dervishes, Hundred Blades for Warriors, and Death Blossom for Assassins. As melee classes are normally designed for single-target damage, these skills allow them to function better in PvE, where they're typically surrounded by large numbers of computer-controlled enemies.
• In Jak II: Renegade and onwards in the Jak and Daxter series, you can perform one of these by shooting while using a Spin Attack.
• Nearly every major villain in Kingdom Hearts does this. However, their ways of doing this vary a lot.
  • Axel, Larxene, Lexaeus, Saïx, Marluxia and Roxas has attacks that cover all of the battlefield.
  • Various characters in the series can create a Storm of Blades.
  • Many others use a high number of magic missiles to do this.
• Megablast, an arcade shooter, grants your ship turrets on its front, back, top and bottom by default, where you can fire in all four directions anytime you want.
• Most incarnations of the Giga Attack in the Mega Man X series, the exceptions being the variations used by the Mega Man X6 armors and, ironically, the infamous Game-Breaker, the Nova Strike. X uses them by equipping the Body Part of his armor, while Zero learns them from specific bosses who also use this kind of attack.
• Overwatch has multiple instances, but the most iconic is Reaper's Death Blossom ultimate, a direct reference to The Last Starfighter. Reaper evokes a smoke cloud around him and whirls to fire his shotguns in every direction. Somehow, he manages to pour enough lead into an area to kill every unshielded hero around him... with two semi-automatic shotguns that usually only hold four shells each.
• Paladins in Pillars of Eternity are capable of periodically blasting their immediate vicinity with an eruption of soul energy.
• Sine Mora has the Spider Tank Tsuchigumo. One of Tsuchigumo's attack patterns strongly resembles a spiderweb, and covers the whole screen rather than just going directly towards the player.
• Seen in the promo video for Star Citizen. To give you an idea of the Beam Spam coming off the Bengal-class carrier, they had to reduce the number of guns firing by over half or else the demo attack would've been over in seconds.
• In Star Control II, the Pkunk Fury has a rapid-fire three-way cannon and very high maneuverability. Hold down the attack button, let go of the accelerator, and spin in a circle, and you can easily pull off a Death Blossom.
• Star Trek Online: Step one: Plow a cruiser with lots of beam weaponry into the middle of a furball. Step two: Activate the Tactical bridge officer power "Beam: Fire at Will" and watch as your ship spits energy in all directions. The playerbase considers BFAW essentially mandatory for any beam build: it's this trope in a target-rich environment, and simple beam rapid fire if there's only one target.

• Super Robot Wars:
  • The "Placement Bonus" introduced in modern titles, wherein a unit surrounded on two or more sides by enemies will receive an increase in damage taken. This modifier applies to allied and enemy units.
  • The MAP attacks from some Mechs surround the user, and hit everything that can be targeted. Used wisely, over a dozen enemies can be felled in one blow.
• Touhou Project, being a series of Bullet Hell games, features many enemies that can do this. Yes, even the Mooks from the first stage. Several Bombs of the Player Character can also count, such as Marisa's Non-Directional Laser or Sakuya's Indiscriminate. Utsuho Reiji deserves special mention; some of her victory quotes from Touhou Hisoutensoku ~ Choudokyuu Ginyoru no Nazo o Oe imply that her in-universe strategy is to simply blow up everything around herself, without even bothering to keep track of where her opponent is.
• Warcraft:
  • The Barrage ability lets the Siege Engine shoot rockets at multiple air units simultaneously. Many, many custom maps see the potential in this and change the ability to target ground units as well.
  • The Phoenix's Phoenix Fire allows it to damage random targets while moving.
  • The Warden's Fan of Knives spell flings knives at all enemies in the vicinity. She also has a spell that lets her teleport short distances, which meshes very well with the spell.

Webcomics

• Jagganoth from Kill Six Billion Demons executes the Supreme Divine Art, Blood Sated Sword Soul, which is a sword strike excessive even by the comic's standards: it can't be dodged because it "leaves no space that is not a sword".
• In Spacetrawler, one of Yuri's cyborg upgrades apparently lets her attack everything around her, though it is never seen on-screen.

Western Animation

• In Season 3 of ReBoot after the Time Skip, Matrix has a gun, named Gun. It's able to lock onto a target, at which point a glowing M appears on the target's forehead after which he literally can't miss. When cornered in a bar by rogue Guardians, he puts it in "Death Blossom" mode: it begins to gimble crazy-fast, and the target-M appears on every single sprite in the bar besides himself. The Guardians back down.
• In the Star Wars: The Clone Wars episode "Bounty", droid bounty hunter C-21 Highsinger performs a rapid-fire spinning blaster barrage against a crowd of mooks.
• In Steven Universe, the combined form of Amethyst and Pearl, Opal, is able to combine her two component gem's weapons into a bow that shoots arrows of light. In her first appearance, she fires off an arrow into the middle of an encroaching Zerg Rush of bird-like gem shards at which point it explodes into a Rain of Arrows that instantly tags and bubbles the near-hundreds of bird-shards.

Real Life

• The notoriously temperamental Sten gun would not just fire if dropped, but discharge the whole magazine while dancing around in a circle. Apocryphally, partisans or even Allied troops who'd run out of hand grenades would sometimes throw a spare one into the midst of some enemy troops instead.
• The Uzi submachine gun had a similar reputation among the armies and police forces that used it. A common semi-joke among German soldiers claimed that the easiest way to clear a room full of hostiles was to open the door just wide enough to toss in an Uzi, then wait until the shooting stopped. Allegedly it didn't even matter whether the gun was cocked or not, and whether its safety was on or off.
• A real-life Briefcase Blaster, designed to hold an MP5K with its trigger operated by squeezing the handle of said briefcase, pretty much had to be used in this fashion because aiming was at best approximate. The general idea was that the user would walk into a Bad Guy Bar or Den of Iniquity full of terrorists pretending to be a VAT inspector or something and turn on the spot while spraying bullets in a 45-degree arc. It did save one the inconvenience of resorting to Trenchcoat Warfare in weather where that might draw unwanted attention, but overall it was probably Cool, but Inefficient.
• The whole point of the galleass: in a time when the standard warship was the galley, that could only mount a single large gun forward and one aft plus a handful of smaller guns, the galleass mounted on each side rows of heavy guns equal to the larger ones of the galley. Their debut at the Battle of Lepanto was a Superweapon Surprise: six Venetian galleasses let themselves be surrounded by the Ottoman fleet before opening fire, sinking or damaging 70 out of 216 enemy galleys and disrupting the enemy formation, forcing the Ottoman into a suicidal charge against the main Holy League fleet that saw them crushed, without suffering any damage whatsoever.
  • The Galleass itself was rendered obsolete by the Ship of the Line, which took the black powder era navy to its logical conclusion by two to three entire decks filled front to back with cannons. Set piece naval battles could have ships shooting both port and starboard.
• While a ship with gun batteries and missile launchers will see benefit in being able to shoot at multiple things at the same time, this is turned to be a badly impractical case with tanks, with no multi turreted or multiple machine gun models being successful, needing large crews to shoot at different things which makes it a nightmare to direct fire service for the tank commander.

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