YMMV / Action 52 Owns

• Awesome Music: Non-Human has multiple awesome stage musics as well as boss musics. The original music only appears at the end section of the game. The first stage of STREEMERZ also qualifies.
  • The soundtracks from Sombreros, Illuminator, Bubblegirl Rozy and Meong certainly qualify as well. "Sombreros" in particular converts a bland, repetitive song into a more memorable one with upgrades to make it sound more like the theme of a Spaghetti Western.
• Demonic Spiders: The disembodied mouths in Non-Human. Their tongue lash hurts a lot and has longer range than the mechs' regular attacks unless you get enough range powerups. Normally you can jump it, but you'll usually have to retreat as they tend to appear in enclosed spaces. They also have quite a bit of health, which means that you'll need to advance/retreat a few times to kill them.
• Game-Breaker: The Bug-Torcher 5000 in City of Doom. Deals huge damage (1-2 bursts will kill a window bug) over a large, medium-range area as well as destroying enemy projectiles. Handy for the shot-spamming first boss. It guzzles ammo, but this can be solved by tapping the attack in bursts.
• Goddamned Bats: The flying disembodied hands in Non-Human. These things fly upwards out of regular weapon reach, then do a diagonal rush towards the player. They hurt a lot and can take quite a bit of damage for a small hand, and worst of all, they attack in groups!
  • City of Doom has the "window bugs". They take a good bit of hits to die, hide in windows, and only become vulnerable when they pop out and fire three aimed shots. Thankfully the Bug-Torcher 5000 incinerates them with great ease.
• Hilarious in Hindsight: The Angry Video Game Nerd did a review of Action 52 where he commented on Rocket Jockey. He mentioned on how it would be cool if you could use the lasso instead of the game being just another shoot-em-up. The remake does just that!
• Moral Event Horizon: Dr. Murdon in Non-Human does this during the introductory cutscene. The heroes are closing in on him, so he pumps mutagen into a nearby village and turns all the innocent villagers into the titular monsters.
• Narm Charm: The intentionally goofy and old-school (read: full of grammatical and spelling errors) script in STREEMERZ can certainly get more than a few laughs.
• Nightmare Fuel:
  • The monsters in Non-Human are either disembodied body parts or mutated zombie-like abominations, which are all very unsettling. Even worse still is that they were once human until Dr Murdon turned them into the titular horrors.
  • The ending to Jigsaw. It would be horribly gruesome enough even if it didn't come totally out of left field.
• Paranoia Fuel: Illuminator's gameplay is based in this. Killing enemies requires keeping your flashlight off until it charges up to a certain amount, so knowing where the enemies are is difficult. Even with all the lights you can place to help keep track of enemies, there'll still be plenty of times where you turn your flashlight on and fry an enemy who was only inches away from you and you didn't even know it was there.
• Squick: Gustav from Non-Human. He coughs up his guts as an attack.
• Suspiciously Similar Song: The third area's music of Non-Human is pretty much a remix of Girl World. Justified since both musics are made by the same composer.
• Take That, Scrappy!: In the good ending of Mash Man the Cheetahmen saves Mash Man from being hanged and beats the crap on the Ungrateful Bastard villagers.
• That One Boss:
  • The Rolling Rollblax in Silver Sword, which forces you to constantly be on the move, and drops mushrooms whenever it's hit, exactly where it's hit, which can very quickly clutter the area and make it hard to move if you don't carefully plan where you hit it. And just leaving it alone while you clean up the mushrooms isn't an option, either, because it quickly picks up speed unless you hit it to slow it down.
  • The final boss the irradiated baby princess counts as well, being a Bullet Hell boss with a tiny, tiny hitbox, which is an absolute nightmare when you can only have one projectile on the screen at a time, let alone while planning the distance your Sword Beam travels to exploit it's ever-changing weakness. The third phase is nigh impossible, due to having to maximize your distance on a tiny, moving target that never, ever wants to just move in the path of your Sword Beam.
  • The Giant Enemy Crab/Bug thing in Non-Human. It has two heads as the weak points, the top fires out a bouncy energy ball while the bottom shoots one that hugs the floor, then moves up when you jump over it. Both of these attacks hurt a lot, are tricky to avoid, and the boss can use both at the same time. Then there's the fact that the boss is constantly advancing towards you, limiting your space (and deals incredible amounts of Collision Damage). Your solution is to shoot the heads to damage him and push him back, easier said than done because the crab can use his claws to guard one of them!
• That One Level: The final level of Meong is this and then some. About ten times longer than any other level in the game, it features every single enemy, obstacle and gimmick present in the previous levels, and even some new ones; along with the tighest-timed sections of the game, a maze made out of Temporary Platforms that's annoyingly easy to screw up and an obligatory puzzle that's as simple as it's simple to miss. Checkpoint Starvation is in full effect here, and One-Hit-Point Wonder and Hitbox Dissonance make this level all the better.

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