One of the many battles you'll see.
Chicken Warrior is a Free2Play Beat 'em Up game for IOS made in 2012 by the G and C Software. The game features the titular feathered protagonist going up against his armed brethren in a tournament of some kind. The plot doesn’t go much deeper than that, leaving you free to battle your way through the game’s 128 stages. There is also an arena where you can fight relatively weak enemies for as long as you want.
This game provides examples of the following tropes:
- Action Bomb: Some levels will have a pair of suicide bombers appear halfway through. These don’t inflict too much damage but are much faster than the majority of enemies. They still have to stand still before exploding though, allowing you to get out of the way.
- All Swords Are the Same: Played with. Both the player and enemy costumes have many sword types (from regular straight blades to sabres to Aztec stone swords). They do seem to vary consistently in terms of stats, but all of them have the same attack animation.
- Played entirely straight with other weapon types however. The game treats spears and halberds the same, and throwing daggers, javelins and shurikens all fly at the same speed towards you.
- Anachronism Stew: The helmets of your opponents come from nearly every historical period in existence, plus some fictional ones. There are conquistador helmets, Aztec-like helmets, gladiator helmets, some sort of purple helmets, bronze chicken-face helmets, spiked face helmets, and red bandanas.
- Armor Is Useless: Zig-zagged. All enemies wear helmets of some kind, which fly off at death alongside their weapons. Generally, higher-level enemies tend to wear more enclosing helmets, but on some levels it’s possible to see chickens wearing nothing but bandanas being much tougher than ones in Spanish Colonisation helmets, for instance.
- Awesome, but Impractical: The costumes with area bombardment abilities. Those shurikens or meteorites falling down look cool, sure, but they bombard completely random positions and so their effectiveness varies widely.
- Bloodless Carnage: The game has no blood at all: the defeated chickens simply close their eyes, drop their weapons and armour and fall down before disappearing.
- Boring Yet Practical: The healing ability is this for obvious reasons. While it’s balanced with a long cooldown time to prevent it from breaking the game, it’s very useful nonetheless.
- Charged Attack: Rather than charging it up manually at any time, here a chance to inflict one is awarded automatically as the number of combos grows. Besides simply growing stronger, each weapon type has its own variety: hammers gain a Ground Pound area effect, javelins gain piercing effect allowing them to go through all enemies in one line, etc.
- Combos: A simple variety is used here. If you can land enough blows without getting hit in return, then you’ll have a chance of inflicting a powerful blue-charged attack with every blow, with the chance growing as the combo meter increases, up to a maximum of 999.
- Damage Sponge: Like in other Allegedly Free Game projects, enemies soon become this if you don’t pay real-world money to have enough gold for advanced suits of armour.
- Do Not Run with a Gun: Neither the player character nor the enemies can move and attack at the same time. Much of the combat essentially comes down to timing your attacks to strike the opponents before side-stepping their blows.
- Do Not Touch the Funnel Cloud: The twister ability functions much like this.
- Elite Mooks: The game will spawn higher-level enemies about two-thirds into each stage, which are much stronger and tougher than the rest.
- Everything Fades: All corpses, as well as their equipment, will disappear the second they hit the ground.
- Fake Ultimate Mook: The bomb-throwing enemies. Their explosives do hit hard, but they’re very slow and they travel in a preset arc, so getting out of the way is not difficult at all.
- Fast Tunnelling: Some enemy chickens become this in order to avoid your attacks. It’s very effective too, since they don’t pop out unless they can attack you this second. Once above ground, however, it can take them quite a while to resubmerge.
- Flash of Pain: The enemies will all flash white when hit.
- Kill It with Fire: One of the enemy mage varieties attacks by summoning a long trail of purple fire in front of them for about five seconds. It’s not very powerful, but the damage quickly stacks up if you don’t move out of the way.
- Knockback: Charged attacks and criticals will knock the enemies back, while many special moves will result in a knockdown. One of the main differences between enemy types is their resistance to knockback, and some metal-helmeted chickens seem to have unusually high resistance to it regardless of their level.
- Level Grinding: This being a Free2Play title, grinding for gold will generally become a necessity about halfway through the game if you don’t pay real-world money to convert into in-game gold. Investing in right armours and stats from the beginning theoretically allows you to skip this completely, however.
- Mook Chivalry: Justified due to the fighting taking place in a tournament. It’s implied that the enemies have to attack you in waves rather than all at once in order to keep the spectacle interesting.
- Poison Mushroom: The modifiers you pick up are absolutely random, and they can easily include negative effects, like all enemies on the screen getting healed, player’s movement speed or attack speed slowed down, enemies becoming stronger, attacking faster or moving faster. Last one is especially troublesome because in older versions at least, it was the only effect besides healing that wasn’t temporary.
- RPG Elements: It is possible to spend the in-game gold to increase the health, strength, speed, critical hit rate, cooldown rate and the chance of being awarded bonus gold for kills.
- Shoot the Medic First: There are Catholic monk-like chickens on some levels, who will heal all enemies around them and thus are especially troublesome.
- Spin Attack: One of the most useful abilities available, since it allows you to hit all chickens around you many times, does reasonable amount of damage, quickly fills up your combo meter and knocks them all down, too.
- Squishy Wizard: The enemy wizards have considerably less health than other characters, to compensate for the power of their debuffing abilities.
- Status Buff: The cheaper armours have this as one of the abilities. Nowhere near as impressive as Area of Effect abilities, but they do tend to recharge much faster.
- The good Easter egg drops also often do this to your character.
- Worm Sign: The tunnelling chickens will leave one above the ground to show where they are.
