Characters / Half-Life: The Combine

Half-Life Character Index
Player Characters | Supporting Characters | Xen Aliens | The Combine | Other Antagonists

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In General

A powerful trans-dimensional alien empire, they conquered the Earth and are the main antagonists of Half-Life 2 and its Episodes, as well as Half-Life: Alyx. Their occupation force on Earth, the Overwatch, consists of a portion of their transhuman forces (modified humans using human vehicles and weapons) and "Synths", aliens who have been modified and outfitted with cyborg attachments and pulse weaponry. Think a far more overtly villainous Imperium of Man mixed with the Borg Collective.

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• 0% Approval Rating: Absolutely nobody likes the Combine. Even the people who are actively employed by it such as Doctor Breen or the collaborator scientist in Alyx seem at best contemptuous of it or dislike the organization itself (Breen himself calls them "the Combine" despite treating this name as almost an insult in one of his broadcasts). And that's to say nothing of the people actively being oppressed by them...
• Achilles' Heel: The Combine are an impossibly vast inter-stellar and possibly trans-dimensional empire of massive size and scope. They have advanced technology, competent tactical ability, ruthless efficiency, and a track record for not being trifled with. At the same time, much like the real-life Roman Empire, their massive size causes all sorts of bureaucratic kerfuffles and makes actually mobilizing that immense power difficult to say the least. Thus, the Combine forces on Earth are cut off from the main bulk of the empire's military forces and it is only through the Citadel that they are able to maintain a decently sized militia. Once the Citadel blows up, it's revealed the reason they're so interested in Earth is that we discovered true long-distance teleportation technology at both Black Mesa and Aperture Science. The Combine have no such technology and must slowly drive their fleets across the universe in real-time, which makes long distance travel too much of a resource dump to actually justify doing. However, if they could harvest that portal technology they would be able to move their forces around the universe in a blink of an eye, making them effectively unstoppable. Unfortunately for them, the destruction of the City 17 Citadel and the closing of the Superportal above its ruins means that the remaining Combine forces on Earth are stranded with no backup, and considering the City 17 Citadel also doubled as their only way to communicate with their off-world command center, it's safe to say that humanity actually has a fighting chance against the Combine forces still remaining on Earth.
  • In short, despite their vast, galaxy-conquering might, the Combine regime is bloated and inefficient, at least on a planetary scale, and Earth's Resistance is like a parasite taking down a much larger host that's simply so big it can't concentrate its power properly to destroy it.
• Airstrip One: The remaining cities under their control on Earth are simply given soulless numerical designations, with Half-Life 2 and its episodes being set in "City 17," located somewhere in Eastern Europe.
• Aliens Are Bastards: Oh boy, where to start? Completely unprovoked and imperialistic conquest of an entire species (one of millions no less)? Check. Using headcrabs as biological weapons to inflict a horrifying fate on anyone who gets overtaken by one? Check. Ruthless lobotomization and forced cybernetic augmentation to their army of transhuman slave soldiers? Check. A literal "beating quota" for Civil Protection officers? Check. Indiscriminate slaughter of unarmed humans attempting to escape City 17 or help others do so? Check. Turning any resistance members they capture into cybernetic slaves stripped of their humanity and most of their organs? Check. Steadily stripping the Earth of all its usable resources, up to and including the oceans? Check. Permanent off world relocation as a punishment for failure? Check. Setting up a suppression field to prevent all human reproduction, thus guaranteeing extinction within a century? Check. Honestly, the Combine could have codified the trope.
• Aliens Never Invented the Wheel: A fantastical variant. The Combine are an incredibly advanced multi-dimensional empire that effortlessly conquered the Earth and likely millions of other worlds, but they apparently never discovered a method for short-range teleportation within a single dimension, something which humans managed to invent at least twice.
• Ambiguous Robots: It's unclear whether some Synths are actually alien species enslaved and heavily augmented for military purposes by the Combine, or are just robots manufactured by Combine with some biological characteristics.
• Artificial Brilliance: None of the Combine forces are stupid. First off, the Overwatch soldiers will flank, throw grenades, and run to cover when reloading. Furthermore, the Hunters will use splash damage, flank, and lay down suppression fire. Also, the Gunships will wildly strafe while firing, and will even shoot down your missiles in mid-air. However, they do fight very aggressively, meaning that once you've figured out their tactics, it's fairly easy to fall back and ambush them. Furthermore, Combine foot-soldiers do not have a high amount of hit points, and so will usually get killed by the player before their strategies can kick in. And this trope is mostly averted by Civil Protection soldiers, who tend to stand in place firing away with pistols, which makes sense when you consider that they're really closer to being beat cops rather than soldiers.
• Artificial Human: Synth in this case. According to The Final Hours of Half-Life: Alyx, synths are synthetic copies of animals scanned by the Combine, instead of simply organic aliens converted into cyborgs. Concept art exists of a Combine soldier riding a horse-synth◊. This raises the question of why Overwatch isn't the same — which makes one wonder if this is something Breen negotiated when he wanted humans to be spared.
• Authority Equals Asskicking: The Combine Advisors are the top tier in the Combine hierarchy, or at least very close to it. They have the authority to subsume any Combine forces they need, and sacrifice them without a second thought. While they resemble blind limbless grubs the size of baby elephants, they have powerful telekinetic and telepathic abilities, and are able to completely immobilize and control anyone around them, as well as levitate themselves for transport. They are also Made of Iron. You actually briefly get a chance to shoot at one during the first stage of the assault at White Forest, using a mounted pulse cannon, which seems to be the Combine's equivalent to a .50 machine gun. Despite taking many shots, only a few of which are enough to kill Powered Armor wearing cyborgs, the Advisor shows no visible signs of injury and escapes unharmed. This also shows the limits of their powers; the Advisor can't actually throw Freeman around like the previous ones did, only being able to give him a headache, likely because of the (not at all long) distance between them.
• Awesome, but Impractical: This is a plot point in-universe: their teleportation technology allows them to invade other dimensions, but can't teleport within a dimension, forcing them to teleport vehicles or hijack local ones. It also takes relatively large amounts of energy and machinery to operate, and seems to take several minutes just to teleport one guy or 2 gunships, as seen in the climax of Half-Life 2. This is why they're so interested in the Black Mesa-developed teleporter technology, which has been optimized to the point a couple of scientists in hiding in a post-apocalyptic wasteland can jury-rig a serviceable pair of teleporters to travel within a dimension.
• Badass Army: Well, they don't call it the "Seven Hour War" for nothing...
• Big Bad: Of the second game and its subsequent episodes along with Half-Life: Alyx.
• Big Brother Is Watching: There are cameras everywhere, including flying drone cameras.
• Body Horror: Just about every living thing in the Combine Empire incorporates this in some way. This typically manifests as machinery grafted into skin or missing facial features/body parts.
• The Caligula: Exaggerated. The Combine are a race of hostile aliens, and as a result, they don't care for Earth or humanity and only see us as minute in their grand scheme. The only reason they have anything on Earth to rule over like tyrants at all is because they haven't already made the species extinct.
• Can't Kill You, Still Need You: The only reason why humanity hasn't been fully extinguished yet is that the Combine still need us to crack some much-coveted technology for them.
• Creative Sterility: For all their advanced technology, the Combine Empire appears to be unable to create something that is truly their own, original design. Every bit of their technology and utilities appears to have conceived by violently appropriating an already existing design from another race and then building upon, or rather twisting it until it serves the purpose they need it for.
• Crippling Overspecialization: Despite having sophisticated technology for teleporting between alternative realities, this technology only seems to be found in the Citadel and some other small locations across the globe. Furthermore, it doesn't seem to be that efficient for transporting large groups of units at once (as seen during the climax of Half-Life 2 with how long it takes to just teleport Dr. Breen to the Combine Overworld), with it being all but stated that the Combine's regular access to Earth after the Portal Storms abated became very fragile. And their technology for achieving teleportation within the same reality is downright laughable, with Black Mesa, Aperture Science, and even the Resistance having the kind of tech the Combine could only dream of.
• Crushing the Populace: And how! By the time of Half-Life 2, everyone is wearing the same blue uniform overalls, there is no privacy from the numerous flying drones monitoring people, police brutality is rife, people are randomly spirited away from their homes to become dismembered slaves, political opposition is punished with food ration removal at best, food itself is rationed severely, the government (or what little we see of it) has given up on pretty much everything but basic maintenance of anything civilian...
• Curb-Stomp Battle: The entire might of every military on Earth combined was utterly destroyed by them in just seven hours.
• Cyborg: The Synths subvert this (see Artificial Human above). Transhuman Overwatch and Stalkers on the other hand play this straight, they are the latest examples in this trend, showcasing Combine's true intentions for what they are going to do with humanity.
• Deadly Euphemism: Apparently as part of protocol, the Metrocops, Soldiers and even the Overwatch Announcer use medical jargon Newspeak to communicate. Alien intruders are "exogens", zombies are "necrotics", turrets are "sterilizers", soldiers are "stabilization delegates", Freeman, as Anticitizen One, is "malignant" and contact with him is a "staph infection". Troops are also routinely issued orders like "inoculate", "shield", "clamp" and "cauterize".
• The Empire: Most fictional empires would be satisfied with taking over the world or, at most, the galaxy. The Combine instead conquered the entire universe. But then, even that wasn't enough, so they made portals to other universes and proceeded to conquer them too.
• The End of the World as We Know It: After the fall of City 17, the Union is pissed, and this is said to happen if the forces on Earth manage to ever call the rest of their empire for reinforcements.
  Isaac Kleiner: What you're seeing is the infancy of a Superportal. If it attains full strength —
  Eli Vance: It'll be the Seven Hour War all over again. Except this time, we won't last seven minutes.
• Evil Learns of Outside Context:
  • After the Resonance Cascade event accidentally opens a portal between the Earth and the alien world of Xen, this alerts the Combine (who had enslaved the species inhabiting Xen) of Earth's existence. After an extremely brief "war", the Combine conquer Earth and add it to their collection of enslaved worlds. Twenty years later, a similar problem threatens to happen: the Combine have mostly turned their attentions away from Earth to allow their local puppet (Dr. Breen) to rule, but Breen warns that the insurrection started by Gordon Freeman might make the Combine start paying direct attention to the Earth, which would not go well for anyone. Even after Breen is defeated, portal storms start occurring over Earth, only making it more likely that a huge Combine force will arrive to put down any further sedition.
  • Obscure details within the game lore reveal that this trope actually makes Earth extremely important to the Combine's plans. Despite their massive multiversal empire, the Combine fall into the same trap that most massive empires do: being much too large to effectively rule. Although they are capable of using portals to travel from world to world, this only transitions them between dimensions and not space, and this is a relatively inefficient form of teleportation requiring large amounts of machinery and energy. However, Earth scientists were on the cusp of discovering relatively cheap and small-scale interspatial teleportation that, if perfected, could allow the Combine to mobilize their entire fleets anywhere within their massive empire at any time. This was the bargaining chip that Dr. Breen used to convince the Combine that Earthlings were valuable, but should the Combine gain such technology, then they would effectively be unstoppable.
• Expy:
  • Generally speaking, they're one of Ingsoc and Oceania from Nineteen Eighty-Four, only with aliens. Both the Combine and Oceania are run-down totalitarian states based in locations whose names are completely devoid of humanity, feature a seemingly omnipresent dictatorial leader always announcing how things are improving even though they're clearly not, and houses its miserable, constantly oppressed citizens in hideous-looking poorly maintained mass housing projects. Even the matching blue jumpsuits that Combine citizens wear look identical to those worn by the Outer Party/"Proles" in the novel. This was even more visible in the Beta, which looks astoundingly similar aesthetically to the 1984 film adaptation.
  • Their Striders are heavily based after the Tripods from The War of the Worlds.
• Fascist, but Inefficient: Shockingly so. Despite being an empire that spans multiple universes, encompassing countless galaxies, planets, and millions of different species, the Combine forgot to invest anything in worthwhile teleportation technology. Their travel methods are slow and inefficient considering the massive span of their empire, and their teleportation system, while functional, is actually less advanced than what both Black Mesa and Aperture Science have designed.
  • It really can't be overstated how awful this is for them. It's explained that they can only efficiently teleport between dimensions, not within a single dimension. Whether or not they have some sort of space fleet for travel is unknown, but what is known is that the destruction of the Citadel crippled their forces on Earth, as it not only knocked out their only source of transit to/from Earth and cost them their biggest base, it also resulted in their distress signal to their empire proper getting intercepted by the Resistance. This is why in Episode Two the Combine, especially the Advisors, become very desperate to obtain the Black Mesa teleportation technology so they can contact their headquarters for reinforcements. You'd think a reliable method of teleporting among your galaxies upon galaxies of controlled territory would be one of the first things a multi-dimensional empire would develop.
  • It's also subtly implied that although the Combine are very good at oppression and warfare, their ruthless pragmatism, fascist society and Lack of Empathy has left them uncreative and inefficient at novel research. Almost all their technology seems to be related to enslavement or simply modifying conquered alien tech. The fact they haven't invented local teleportation themselves across multiple dimensions shows a lack of scientific creativity for such a massive empire.
• Foreshadowing: At the very least, something much nastier than the Xenians was hinted at by the Nihilanth way back in the first game.
  Nihilanth: Their slaves... we are their slaves... we are...
• Gas Mask Mooks: Justified, in that Overwatch Transhuman troops are in use on other, non-human-habitable planets.
  • Apparently, the Civil Protection officers just wear them because it looks intimidating. Also Justified as this is something SWAT teams do in real life. Besides, given how brutal the metrocops are, it's probably best they remain faceless and anonymous.
• Genericist Government/Skeleton Government: Given that the Combine administer all of Earth and have done for about twenty years at the point of Half-Life 2 beginning, it's hard to discern exactly how they do it other than, obviously, in a very brutal and repressive way with little concern for the lives or happiness of the people on it. References are made to some sort of civil code^note Most prominently on a sign close to the gate controls during "Water Hazard", which also mentions some sort of "Combine Civil Authority", but you're also accused of breaking some civil code sections by Overwatch during "Route Kanal", implying that the Combine have some sort of structured legal system in place - to what extent this is something real, as opposed to a fig leaf over their repressive nature, is open to debate (not least since a great deal of infractions seem to be dealt with via summary capital punishment). Beyond that, the only real aspects of Combine government we see relate to the military or law enforcement - it's entirely possible that they have no civilian government functions on Earth as we would understand them, since they don't see the need for them and don't really care about humans except inasmuch as they might become a threat.
  • As mentioned in Achilles' Heel, this may very well be a weakness rather than a simple matter of apathy or cruelty on their part. The Universal Union is incredibly vast, but with extremely limited means of traveling between their worlds, it's possible that the Combine simply can't manage Earth and other worlds as efficiently as they'd like to. Far too many worlds to govern and far too little time, resources, or transportation to govern them.
  • In a small aversion, Half-Life: Alyx shows that years before Half-Life 2 the Combine did appear to be making a reasonable effort to deal with one of the more potent threats to human health in the world, that being the proliferation of Xen flora and fungi. It appears to have been successful, since there's none visible in Half-Life 2.
• Gone Horribly Wrong: Their attempt to clean up an alien-infested zone of City 17, at least at the time of Half-Life: Alyx. Xen flora and fauna are shown running rampant in this Quarantine Zone, while the cleanup crews sent in to handle the mess are all either dead or zombified, their efforts subsequently left half-finished.
• Government Drug Enforcement: The Combine have allegedly poisoned the water to affect peoples' memories. They're certainly keen enough on handing out "Dr Breen's Private Reserve" from various vending machines.
• Greater-Scope Villain: Of the first game. They're the ones who pushed the Nihilianth and the Xenians into invading Earth, leading to the Resonance Cascade and the chaos that comes after. Also in Half-Life 2, while Breen acts as the Big Bad, the Advisors are clearly above him and are seemingly the Combine's leaders.
• Heinousness Retcon: In Half-Life: Alyx, their oppression of the civilian populace is not nearly as overt as previously shown. While citizens are still mostly limited to eating meager rations and live in fear of Civil Protection, they're not forced to wear uniforms like in Half-Life 2 and are less apprehensive about walking the streets and mingling with each other. Such a detail might be attributed to Alyx taking place earlier in the Combine's occupation.
• Hijacking Cthulhu: Somehow, they managed to capture the G-Man. Whether or not the G-Man himself and/or his employers warranted this isn't clear, but the G-Man manages to use this to his advantage when Alyx comes to rescue him under the belief that he's Gordon Freeman.
• Hypocrite: They, through their Puppet King Dr. Breen, actively propogate the idea that instinct makes people fear the unknown, see it as a threat. Ironically, the Combine themselves deem Freeman a threat the second he sets foot in City 17 simply because he's an unknown miscounted citizen.
• Immortal Procreation Clause: Breen claims that the Combine sets up the reproductive suppression field because they plan to grant immortality to humanity at some point and need to keep the population in check. That is all but certain to be a bold-faced lie to mask the quiet genocide of humanity, however.
• Insectoid Aliens: The land Synths look like insectoids, while aircraft Synths look more like cetaceans or crustaceans. Made of metal. With guns.
• Insignificant Little Blue Planet: It's clear that they don't care at all about Earth or humanity, considering the token force they've left to occupy it (with the majority of even the transhuman forces being used elsewhere) and the miserable state of the planet after they're done draining it for resources. They've conquered millions of species; the humans are just one more to them.
  • On the other hand, once they learn that the Rebels have developed simple and cheap teleportation (compared to the Combine teleporters at least), the Combine becomes immensely more interested in their activities. And after City 17 falls, they immediately stop underestimating the Rebels, and waste no time making preparations to call a massive assault on Earth with reinforcements from the Union's Home Universe itself.
• Insufficiently Advanced Alien: The Combine are quite capable of staging interdimensional invasions, but seem to be quite poor at moving troops and resources around within a dimension itself. While the exact mechanics of determining and controlling the relationship between interdimensional teleportation locations with relevance to physical dimension locations^Note i.e. How easy is it for the Combine to open portals to other parts of the same universe? Could they open a portal on Mars for example? Could they open a portal on the other side of our universe? goes intentionally unexplained, it's possible that the Combine have only amassed their overwhelming resource and technological dominance by invading individual resource-rich planets across multiple realities. For all the player knows, given the Combine's difficulty moving resources and troops over long distances within dimensions they may not even truly dominate their home universe.
• Leitmotif: invoked "Combine Harvester", though sadly not used in the games. It's Music to Invade Poland to mixed with haunting alien noises.
• Les Collaborateurs:
  • The Civil Protection members are humans who willingly decided to work with the Combine. It is implied that while at least some of the volunteers have somewhat sympathetic motives for joining up, such as better food and housing, many of them have done it simply for the power and brutality they are allowed to exercise.
  • Dr. Breen is a more direct example, as is the collaborating scientist seen in Alyx.
• Load-Bearing Boss: A collective, in-story version. For all the Combine's cruelty, they at least did manage to keep the massive Antlion infestations in check and keep headcrabs out of their cities. But then Gordon Freeman blew up Nova Prospekt, destroyed their defensive network of machine gun bunkers and 'thumpers' on the coast (thereby letting the Antlions into Nova Prospekt), slaughtered hundreds of soldiers and Synths, started a worldwide rebellion, and blew up the Citadel. All these things caused the Combine to lose control over City 17, resulting in a massive invasion by the nearby Antlion colonies and an infestation of headcrab zombies. By the time Episode One begins, the entire region is caught in a four-way struggle between the headcrab zombies, the antlion hordes, the Resistance, and the Combine.
• Mars Needs Water: According to the coffee table book Half-Life 2: Raising the Bar, the Combine are draining the Earth's oceans and resources to be used on other Combine worlds.
• Meaningful Name:
  • They take organisms and technologies from many other universes and fuse them in numerous ways, a.k.a. combining them.
  • Like a combine harvester in a field of crops, the Combine chew up everything in their way and spit it out as a homogeneous, unrecognizable mass.
  • The name clearly invokes the technocratic police state in Chief Bromden's nightmares from One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest.
• Million Mook March: Upon exiting Victory Mine in Episode Two, you get a clear view of a distant bridge where surviving Combine forces from City 17 are all marching together to regroup with other survivors. Transhuman soldiers, Striders, Gunships/Dropships, and City Scanners travel together escorting their rescued Advisor commanders, who are still in their escape pods.
• Mini-Boss: Gunships and Striders are encountered by Gordon rather infrequently, and serve as large threats that need lots of firepower to be taken downl
• Mecha-Mooks: The Earth Overwatch seems rather understaffed (likely due to most of the transhuman forces being shipped off-world), so make use of units like automated turrets, scanner drones, and Manhacks to make up for it.
• Multiversal Conqueror: According to invoked Word of God, the Combine have already conquered several universes, enslaving their home species and forcibly modifying them for use as Synths. They're in the process of doing the same thing to Earth.
• Near-Villain Victory: It's not stated, but the fact that the Combine has managed to build a working (albeit finicky) teleporter at Nova Prospekt strongly implies that they were on the verge of fully achieving local teleportation. It was only due to Gordon's timely intervention and destruction of the facility that the Combine failed to perfect their tech in time.
• Nice Job Fixing It, Villain: When Gordon Freeman goes through their weapon confiscator field in the Citadel, it destroys all his weapons except the Gravity Gun, which the confiscator instead makes more powerful, powerful enough to kill Combine soldiers with a simple trigger, pick up energy balls from a distance, and eventually destroying the Citadel's dark energy core.
• No-Nonsense Nemesis: The Combine do not screw around when dealing with problems — as soon as the conquered Earth, they used the Suppression Field to halt human reproduction, use careful incentives to get compliance if not respect, and damage the biosphere such that even if mankind repels them, whether Earth will be worth saving is up in the air. The Citadel, in turn, is equipped with a field that will destroy any weapons within it, even if they belong to their own troops, so that any enemy entering the Citadel will have to do so weaponless.
• Only Known by Their Nickname: "The Combine" doesn't appear to be their actual name, but it's unclear otherwise what their real name is or where "Combine" derived from (although it's possibly a corruption of the "CMB" lettering visible on their propaganda - and even this may not intentionally be a wordmark, but just some other symbol that happens to look like it). Although Breen says outright that "Combine" is a pejorative name used only by "small minds", there are references on official signs and materials to "Combine", so who knows what they actually think about it - if they even really care.
• Organic Technology: The Synth units. They were originally living animals or people until the Combine invade them, converting them into bio-mechanical weapons. In fact, the Combine gunship serves as that trope's current page image.
• Planet Looters: It's very clear that the Combine have no long-term plans for Earth. They're visibly just taking every resource they can use, including the oceans, atmosphere, and some population, and shipping it off-world.
• Police Brutality: Civil Protection; some of their terror-mongering acts include beating people for no reason, shooting people after they surrender and lining up innocent people on walls and using them for target practice in true Nazi-Gestapo-meets-Soviet-NKVD style. Think of them as a worldwide example of the Stanford Prison Experiment.
  • Just like the Stanford Prison Experiment, many of the terror-mongering acts and brutality is the expected standard of all Civil Protection members. Little wonder if attracted the worst.
• Propaganda Piece: Despite their apparent indifference to the lives and opinions of the population, the Combine at some point saw fit to propagandise to them. Posters are everywhere depicting the Combine "claw" logo next to a dove (possibly to associate the regime with the cessation of the portal storms and the Xen invasion, which in fairness to them they did stop) and others showing a massive rally in the same context, presumably to give the appearance of some kind of mass popular support (which, naturally, does not exist).
• Putting on the Reich: The Civil Protection and Overwatch uniforms were based on both Soviet and Nazi designs. This was more blatant in the original concept art.
• Repressive, but Efficient: As a small point in their favour (for what little that counts for considering the countless atrocities they're responsible for), the Combine did manage to find ways keep the remaining population fed, housed and relatively safe from harm - not easy work in a world in which invading Xen aliens destroyed virtually the entire food chain, along with many settlements, and where many of those dangerous creatures would still roam free were the Combine not actively deterring them through various means. Alyx also shows that they were taking extreme and apparently quite resource and personnel-intensive measures to clean up invasions of Xen flora all throughout the Quarantine Zone. Any government would have its work cut out trying to deal with the numerous problems the portal storms dumped onto Earth.
• Riddle for the Ages: After more than 15 years, it's never been explained who the leader of the Combine or any other ruler is. We know the Combine Advisors are high-ranking, but it's never been explained who they are advisors to, or even if they're the ruling class in its entirety.
  • Many details about the Combine are intentionally made vague to keep them frightening and mysterious, such as if they have an advanced space fleet and how easily they can access other realities (it's known that their access to Earth became significantly weaker after the Portal Storms caused by the death of the Nihilianth abated with time, but how exactly significant this really is to the possibility of the Combine reinforcing their forces on Earth is unknown).
• Scary Dogmatic Aliens: Of the "Aliens as Conquistadores" sub-type, with it being incredibly clear that they have no long-term concerns regarding Earth aside from ruthlessly exploiting its natural resources and native populace for their own benefit.
• Shout-Out:
  • invoked Word of God has stated that the main inspiration for the Combine's "Civil Protection" organization was that of the Stanford Prison Experiment.
  • The Combine as a whole are heavily inspired by the hallucinations of Chief Bromden from One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest.
• Sigil Spam: They love to put their "claw" emblem everywhere they have space for it. It forms a prominent part of their identity and takes up an inordinate amount of space on things like their computer terminals.
• The Singularity: The Advisors have passed it, a very long time ago, according to invoked Word of God.
• Slave Mooks: An entire army of them, with most of the Combine soldiers you fight throughout Half-Life 2 and its episodes are actually cybernetically modified and enslaved transhumans. Also, the "Striders," "Gunships," "Hunters," "Dropships," and "Synth Scanners" you see in-game are all either enslaved aliens or biomachines. It's invoked implied that there are millions of enslaved species. The Vortigaunts may have been one of them, though they were later found to be enslaved by the Nihilanth. In fact, the Nihilanth's species' role in relation to the Combine is never really explained, and neither is Race X's role.
• Sociopathic Soldier: Surprisingly, not the Overwatch. They're just brainwashed slaves who tend to kill their targets while being mostly stoic. No, the real sociopaths here are in Civil Protection, mentioned above in Police Brutality; the corps consists of humans who joined the Combine's forces willingly, for perks like extra rations and sexual privileges. They appear to be somewhere between SWAT police and low-ranking soldiers. Their tasks are basically to instill fear in every citizen, and to brutally crack down on small resistance pockets. Their technology is notably a bit more primitive, as well. Where the Overwatch and Airwatch use Striders, Gunships and energy weapons, CP units make do with APCs, patrol helicopters, and submachine guns.
• Sufficiently Advanced Aliens: They curb-stomped the combined military might of every country on Earth in just seven hours. It took Dr. Breen to convince them not to exterminate every single human and settle for enslaving us instead.
• Suicidal Overconfidence: Part of their official policy. Any Overwatch soldier who fails to stop Freeman and lives to report about it will receive "permanent off-world assignment". Their destination is almost certainly not pleasant, and when combined with a surgical procedure that half-lobotomizes people you get an entire army of barely human soldiers who rather stoically throwing themselves to their deaths trying to kill as many rebels as they can.
• Surprisingly Realistic Outcome: The Universal Union managed to take over Earth through sheer, overwhelming force with presumably an entire main fleet within seven hours, using technology and capabilities humanity didn't remotely stand a chance against. Twenty years later, the idea of the main force showing up again is instantly the top priority for the Resistance to prevent, but in regards to their actual earthbound forces, they're hilariously inept, undertrained, and simply not very efficient whatsoever because they already ruled the world and didn't need to be efficient. Gordon Freeman reappearing combined with sparking the fire in the Resistance and all of humanity suddenly resounds to a brutal war that nonetheless has humanity kicking the everliving crap out of the Combine all over the place. About the only time this really gets turned on its head is with the assault on White Forest, and that's through sheer numbers and firepower of a blitzkrieg with everything they've got more than it is any formal skill and tactics.
• Vestigial Empire: Not the Union itself, but its occupation of Earth is quite low in maintenance. Some of their own structures appear to be rusting, and most of their much stronger Synth army was withdrawn in favor of human occupation forces long ago. As mentioned under Genericist Government, they don't appear to have any real civilian government or administrative structures beyond fleeting references to labor organizations and a legal system that may or may not be functional, if they actually exist in reality at all. It's made evident they don't care much about Earth or its long-term integrity; whether or not this is the case for their other worlds is unclear.
• Villain Ball: Downplayed, but their usage of headcrab shells on Resistance locations isn't a very good idea, since it only replaces still-dangerous-but-manageable human Resistance fighters with uncontrollable hordes of Zombies that can be a lot more unpredictable and difficult to manage than the Resistance itself. For reference, see Ravenholm, a Resistence hideout that got shelled with Headcrabs to hell and back that also happened to have a mining tunnel that leads directly to City 17, thus creating a regular stream of both Headcrabs and Zombies who only need to get past a flimsy wooden barricade to wander into the City.
• White Mask of Doom: The Metropolice, although the Combine Elites are even worse.
• You Have Failed Me: Discussed. Breen talks at length about how dissatisfied the "Benefactors" have grown with him, implying that they're on the verge of ending his administration and wiping out the entire human race.
  Breen: If the transhuman forces are to prove themselves an indispensable augmentation to the Combine Overwatch, they will have to earn the privilege. I'm sure I don't have to remind you that the alternative, if you can call it that, is total extinction - in union with all the other unworthy branches of the species.
  Breen: You have plunged humanity into freefall. Even if you offered your surrender now, I cannot guarantee that Our Benefactors would accept it. At the moment, I fear they have begun to look upon even me with suspicion. So much for serving as humanity's representative.

Shu'ulathoi/Advisors

Rhino-sized, grub-like alien lifeforms. They led the Universal Union's Synth invasion of Earth, and now command the Combine forces stationed on Earth through Breen and the Overwatch, taking direct control in Episode Two. The Vortigaunts are familiar with the Advisors, whom they call "Shu'ulathoi", having long been enslaved by them. They are ancient beings, extremely intelligent and powerful, possessing a variety of psychic and telekinetic abilities.

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• Aliens Are Bastards: Our First Contact resulted in them enslaving us and exterminating much of the population. At the end of the day, they are just here to extract our resources and ship it back home.
• Alien Blood: Like most aliens in the series, the Advisors have yellow blood.
• Alien Invasion: They led the Combine in their invasion of Earth, conquering the planet in only seven hours.
• Aliens Speaking English: They can fluently communicate via telepathy in what seems to be a variety of languages.
• Always a Bigger Fish: Although it's no longer compatible with official canon, Epistle 3 shows Breen in the process of "ascending" to an Advisor against his will, certainly a reference to Lord Leto metamorphizing into a sandworm. This would mean that even these reality-bending eldritch abominations are still ultimately just another lowly caste of the Combine's slave hierarchy, like the Nihilanth, and that the true mastermind remains to be seen.
• Ambiguous Situation: Their name: it's unclear if they're the rulers of the Combine and are "advisors" to Breen's puppet government, or if they're lower-ranking advisors to something even more powerful.
• Ancient Astronauts: Though they never technically visited Earth, according to invoked Word of God they had been closely observing Earth for a very, very long time before they invaded. Not for us humans, but for our natural resources.
• Assimilation Plot: Every race the Combine conquers is either forcibly or willingly assimilated into their unified ranks. After Breen convinced the Advisors to not annihilate humanity, this has become their main goal.
• Authority Equals Asskicking: It's unknown where exactly they fall in the Combine hierarchy, but Dr. Breen is completely subservient to them, as are all Combine-affiliated forces on Earth by extension. They're armed with extraordinarily powerful psychic abilities and end up directly commanding all of the Combine military force left on Earth by Episode Two.
• Big Bad: At the very least they oversaw the Combine invasion of Earth, and later rule over its occupation from clandestine stasis pods.
• Blob Monster: Other than their long tongues, they have no discernible body features, appearing like a mass of grey flesh, resembling grubs.
• Cyborg: Apparently they aren't adapted to Earth's atmosphere (not yet, anyway) and as such are outfitted with a wide variety of odd mechanical apparatus. Additionally word of god states whatever the Advisors once were they hit the technological singularity a long time ago and achieved their species equivalent of widespread transhumanism. It shows.
• Death of Personality: Another bit of dubiously canon info from the BreenGrub account says that they are merely the larval form of their species. However, upon metamorphosis they lose not only their psychic powers but their sapience, becoming little more than beasts concerned only with eating and reproduction. The larvae on the other hand had an entire psychic dream world they lived in while they were dormant beneath the ground. The Combine suppress this metamorphosis, likely because they would lose all their valuable traits upon doing so.
• Decapitation Strike: Pulls this at the end of Episode Two, killing Eli and almost doing the same to Alyx and Gordon.
• Evil Colonialist: Their entire motif is conquering then assimilating and/or enslaving all species they come across, or simply plundering their worlds for resources.
• Eviler than Thou: By the time of Episode Two, we find out the Advisors are much more irredeemable than Dr. Breen himself was in the main Half-Life 2 story, as they're extremely powerful entities with Psychic Powers that can and will absolutely kill anything that gets in their way, and also are the ones leading the apocalypse on Earth that Gordon is trying to stop in the first place.
• Evil Overlord: Unclear how high in the overall Combine rankings they are, but they are the overseers of the Combine occupation of Earth.
• Expy: They're heavily based on the Guild Navigators from Dune.
• Fat Bastard: Whether they're naturally this fat or it's the result of their modifications, the Advisors are nonetheless diabolical aliens who are behind the Combine invasions. The way they kill their prey by eating the victim's brain with their long tongue while trapping said victim with Psychic Powers is deeply unsettling.
• The Ghost: Their existence isn't known by anyone on Earth outside of the Combine's highest ranks and the oldest Vortigaunts; not even the folks of Black Mesa knew what they were. By Episode Two, it's revealed that Breen was little more than a puppet for their interests.
• Greater-Scope Villain: For the entire franchise thus far, especially in Half-Life 1 and 2, as they were revealed in Episode Two to actually be the ones who were in charge all along, not Breen.
• Hate Sink: Like Dr. Breen, who is the one that submits to them, the Combine Advisors are depicted as bloodthirsty, remorseless, psychopathic aliens whose sole intent is to Take Over the World and have no problems killing off the entirety of humanity if they so desired, with absolutely no redeeming qualities or altruism to be seen. Even when seen in action, they are committing heinous acts. Unlike Dr. Breen, they don't hide this behind a Faux Affably Evil facade.
• Just the First Citizen: Their innocuous title implies a mere advisory role to Dr. Breen and other vassals of the Combine, but the true power dynamic is clear.
• Karma Houdini: At the end of Episode Two, the Advisor who killed Eli Vance does get a swift beating from D0G, but it nonetheless survives and escapes with the other Advisor, leaving the game on a depressing Cliffhanger with Gordon slowly losing his consciousness while watching Alyx Vance grieving over her dead father. Thankfully in Half-Life: Alyx, this very same Advisor gets killed by Alyx herself, thanks to the use of Reality Warper powers from a deal with the G-Man himself. The other one still gets off scot free, though.
• Kill All Humans: At first they wanted to wipe out the human race entirely, viewing us as insects not even worth ruling over. Only through Breen's pleading did they reconsider this and settle for enslavement.
• Knight of Cerebus: The presence of Advisors signals a major tone shift in Half-Life 2 towards the more serious, especially during the Episodes.
• Leitmotif: Plays alongside them, named after them.
  • This even incorporates some of their own synthetic vocal noises, as if they're singing along.
• Logical Weakness: They are incredibly powerful psionics, but D0G is able to absolutely tune one up the moment he gets his hands on it; he's a robot — their mind-altering abilities don't affect him, meaning it's basically a floating bug versus a furious robotic gorilla.
• The Man Behind the Man: They are the ones behind Dr. Breen and his evil schemes during Half-Life 2, and are much more powerful than he is. They likely would've killed him off too if he didn't give away humanity's freedom for power and allegedly "humanity's survival".
• Mars Needs Water: One reason they invaded Earth, it seems, was to siphon our oceans.
• Master Race: Often believed that they are the masterminds of the entire Universal Union, or at least part of the leading race.
• Mind Probe: Their long tongues allow them to pierce through humans easily; invoked Word of God suggests they can literally suck out human brains in order to interpret their knowledge and their memories, making it especially vital that Resistance leaders don't fall into their clutches. Given that one of them seemingly ate Eli's brain at the end of Episode Two, it's probably a good thing that Alyx diverts that timeline in her game.
• Mind Virus: According to the BreenGrub account (which isn't canon but was written by Marc Laidlaw), the Shu'ulathoi were originally a peaceful race of psychics who accidentally dreamt up a memetic hazard that turned them into a Hive Mind of cruel monsters. Seemingly unable to conquer these powerful reality benders through brute-force like in the Seven Hour War, the Combine instead weaponized the parasite and corrupted them into like-minded tyrants.
• Oh, Crap!: Does a subtle one in Alyx. When the G-Man reverses time on the one that killed Eli, it briefly turns to look at Alyx before being frozen, implying that it realized too late what was going on.
• Psychic Powers: Telekinesis, Clairvoyance, Telepathy, Empathy.
  • Mind Rape: Either through their vocal noises or through mind powers, they can induce debilitating, severely painful seizure-like effects on anything in their close proximity.
    • The graphic and sound effects used on-screen when an Advisor is in close proximity gives a very realistic portrayal of what it's like to have a migraine. Don't get migraines? Now you know what it looks and sounds like to those who do.
• Reality Warper: Not on the same level as the G-Man, but they are capable of freezing time and space in a short area, and can manipulate this localized area at will.
• Reluctant Ruler: For unknown reasons the Advisors remain in stasis up until Episode Two, very rarely asserting control over Earth themselves and leaving most of it up to Breen. By Two, however, they take direct control with a vengeance.
  • Justified by meta-explanations of canon — The years that Earth had been under their rule, they were merely there to observe and not intervene, part of Breen's obligation to prove to them that humanity was worth sparing and integrating into the Universal Union rather than eradicating outright.
• Squishy Wizard: They have strong psychic attacks, but they're easily dispatched in a physical fight by D0G, and can even be taken out by conventional fire.
• Super-Intelligence: As some of the oldest beings in existence, they've got the intellect, accumulated knowledge, and the administrative skills to control, or at least aid in running, an empire that stretches across multiple dimensions. It's even implied that they mastered universal space travel at the same time as humanity was still in its Prehistoric era.
• Starfish Aliens: They resemble rhino-sized brain-sucking grubs with no eyes, arms, legs or face. The invoked developers deliberately wanted to invoke the image of a species that passed its Singularity a very long time ago. They rely on mechanical arms and eyes for manipulation and anti-gravity packs for movement. Well, those and their near-unstoppable telekinetic and telepathic abilities.
• Villain Override: During the events of Episode 2, the Advisors assume direct control of all Combine units, with the implication being that they are stripping away even the few strips of autonomy that the Combine Overwatch has left. It's even possible that they see and hear everything their subordinate Combine units do and are trying to kill the heroes personally by launching endless attacks in the bodies of their minions.
  Overwatch: All autonomous units: Accept mandatory sector assimilation. Coordinated constriction underway. Debride and cauterize. Entering phase nine, enhanced compliance. Deploy advisory control and oversight. Submit and be subsumed.
• The Worf Effect: At the end of Half-Life: Alyx, all the G-Man has to do is buff Alyx's gauntlets a bit with some of what appears to be his own power, and that is enough for her to absolutely toast the Advisor that aimed to kill Eli, with the Advisor never even realizing what was happening before dying. Super-intelligent as they are, even these beings are utterly vulnerable against whatever the hell the G-Man is.
• Worf Had the Flu: G-Man froze that particular Advisor in time and space, however, meaning Alyx had the easiest kill of her life with the creature being completely unable to move, react, or defend itself. Were she fighting one without it being paused in time, who knows just how much of a challenge it would pose, let alone more than one?
• You Have Failed Me: After Breen's consistent failures against the Resistance and Freeman, it's made clear they no longer have any use for him.

Dr. Wallace Breen

The Administrator / Dr. Wallace Breen

"Make no mistake, Doctor Freeman, this is not a scientific revolution you have sparked, this is death and finality!"

Voice Actor: Robert Culp (English)^note Other Languages: Philippe Monnet (French), Wolf Kahler (German), Kang Gu-han (Korean), Boris Sosna (Russian - SDL dub), Nikita Prozorovsky (Russian - Buka dub), Carlos Riera (Spanish)

"Welcome. Welcome, to City 17. You have chosen, or been chosen, to relocate to one of our finest remaining urban centers. I thought so much of City 17, that I elected to establish my administration, here, in the citadel, so thoughtfully provided by our benefactors. I am proud to call City 17 my home. And so, whether you are here to stay, or passing through to parts unknown, welcome, to City 17. It's safer here."

Dr. Wallace Breen is the earlier head of the Black Mesa Research Facility, and was unnamed and unseen in the first game, where he was merely referred to as "The Administrator". In Half-Life 2, he is the main antagonist and the Combine's puppet ruler of Earth, a position he got after selling out mankind to them.

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• 0% Approval Rating: Given that he's The Quisling for The Combine and it's heavily implied that he's really in this just for the power, pretty much no one outside of the Combine's own forces like him.
• Anti-Villain: Him being The Quisling aside, he did end up sparing humanity from extinction by trying to bargain with the Combine. And he arguably has little if any power to interfere with their plans for Earth anyway.
• Asshole Victim: While it's unclear if he actually dies at the end, either way it's hard to feel too sorry for him given his status as Earth's cruel puppet ruler.
• Beard of Evil: Interestingly, it's rather similar to Gordon's beard.
• Big Bad Wannabe: While he is the main antagonist of Half-Life 2, it's incredibly obvious that he's just being used as a Puppet King by the Combine Advisors (who are the real main antagonists) to maintain the faintest facade of legitimacy, and is shown to be a Dirty Coward when faced by Gordon.
• Bitch in Sheep's Clothing: While he superficially seems like a Reasonable Authority Figure, he is actually helping the Combine to wipe out the human race (he actively advocates for the use of a device that prevents humans from breeding, which he claims will help them focus on other things, when in reality it's a plot to make people stop reproducing so they go extinct, though to be fair it's possible he has no say in the matter). Dr. Breen may have had positive intentions at first in order to secure at least some form of humanity, but by the present day it seems to be all but certain that he's only in this for the power the Combine grants him.
• Body Horror: In the original Half-Life 2 script, Breen himself was going to be turned into an Advisor. In fact, the last conversation Breen has with an Advisor has him complaining there's no way he could survive Combine space, and apparently gets a psychic answer, because he then reacts incredulously that the Advisors have a less-than-pleasant way for him to live.
• Bond Villain Stupidity: When he flees to the portal after talking to the Advisor, he forgets to take the supercharged Gravity Gun with him.
• Breaking Speech: He's quite found of these such as near the end of HL2.
  Dr. Breen: I'd like to take a moment to address you directly, Dr. Freeman. Yes, I'm talking to you. The so-called One Free Man. I have a question for you. How could you have thrown it all away? It staggers the mind. A man of science, with the ability to sway reactionary and fearful minds toward the truth choosing instead to embark on a path of ignorance and decay. Make no mistake, Dr. Freeman. This is not a scientific revolution you have sparked... this is death and finality. You have plunged humanity into freefall. Even if you offered your surrender now, I cannot guarantee that our benefactors would accept it. At the moment, I fear they have begun to look upon even me with suspicion. So much for serving as humanity's representative. Help me win back their trust, Dr. Freeman. Surrender while you still can. Help ensure that humanity's trust in you is not misguided. Do what is right, Dr. Freeman. Serve mankind.
• Corrupt Corporate Executive: He was the administrator of Black Mesa before becoming the Combine governor of the Earth, and pushed for the risky analysis that eventually led to the disaster in the first game.
• Dirty Coward: He begs Freeman to surrender to the Combine and attempts to escape him by teleporting away from Earth. Not helped by the fact that he essentially sold all of mankind's freedom to the Combine (admittedly because otherwise, the Combine would have completely erased humanity from Earth, but still) so he could sit comfortably at the top of the Citadel and wants to avoid all kinds of direct confrontation.
• Dystopia Justifies the Means: Unlike the Combine, Dr. Breen is a human being who knows what the world was like before they invaded Earth and turned it into their plaything because he's an inhabitant, while they just see it as another place to extract resources from. This means he is enforcing the dystopia aware that it's a dystopia but doesn't really care.
• Establishing Character Moment: His first appearance on the monitors. While he may sound like a kindly ruler, his rhetoric is decidedly authoritarian, befitting his status as an Expy of Big Brother.
• Evil Old Folks: He's at least old enough to be in his 50s and is the Combine's Puppet King.
• Evil Overlord: Of City 17 and the rest of Earth.
• Expy: Of Big Brother from Nineteen Eighty-Four, with both characters being the seemingly omnipresent dictatorial leaders over the main antagonistic faction of each respective work, and whose public service announcements constantly claim everything is fine (when it most obviously isn't) while implying that the oppressed citizenry should be giving even more of themselves to the state with nothing expected back.
• Faux Affably Evil: Breen's pretty well spoken and (mostly) calm for being a smug backstabber. But he's also cold, dismissive, patronizing, arrogant, smarmy and passive-aggressive. Though he often covers it with a veneer of concern, friendliness, and approachability — especially in his Breencasts — the underlying disdain and indifference, even towards his allies, is unmistakable.
• Foil: In a lot of respects, he serves this to Gordon Freeman: both are bearded scientists who worked at Black Mesa and had a prominent role in the catastrophe, but contrasting a Heroic Mime who proves his worth through action with a Non-Action Big Bad whose primary role is his endless bloviation. Both are also pawns of a larger power with little meaningful agency who are upheld as figureheads by the populace, making Breen's fervently loyal yet empty and miserable servitude of the Combine into something of a possible future for Gordon.
• The Ghost: In the first game, he's just referred to as "The Administrator" a couple of times but is never seen.
• Godzilla Threshold: Gordon Freeman's mere arrival forces Breen to cross this. While he knew of the rebel cells and was waiting for the opportunity to clean them up once and for all, Freeman's appearance in his office (which also gives away that the rebels have been working on teleportation, a big deal to the Combine) forces Breen's hand because he knows that the One-Man Army theoretical physicist being allowed to gallivant around freely could undermine everything he's worked for. Going all-out with the Combine Overwatch captures Eli and strikes the rebels before they were ready - but drives Freeman into the perfect circumstances to incite a world-wide rebellion and come for Breen.
• Hate Sink: Breen is good at holding public speeches, but they underly his deceitfulness. Otherwise he lacks any sympathetic, likable or even cool qualities, and apart from being a ruthless dictator, he is shown to be little more than an incredibly smug, condescending, cowardly asshole who is slowly wiping out humanity on the behalf of alien invaders for the sake of personal power.
• Humans Are the Real Monsters: In a series all about fighting evil aliens, one of the most vile and dangerous enemies of all is a human.
• Hypocrite:
  • In his Breencasts he says that "small minds" use the term "the Combine", and ostensibly eschews that label in favor of "Our Benefactors" and "the Universal Union." However, when you meet him in person he himself calls them "the Combine."
  • As Gordon Freeman continues to undermine his rule over City 17, Breen accuses him of having selfishly betrayed mankind to the extent that it could mean the end of the human race as the world knows it. This is the same man who has spent the entire game trying to exterminate humanity just so he can keep his power and authority as the Combine's Puppet King on Earth.
• I Did What I Had to Do: Dr. Breen rationalizes his actions on the grounds that the Combine were going to simply exterminate humanity in its entirety to take Earth's resources and what little valuable technology we had invented. Dr. Breen convinced them to spare humanity on the condition we proved ourselves worthy of being assimilated. At least on paper his actions make sense, but in the process he secured a comfortable position of power for himself and proceeded to lord it over the remains of humanity, effectively ignoring the fact that mankind was still condemned to extinction by the suppression field. He may have saved humanity but for his own sake rather than humanity as a whole.
• Knight Templar: The speeches heard by him on the screens around City 17 bring to mind a delusional person who thinks that what he's doing for humanity is right and that people who fight against the Combine are the same as those who are willing to die.
• Lack of Empathy: He is horrendously apathetic towards the suffering of Earth's population under the Combine's rule and doesn't really seem to care as long as he gets to benefit from it.
• Leaning on the Fourth Wall: During the Nova Prospekt chapters, he expresses his bewilderment that Gordon Freeman, a theoretical physicist with no training and little combat experience, could take on the elite forces of the Combine Overwatch and somehow come out on top without breaking a sweat.
• A Lighter Shade of Black: Downplayed. No doubt Breen deserves to be the most hated man in the world and should be condemned as the traitor he is for cooperating with the Combine. However, the Combine are the ones who invaded Earth in the first place and he's just their delusional figurehead. Considering he allowed the Combine to rule over the entirety of Earth by letting people be slowly tortured by them and is still an incredibly bad person regardless of who he aligns with, he still isn't that much better than the alien invaders themselves.
• Misanthrope Supreme: His motivations are a wee bit unclear. He did convince the Combine to enslave rather than outright exterminate humanity (and was afterwards named Administrator of Earth), but whether he did so for personal power, or because he really cared about humanity is left unclear.
• Morally Ambiguous Doctorate: His title is "Dr." and he's one of the Combine's primary disciples.
• Mysterious Past: Other than being the administrator of Black Mesa, little is actually known about Breen's past prior to his tenure as Earth's puppet administrator. A newspaper clipping in Alyx reveals that through means unknown, he figured out how to communicate with the Combine during the Seven Hours War and was granted full authority by the United Nations to negotiate an unconditional surrender.
• Narcissist: He's got propaganda posters of himself in City 17 and even busts of himself in some locations, including his own office. Then there's the fact he's got jumbo screens of himself talking plastered all over the place.
• Never Found the Body: We never really know what happened to him after the end of 2 when the Citadel is destroyed. Considering the massive explosion and teleportation link to Combine territory in a whole other universe, it's a coin flip between him being utterly obliterated while standing in the source of the blast, or being thrown and stranded in parts unknown in one form or another.
• Nice Job Fixing It, Villain: His actions at the tail end of 2 and his ignorance about the Gravity Gun (and especially its 11th-Hour Superpower form) gave the Resistance the chance to fend off the Combine and close the portal at the end of Episode Two. At the tail end of "Our Benefactors", he takes the Gravity Gun from Gordon, only for Judith (who clearly never told him about the device) to pull off a High-Heel–Face Turn and him hitting Gordon with the device to free the heroes in reaction... and later leaving it on the floor while escaping, allowing Gordon to take it back. The empowered Gravity Gun and its ability to take off cores from their channels end up being the key to Breen's defeat and, later on, help him and Alyx retrieve the data from the imploding Citadel core at the beginning of Episode One, which, in turn, allows the Resistance to learn about the location of the Combine portal and devise a plan to close the interdimensional portal, considerably weakening the Combine forces at the end of Episode Two. Had he knew about the Gravity Gun, or Judith told him about it, the entirety of Episode One and Episode Two wouldn't have happened because Gordon, Alyx, Judith and Eli would've been dead.
• Non-Action Big Bad: The final battle is against him, but it's the other soldiers and the gunships who are attacking you while Breen tries to escape via teleportation.
• Oh, Crap!: His smug façade cracks when Judith turns against him, and it completely shatters when Gordon starts damaging the teleporter at the top of the Citadel.
• Puppet King: Over all of humanity due to the Combine installing him as Earth's administrator.
• The Quisling: He refers to a genocidal race that owns a big chunk of the multiverse as "Our Benefactors", at least when speaking over the Breencasts.
• Sesquipedalian Loquaciousness: Mildly. He's very eloquent and likes to use fancy or obscure synonyms for common words. It's like he reads thesauruses in his spare time.
• Smug Snake: Things escalate beyond his control rather quickly. He also gloats about being able to effectively demand anything he wants from the Combine in exchange for handing over Eli, but while it is true that Eli's knowledge of how to achieve local teleportation would be very valuable for the Combine, "anything I want" is probably a tad presumptuous against an unfathomably powerful multversal empire that could just march in and take Eli if they really wanted to.
• Sophisticated as Hell: His speech is normally impeccably erudite, so it makes the one time he swears glorious.
• Treachery Is a Special Kind of Evil: He essentially betrays the entirety of humanity in favor of becoming the Combine's figurehead and even endorses their invasion by telling humanity that the Combine have helped us. This ends up in everyone on Earth hating him.
• Uncertain Doom: At the end of Half-Life 2, the platform lifting him up the teleporter collapses, and he seems to fall to his death. In Episode One, a recording of Breen conversing with an Advisor suggests he may have become (or had a copy of his mind transferred into) an Advisor.
• Viewers Are Geniuses: An in-universe example. For 20 years, humanity has been living in squalor, with the average citizen having no access to education, but his speeches are either intentionally obfuscating, or written entirely for himself. For some reference, they are filled with references to the history of human evolution, human psychology and paleontology, all spoken in eloquent english and resultantly nearly incomprehensible to the average citizen of City 17.
• Villain Has a Point:
  • He boasts that he's "laid the foundation for humanity's survival", and he's right about this in that his negotiating humanity's surrender at the end of the Seven Hour War is the only reason there's anything left for Gordon to save.
  • He tells Gordon that through his actions, he has sparked "death and finality". A lot of people end up paying the price for Gordon being a Doom Magnet throughout the game and the following Episodes.
• Villainous Breakdown: He becomes increasingly impatient and childish as Gordon Freeman kills off his soldiers and starts a rebellion. When Gordon invades the Citadel, Breen goes from first trying browbeating him into surrendering, to frantically but still condescendingly trying to reason with him, and finally he starts outright begging for him to stop. Later, while trying to escape via teleport, he resorts to juvenile taunting and mockery, then goes back to begging when it becomes clear that Gordon's not going to quit anytime soon.
• Wicked Cultured: He shows a mild example of Sesquipedalian Loquaciousness, and makes reference to advanced physics notions several times, but we're not sure exactly what his Morally Ambiguous Doctorate is actually in. In any case, everything about him, from his way of speaking to his bearing and his dress, screams "scholarly and cultured". If Dr. Rosenberg's dialogue in Decay are still canon, however (though the game was made long before Breen's character was ever properly formed), they indicate that he considers Breen "a bureaucrat, not a scientist", indicating that he doesn't think highly of the man's intelligence, which would imply that while Breen isn't neccessarily an idiot (far from it), he's actively trying to come off as smarter than he actually is.

The "Shadow Scientist"

Voiced by: Kim Dickens (Half-Life: Alyx)

"We need to move the box or this thing is going to be Black Mesa all over again."

A mysterious figure glimpsed in Half Life: Alyx working with the Combine.

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• The Faceless: The player never sees her directly, only her shadow cast on the wall. The only way to see her actual model is through datamining.
• I See Them, Too: One of the few characters revealed to have knowledge of the G-Man.
• The Quisling: Whoever she is, it's clear from her brief appearance that she's a Combine sympathizer. However, she also seems to enjoy a great deal of autonomy as she describes herself as being her own boss, is cleared to know about the Vault and its contents despite being an unaltered human and the Combine's obsession with keeping it secret, and can talk down to Advisors without repercussions.
• Small Role, Big Impact: Unintentionally, her conversation with the Advisor is what causes the protagonists to think that the Vault contains Gordon Freeman.
• Suspiciously Similar Substitute: As a defector working with the Combine, she plays a very similar role to Judith Mossman, to the point of many players making the assumption that she is indeed Mossman. Datamining has revealed that she isn't Mossman.

Overwatch Voice

Voice Actress: Ellen McLain (English)^note Other Languages: Corinne Kempa (French), Daniella Eaton (German), Yeo Min-Jeong (Korean), Natalia Radski (Half-Life 2), Olga Kuznetsova (Episode One), Zhanna Nikonova (Episode Two) (Russian), Elsa Ochoa (Spanish)

"Attention ground units. Anticitizen reported in this community. Code: lock, cauterize, stabilize."

The other voice of the Combine, outside of the Breencasts. The voice is a feminine AI who spouts propaganda and announcements to the public, and delivers orders to the Civil Protection and Overwatch troops.

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• Accent Upon The Wrong Syllable: Initially she speaks like this, due to being an AI who is likely going through automated messages. By the time of Episode Two she's dropped this in favor of a cold and perfectly pronounced dialect.
• Big Brother Is Watching: Anything that camera drones spot is apparently relayed straight to her and is downloaded into every relevant unit when needed - Freemans luck instantly starts to turn for the worse after a mere couple steps into City 17 thanks to his picture being taken, the AI not recognizing him and alerting every officer nearby to investigate. If one pays attention to ambient dialogue, both her and Civil Protection were tracking Freeman down long before he even swings a crowbar.
  Airwatch reports possible miscount.
  Citizen notice: priority identification check in progress. Please assemble in your designated inspection positions.
  Attention please: unidentified person of interest - confirm your civil status with local protection team immediately.
• Canned Orders over Loudspeaker: For either Combine propaganda or to relay tactical information to ground units. Somehow the Combine doesn't care that Gordon Freeman and La Résistance can hear them.
• Deadly Euphemism: Many of her brutal orders are given in a combination of medical terms and Newspeak, and are echoed by the troops she commands. To name a few:
  • Amputate: Orders to kill.
  • De-service(ed): Also used for killed, typically reserved for the death of Civil Protection officers, troops and Combine prisoners.
  • Sterilizers: Sentry guns.
  • Cauterize: Secure the area, kill all targets.
  • Infection: Anti-civil activity.
  • Verdict(s): Civil Protection punishments. CP units are occasionally heard using verdict as a synonym for ammo.
  • Extractors: Grenades.
  • Terminal/Capital Prosecution: On-the-spot death sentencing by Civil Protection teams.
  • Sacrifice-Coagulate-Clamp: Code for all units to enact a Zerg Rush.
  • Deploy-Diagnose-Dissect: Code for units to investigate the situation, weapons ready.
• Dissonant Serenity: City 17 can be exploding all around her, which is exactly what ends up happening by the time Gordon returns, and yet she'll still coldly and methodically be sending out orders to the troops.
• Disproportionate Retribution: While Freeman is escaping City 17 through its city blocks and eventually the Underground Railroad, she's heard ordering Civil Protection teams to exterminate all civilians in the block. Later, she's heard announcing that another blocks ration supply, which is presumably already the bare minimum, is being reduced even further. Both of these were for their inaction in trying to capture Freeman who incidentally passed by their homes while on the run.
  Citizen reminder: inaction is conspiracy. Report counter-behavior to a Civil Protection team immediately.
• The Dragon: While Breen is a figurehead for the human populace and the Advisors run the planet from behind the scenes, the Overwatch AI seems to have the majority of control over the police and military might on Earth, and even significant control over civilian rights, and as such seems to operate separately but still in conjunction with the Advisors and the occasional tip given by Breen. When the Citadel explodes and takes the city with it, the remaining Combine make the effort to salvage and repair her to help rally scattered forces, meaning she's definitely of high enough priority and importance for the Combine to be 'rescued'.
• Electronic Speech Impediment: Following the heavy blow dealt to the Citadel at the end of Half-Life 2, her orders are buggy at best and non-sensical at worst, constantly repeating herself in a slow and drawn out manner.
• Emotionless Girl: Her voice is feminine, and she simply spouts the Combine's orders and propaganda matter-of-factly.
• Leave No Survivors: She gives the order to 'de-service' all prisoners in Freeman's area when he breaches Nova Prospekt to prevent them from meeting. You can find possible evidence of this when you reach a prison cell where a dead Vortigaunt was strapped to a chair and apparently executed.
• Leave No Witnesses: One of the possible response lines when Freeman is killed is to perform "witness sterilization".
• Minor Major Character: She's pretty much never referred to or acknowledged by any characters aside from Combine units reporting things into their radio to her and rarely characters reacting to her voice as a sign of incoming Combine, but she's still heard throughout the game relaying tactical info and helps provide context to how the Combine military operates and what's it like living under Combine rule.
• Mission Control: For the Combine.
• Mission Control Is Off Its Meds: In Episode One, it's clear that the heavy damage to the Citadel has done a number on her. Her voice is slowed down and generally buggy and she is seemingly out of touch with the situation, with the orders she gives to stabilize the reactor core being ignored by the soldiers. In Episode Two her voice is more stable, but even colder and more imposing, implying she was repaired by and is now under direct control of the Advisors.
• NewSpeak: A great deal of the Combines jargon comes from her, with most threats and implications of death being replaced by euphemisms based off allegorical medical terms and stuffy legal language, respectively. Unlike most examples this doesn't serve any purpose close to mitigating or hiding the meaning of words, the terms are instead indicative of how lowly the Combine view the subjects they rule - as an equivalent to germs.
• Nicknaming the Enemy: The Overwatch has given a variety of codenames to threats to the Combine rule, most, if not all in medical jargon.
  • Parasites/Necrotics: Headcrabs and Zombies.
  • Viromes: Antlions.
  • Outbreaks/Malignants: Rebels.
  • Vance Subprime: Alyx Vance. Eli Vance is presumably Vance Prime.
  • Anticitizen One/Staph Infection: Gordon Freeman.
• Prepare to Die: While Gordon is still being chased by the Civil Protection, she may make it a point to directly refer to him via the officer's radio when he's critically injured.
  Attention: Freeman. Prepare for final sentencing.
  Attention: Freeman, you are charged with terminal violations 143, 243, 245. All protection team units: complete sentencing at will.
• Robot Girl: She's clearly an AI, and talks in a feminine, cold, clinical voice.
• Terse Talker: While she started out fairly wordy and tended to draw her speech out, Episode Two has her recovered and repaired by surviving Combine, and she now speaks in short and aggressive commands to reflect the Combines now wholly militaristic plan of action.
  All autonomous units - accept mandatory sector assimilation. (...) Coordinates constriction underway. (...) Debride and cauterize. (...) Entering Phase nine, enhanced compliance. (...) Deploy advisory control and oversight. (...) Submit and be subsumed.
• Vocal Evolution: Every game she's appeared in gives her a different kind of speaking style.
  • Alyx has her sound at her most human and emotive, but also at her most aggressive with barely any sense of her being autonomous.
  • Half-Life 2 gives her an emotionless and monotonous tone with plenty of sentence splicing in the context of the location and situation, as if she was an AI analyzing and generating orders into the radio on the spot.
  • In Episode One she's suffered heavy damage from the events of Half-Life 2, and speaks slowly in a half-damaged half-dazed tone while the Citadel is close to being destroyed.
  • Episode Two has her lose some of her autonomous tone in favor of a dry and human sounding voice, which drops most of her Newspeak tendencies in favor of short and blunt orders.
• Voice with an Internet Connection: Is present in City 17, Nova Prospekt, the Citadel and eventually the town outskirts in White Forest to give orders to Civil Protection and Overwatch units.

Civil Protection

"Pick up that can."

— A Civil Protection officer trying to bully Freeman minutes after his arrival.

Voiced by: Kelly Bailey

The Combine's excessively violent police force, which consists of humans who have joined the Combine willingly for all the benefits it will get them.

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• Advertised Extra: Despite only mostly appearing in the beginning, and that they are pretty weak in comparison to the rest of the Overwatch, Civil Protection are probably the most heavily advertised Combine unit in the series, with them being more representitive to the rest of the Combine than Breen himself is. It also helps they are pretty quote worthy too.
  Civil Protection: Pick up that can.
• Artificial Stupidity: Downplayed, but when compared to the Overwatch troops AKA an actual military force, Civil Protection tactics are about as basic as standing a healthy distance away and firing their guns without many other tactical maneuvers. Justified, in that they're essentially police officers and not trained military.
• Boisterous Weakling: Unlike the Combine soldiers or synths who are unthinking, efficient killing machines built for war, the metrocops are basically untrained street thugs who enjoy harassing citizens for entertainment, and they're exceedingly weak against someone who can fight back.
• Demoted to Extra: Despite still being an Advertised Extra, they play a very minor role in Alyx where they only show up in the opening level, and later when she is held inside a prisoner truck. Alyx doesn't even fight them at all as the main Combine enemies are the Overwatch Units.
• Drone Deployer: Some of them pack Manhacks on themselves, and will activate and toss them in the air to hunt targets down for them.
• Flatline: Their radios will emit a prolonged tone upon their death, followed by the Overwatch Voice urging nearby units to respond.
• Gas Mask Mooks: They wear particularly bulky gas masks, and unlike the Overwatch military, they don't seem to serve any tactical or life preserving purpose other than keeping the officer anonymous and intimidating to civilians.
• I Have Your Wife: After killing Freeman, one of the messages the overwatch voice can notify to the Civil Protection soldiers is that their "family cohesion has been preserved", implying that many of them are working under the threat of being separated from their families entirely if they fail at completing the task.
• Hoist by Their Own Petard: Very quickly in their first combat encounters with Gordon, they start resorting to setting oil drum barrels on fire and kicking or throwing them down at him to try to clear him out, and throughout encounters with them for the rest of the game they tend to have these barrels all over the place. Nothing stops you from pre-emptively shooting the barrel while it's still in front of them, or detonating their oil stockpiles amidst their squads, or better yet, using the Gravity Gun to launch their own barrels at their faces.
• Police Brutality: They're well known for their especially violent and bullying nature, whether on command from the Overwatch AI or just for their own amusement.
• Punch-Clock Villain: Many citizens end up joining Civil Protection for the bonuses that come with it, ranging from ration rewards, family safety, somewhat better living conditions, and non-simulated sexual gratification. As such they show much more humanity than the lobotomized and brainwashed Overwatch troopers.
• Radio Voice: Their voices are especially garbled and deep thanks to their helmets, likely to either keep their communications hard to understand to non-CP units, and also just as likely to keep them anonymous.
• Screw This, I'm Outta Here: A squad of CP officers attack Gordon, Barney and the citizens Gordon's escorting in Exit 17. Barney implies that they are trying to use the train for themselves to get the hell out of City 17, having second thoughts about still serving the Combine in such a dire situation.
• Super-Persistent Predator: Throughout much of the ride in the airboat in Water Hazard, a CP attack helicopter is constantly ahead of you, trying to bomb and gun you to death no matter how many tunnels and detours you take. It isn't until the boat's armed with a cannon that it's able to be taken out, and even then the pilot is determined to die trying to kill you in the final confrontation.
• Tanks for Nothing: Not battle tanks, but the Civil Protection apparently have access to APCs armed with guided missiles, and are more than happy to deploy a street's worth of them to kill Freeman. Not that it does them any good, as they're very easy to outmaneuver and speed past.
• Too Dumb to Live: Potentially. They'll try to throw flaming explosive barrels at Gordon, who can use this against them, and when Gordon's speeding around in an airboat, they'll jump down and rappel straight into his driving path, all but encouraging you to make them ragdoll roadkill and send them flying. Their own inefficient combat tactics as police forces rather than trained military also tend to result in just about anyone, even Resistance members, outgunning and slaughtering them.
• Transhuman Treachery: Willingly joining the alien empire that supresses and slowly exterminates mankind is only one part of this deal. It is implied that promoted metropolice officers are transferred to the Overwatch, where all remaining bits of humanity are stripped away entirely through surgery and brainwashing.
• Villainous Valor: Downplayed, as Barney implies that they are trying to save themselves, but the remaining CPs attack Gordon, Barney and the rebels in Exit 17 despite being utterly outgunned and outmatched.
• White Mask of Doom: Played with, as their gas masks are pale white and they terrorize citizens daily. To any sufficiently armed Resistance member, and especially Freeman, they're only rarely as dangerous the Combines formal military forces.

Combine Overwatch's Transhuman Arm

Half-Life 2 units.
Left to right: Soldier, Shotgun Soldier, Elite

Half-Life: Alyx units.
Left to right: Grunt, Charger, Suppressor, Ordinal

Voiced by: Kelly Bailey, Jason Vande Brake (Grunts), Michael Schwalbe (Chargers), Isaac C. Singleton Jr. (Suppressors), Rajia Baroudi (Ordinals)

The Transhuman Arm of the Combine Overwatch represents the Combine's military infantry forces on Earth. They are much better trained and equipped than Civil Protection, and unlike them are not merely Black Shirts, but fully cybernetically converted post-human soldiers remade in the Combine's image. They are called "Stabilization Teams" during the first years of the regime.

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• Adaptation Personality Change: Overwatch troops encountered during Half-Life 2 and the Episodes are unwaveringly stoic, communicating with each other using clinical Newspeak and seldom dropping their monotonous speech patterns. While they maintain much of this in Half-Life: Alyx, they're decidedly more humanlike in terms of personality, holding casual conversations while on duty and generally showing more emotion in their speech. Justified as the Overwatch soldiers in this game are earlier, less augmented versions of their Half-Life 2 counterparts.
• And I Must Scream: Soldiers overtaken by Headcrabs are unique among zombies in that they're clearly, unambiguously speaking despite their predicament, laboriously attempting to warn other units over the radio of a parasitic infection and hostile contacts through sheer willpower and/or brainwashing, although they can't help but sometimes let out an anguished howl of pain when forced to chase prey.
• Artificial Brilliance: They flank, throw grenades, use cover while reloading, move in squads, and fire while moving and slicing around corners, but due to their relatively low health compared to the player, they tend to die before they can employ any real impressive degree of strategy.
• Badass Army: As the occupational arm of the Combine Empire, they don't mess around.
• Body Horror: Half Life: Alyx seems to show they're essentially sealed inside their suits, to the point that if the helmet is removed their flesh retains the shape of its indentation. Their eyes have also been removed to allow for a direct connection between their helmet optics and their brain.
• Bio-Augmentation: It is revealed in Alyx (and technically speaking, the Half-Life 2 pre-release, on a piece of dialogue with two Metrocops) is that not only are they cybernetically changed, but also their very genes as well. In Alyx, it is explained that this so they can use their "bonded/Gene-Coded" weapons. It doesn't explain why Gordon and the rebels can use the same weapons without trouble though. On the other hand, it may also explain how they can survive in high radiation areas just like the Stalkers.
• Boring, but Practical: Outside of their obviously advanced pulse weapons and cyborg vehicles (which even then are equipped alongside mundane firearms and regular vehicles), most of the Combine body armor is fairly mundane padded kevlar, with the odd equipment out being their advanced helmets that has access to a handful of augmentations and visual-downloading functions. Likewise, this may be the case why they aren't physically similar to fellow bio and cybernetically augmented sci-fi soldiers like the Adeptus Astartes and Spartans. They are made to be more efficient human soldiers, not truly superhuman killing machines.
• Color-Coded for Your Convenience: The regular soldiers are colored gray and blue, and are relatively average combatants. The Shotgun Soldiers, on the other hand, are brown and red and more dangerous. And then there's the Combine Elite (though his model is separate), who is white with touches of black and is the most dangerous.
• Cyborg: All soldiers of the transhuman arm, as their branch title says, are augmented. It is unknown how much, but they can survive radiation and their brains are given some sort of computerized augmentation. As they can delete memories on the go, as long as Overwatch command allows it. They even can interface with their helmets via the empty eye sockets they have.
• Cyber Cyclops: The Combine Elites have a single red eye in the front of their helmets.
• Cybernetics Eat Your Soul: The military forces of the Combine have been largely outfitted with tons of cybernetics done through invasive surgery, with the head being a frequent target of operation by removing the eyes to allow for direct interface with their helmet optics, or outright cleaving everything except the brain away to basically make their helmet their new head. Outside Combine soldiers are hardly emotive outside of being surprised, with the most heard out of them is a uncharacteristically panicked 'Shit!' if their sniper's nest had a grenade tossed into it, or shouting 'Outbreak' into their radio if their squad's been wiped out.
• Deadpan Snarker: Overwatch soldiers in Half-Life: Alyx occasionally get in on this, courtesy of their more humanized portrayal.
  (Two Grunts are moving a waste barrel)
  Grunt 1: Hey! Watch it. I don't want to get any of this crap on me.
  Grunt 2: Why? Is it dangerous?
  Grunt 1: We're not dumping it in a pit because it's safe. Keep moving.
• Electronic Speech Impediment: One of their most standout characterizations is the varying degrees of Radio Voice they always speak in, due to their enhancements. The new Combine units introduced in Alyx have even more distorted speech, with the Combine Chargers sounding like they're speaking inside a small echo chamber, and the Ordinals' voice being almost muffled and sounding like they speak while inhaling.
• Elite Mooks: The Combine Elites. They have better aim, take more damage before dying, are always equipped with assault rifles, and utilize their assault rifle's undermounted energy ball launcher. Plus they show up much later in the game.
• Evil Sounds Deep: They communicate through deep, vocoder-filtered voices.
• Eye Scream: Implied with the Combine Elites due to their singular red eyes. You can see an undressed Combine Soldier with several cybernetic implants in Nova Prospect. This can make one wonder what the Elites look like beneath their helmets... or not.
• Fake Ultimate Mook: The Combine Overwatch may look big and scary, but the untrained ragtag rebels are actually better shots. Still, the Overwatch soldiers are actually more effective in combat though because of their ability to throw grenades and their slightly larger amount of health, and with most weapons Rebels and Combine soldiers are on par in accuracy.
  • Depending on your interpretation, this could be justified in that, despite their augmentations, they're less Super Soldiers and more mass-produced disposable Mooks. Alternatively, their shortcomings - like inaccuracy with SMG's or dying in one hit to Antlions - could simply be for game balance reasons, and not actually indicative of their quality in the game's story.
  • Perhaps their augmentations are more to allow them to be the best a human soldier can be within human limits, while erasing or downplaying human weaknesses. Maybe some of their augments are geared towards higher pain thresholds (Combine Soldiers in Alyx can limp in pain, but still fight nonetheless), not needing food or sleep for higher periods than regular men.
• Flatline: The soldiers in Alyx inherit the Civil Protection officers' flatline-upon-death characteristic, albeit without the Overwatch voice announcing their death afterwards.
• Gas Mask Mooks: Justified, in that Overwatch Transhuman troops are in use on other, non-human-habitable planets.
• Hazmat Suit: The Grunts in Alyx deviate from typical Combine body armor by wearing something resembling a hazmat suit and belts holding combat gear - fitting apparel for deployment in a quarantined, Xen-infested part of town.
• Heavily Armored Mook: Seen with the introduction of Combine Suppressors and Combine Chargers in Half Life: Alyx, having significantly heavier armor compared to standard Combine Grunts, and fulfill very standard Heavy roles in combat; the Suppressor pins you down with heavy automatic weapons fire while relying on his armor to protect him due to him not being able to use cover, while the Charger charges your position with a shotgun.
• Killed Mid-Sentence: In Alyx, when they die they may occasionally try to say something before the flatline cuts them off.
• Laser-Guided Amnesia: It's mentioned on a few occasions that to be promoted in the Overwatch, you need to erase your memories, probably to prevent an uprising as well as to be more efficient in battle. Essentially, the Combine forces consists almost entirely of lobotomized meat-robots. Ambient dialogue in Alyx indicates these memory wipes can be performed on the fly, in the field, to reduce "cognitive dissonance".
• Mook Commander: The Combine Ordinals in Half Life: Alyx serve as the leaders of individual Overwatch squads, preferring to hang back in combat and issue orders to their teammates. Killing them renders the remaining squad members far less organized in their tactics.
• More Dakka: The Suppressors in Alyx, true to their name, keep their enemies pinned down using prolonged fire from their miniguns. Standard Grunts can occasionally get in on this too, dropping their usual tactic of shooting in short bursts in favor of catching you off guard with a hail of full-auto gunfire.
• Reassigned to Antarctica: Transfer to a permanent off-world position is apparently one of the punishments for failure that are meted out to Overwatch soldiers that displease Breen or the Advisors.
• Standard Sci-Fi Army: The Combine Overwatch is a well-organized military that makes use of specialized units. The Transhuman Arm is the General Infantry, consisting of the basic soldiers and make up the primary bulk of the Combine's forces on Earth. Synths are a combination of Artificial Biologicals, Armor, and Aircraft.
  • Combine soldiers act as the Line infantry, being the most commonly encountered Overwatch soldier and are armed with a variety of weapons such as pulse rifles, SMGs, and shotguns.
  • Nova Prospekt prison guards are a combination of Line and Security, being a variant of the Combine soldier assigned to guard Nova Prospekt.
  • Combine Elites serve as Elite and Praetorian, being the Combine's most elite transhuman soldiers armed with powerful weapons and show up late-game. They also have a distinctive appearance from the other Overwatch soldiers and are shown acting as bodyguards for the Combine's leaders.
  • Overwatch Snipers are Special Ops, often working alone and pick off their enemies one-by-one with their high-powered sniper rifles.
  • Stalkers are a mix of Logistical and Engineers. They act as the Combine's support units, handling the menial work in the Citadel and are responsible for repairing and maintaining the Combine's vehicles.
  • Combine Grunts are a mix of Light and Line infantry. They are the Combine's most commonly encountered unit in Half-Life Alyx but are not as mechanically modified compared to the typical Combine soldier. They are also more lightly armed, using solely SMGs as their primary weapon, and are more lightly armored.
  • Combine Ordinals are Elite. They use an early version of the pulse rifle and are better armored than the Grunts. They are shown acting squad leaders for teams of Grunts.
  • Combine Chargers and Suppressors both act as the Heavy infantry. Chargers are a heavily armored and slow mook who tanks damage, uses an energy shield to block gunfire, and wields a powerful shotgun in combat. Suppressors are also heavily armored and use a mini-gun to pin down Alyx and enable the Grunts to flank her.
  • Civil Protection is Security, being the Combine's civilian police force charged with controlling the populace and enforcing the Combine's rule over Earth's populace.
• Undeathly Pallor: In some points of the the series, you can see what an unarmored Overwatch soldier looks like. In Half-Life 2, they're deathly pale white with cybernetic insertions on their body, presumably they're in the process of being given their armor. Possibly a side effect of gene alteration.
  • In Alyx, you can examine a soldier without his faceplate. They're also deathly pale◊, but now have patterned imprints strewed across their face, their skull seems indented from wearing their helmets and their eyes have been scooped out to directly connect their optic nerves to their helmets. That, or their eyes were directly connected to their helmet before it got pulled off and took their eyes with it,
• Super Soldiers: Combine Soldiers are given extensive biological augmentations and mentally-programmed tactical acumen. While this proves ineffective against the Plot Armor of the main cast, the Overwatch is capable and competent enough that they're even sent off to other worlds for assignment.
• We Will Wear Armor in the Future: Averted with the transhuman Overwatch soldiers, who wear kevlar-like soft armor that resembles modern riot gear with what look likes protective inserts, in contrast to the more standard sci-fi plate armor with Shoulders of Doom that most FPS soldier enemies tend to wear.

Stalkers

"This is what happens to you if you resist... or if you're just in the wrong place at the wrong time."

—Alyx upon seeing a Stalker.

Stalkers are the haphazardly and torturously made cyborgs who the Combine use for menial labor and as maintenance crews for their structures. They're typically created from citizens and rebels judged guilty of disobedient behavior and were unfortunate enough to be caught alive before being hauled away for augmentation.

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• And I Must Scream: If the Stalker's weren't lobotomized and rendered to their base instincts and they still retained their memories of their past selves, then they're living a conscious existence of working in a Combine structure whilst sporting a surgically mangled body that effectively makes them the even more unwilling slaves of the Combine. They also do tend to scream a lot when disturbed.
• Body Horror: Stalkers have been starved to the bone, had much of their inner organs removed, had the ends of their limbs amputated, their groin severed/burnt into a flat surface and they sport various implants around their body. Note that this is used as a punishment more than any real practical purpose.
• The Dreaded: Various major characters like Alyx and Kleiner make allusions and implications to what awaits anyone who gets caught and taken alive by the Combine, implying some Fate Worse than Death. Stalkers are what they're talking about, and Alyx is horrified when she sees one face-to-face.
• Eye Beams: Their face plates can fire a heat ray. It's actually meant for maintenance work, but they'll decide to use it if they detect any troublesome intruders.
• Hell Is That Noise: Their loud scream, notorious if you've ever played any sort of horror themed fan map. It's heard twice in Half-Life 2 and once in Episode One.
• Mundane Utility: Played with. With all the technological might the Combine sport and their expertise in drone technology, both synth and autonomous, they could easily build and program other means of maintenance crews. But instead, they create Stalkers out of disobedient civilians as a punishment, an example to others and a little bit of cruel pragmatism when one has the means and lack of morals. In any case though, Stalkers are still effective at their assigned purpose and are seen diligently holding the Citadel together even when the whole place is falling apart and taking Combine with it.
• Nothing but Skin and Bones: Likely from starvation and being fed the bare minimum needed to live and work.
• Shameful Strip: They're wearing nothing, not even their genitals, save for their cybernetics.

Hunter-Chopper

A rotorcraft re-engineered by the Combine to support the Overwatch forces with heavy fire and the deploying of contact mines.

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• Advancing Boss of Doom: In Half Life 2, the Hunter-Chopper is a continuous threat through the "Route Kanal" and "Water Hazard" chapters, forcing you to take cover constantly to avoid its heavy fire without being able to properly counter-attack. You finally confront it with your own pulse cannon near the end of later chapter.
• Black Helicopter: Well, it's made of the same metal as other Combine constructs, so this was inevitable.
• Degraded Boss: You fight another Hunter-Chopper in Episode Two, but this one doesn't resort to carpet bombing you after receiving enough damage and you can defeat it simply by using the gravity gun to throw its mines back to it without the need of heavy weaponry.
• Lightning Bruiser: Since it's an armored helicopter, the Hunter-Chopper is fast and mobile, has tough armor that can only be damaged by its own weapons (and even then it takes a while to take it down), and carries a deadly arsenal of weaponry, such as a pulse cannon and contact mines.
• Post-Defeat Explosion Chain: When defeated in Episode Two, it explodes multiple times as it hurtles towards the ground, with the final explosion tearing it into pieces.
• Super-Persistent Predator: The fact that no other Hunter-Chopper appears after destroying one near the end of "Water Hazard" suggests that it's been the same aircraft chasing you down all along.
• Turns Red: In its final confrontation near the end of "Water Hazard", the Hunter-Chopper sounds an alarm and starts carpet-bombing the battlefield.
• Unique Enemy: It's the closest thing the base Half-Life 2 game has to a unique boss, as you only encounter one of it, with it chasing you through multiple levels until you finally acquire the weaponry needed to confront and kill it.

Strider

Striders are towering, tripedal Combine war machines whose armored body is held up by three spindly legs. They're armed with rapid-fire pulse cannons, and can occasionally fire a devastating blast from their warp cannon.

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• Animal Motifs: Giraffes and gorillas, according to the game's artists.

"As animation reference for the Strider, I used a giraffe/gorilla combo. I wanted him to capture the gracefulness of a giraffe, but also have the Strider stomp and lead with his elbows like a gorilla when he walks, to convey a simian power."

• Attack of the 50-Foot Whatever: Easily the largest Combine unit seen.
• Conservation of Ninjutsu: Striders are notably a lot more threatening when faced solo, compared to when dealing with packs of them. Compare the Final Boss of Episode One and Alyx to the herds of Striders that get blasted to smithereens via Magnusson Device in Episode Two. The battle against the Striders during the last push to the Citadel in Half-Life 2 is a notable aversion, given that it's one of the most unforgiving sequences in the whole series.
• Cyborg: Keeping in theme with the Combine military, Striders are some kind of alien crustaceans that were forcibly repurposed into serving the Combine. It's unknown how far the cybernetics go, with only their naturally armored exoskeleton and their cannons being visible.
• Degraded Boss: In Half Life 2 and Episode One, Striders are faced as straight-up boss battles, requiring the player ration out rocket supplies, dance around the Strider's attacks and to keep in mind where the ammo crates are. In the finale of Episode Two, several of them show up at once in a mass rush to destroy the Resistance rocket, and the player is expected to take them all out in time. This is made possible thanks to the Magnusson Device, which can kill them instantly provided the bomb connects.
• The Dreaded: The Rebels are reasonably terrified of fighting Striders, who tend to take more than a couple rockets to bring down and can easily level buildings. They're positively amazed when Gordon Freeman shows up and does much of the work needed to kill one for them.
• Final Boss: They serve as one for Episode One and Alyx.
• Hell Is That Noise: Their presence is announced from ground-shaking stomps and long, drawn out moans over the sound of gunfire. In Half Life Alyx, Striders now make drone-like noises that are comparable to the Reapers from Mass Effect, or the Cybertronians from the Transformers Film Series.
• Impaled with Extreme Prejudice: Thanks to their long spiky legs, Striders can impale unfortunate Resistance members who get too close and shake off their skewered corpses, just like how one would scrape off a piece of gum on their shoes.
• Lean and Mean: Striders may be long and spindly, but it doesn't stop them from being among the most terrifying Combine weapons.
• Mighty Glacier: Due to their massive height and awkward gait, Striders are initially slow-moving, and their size makes them easy-to-hit targets. On the other hand, Striders have tough bullet-proof armor that requires five rockets to kill them on Easy mode (seven on Normal mode and above)^note As a reference, the toughest enemy vehicles in the first game could be taken down with just three rockets, pulse cannons that fire hailstorms of bullets, and deadly warp cannons that can ignore cover. As for their speed, Striders can be incredibly fast if they need to, such as crawling in tight spaces. Regardless of their strengths, Striders can be instantly killed with the Magnusson Device in Episode Two, so long as the bomb connects to the main body and is detonated manually.
• More Dakka: Their pulse cannons fire in rapid bursts and they seemingly have a limitless amount of ammunition.
• Mundane Utility: In Alyx, the Combine workforce are shown using unarmed “construction” Striders to help them establish powerlines around town more quickly, namely by riding on their backs like living work-lifts.
• Off with His Head!: For a given definition of 'head', but a Strider who engaged in a fight with DOG had its brain ripped out of its head when the raging robot managed to hop on its back.
• Phallic Weapon: Gabe Newell noted that they were designed by a young art intern, who wanted them to have a penis as their main weapon to intimidate and unease players. Newell used the design on the spot.^note Considering Gronarch is basically a giant testicle, Valve is fairly used to using H.R. Giger-like sexual imagery.
• Target Spotter: During one segment in Follow Freeman, a Strider chases Freeman into a dilapidated multi-level building. While the Strider itself is unable to see where Freeman is hiding inside the building, it calls upon several Shield Scanners to track him down. If a Scanner manages to snapshot Freeman, the Strider will instantly zero in on his location and gun him down.
• Tripod Terror: Crustaceous machine gun totting cyborg tripod terrors, who are just as willing to use their armored legs to kick and stab their enemies with as much as they are for shooting them.

Gunship

Combine Gunships are flying war machines who provide air support to ground units through strafing runs that hail an overwhelming amount of gunfire from their pulse cannons.

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• Artificial Brilliance: When fighting, they'll make wild movements in the air to avoid attacks while trying to keep aim at their targets. If a rocket is homing on in them and they're not either distracted or caught vulnerable, they'll divert their attention to either shoot down the projectile or take evasive maneuvers. However, this can be used against them by maneuvering the missile in patterns that are highly difficult for them to shoot down, such as swirling the rocket in a circular motion whilst heading towards the Gunship, usually guaranteeing a hit as long as there's no other distractions pestering you.
• Cyborg: They're another crustaceous alien creature that likely swam in the waters of its own world before being captured and repurposed as flying gunners. At this point, it looks like only its exoskeleton and eyes remain (which are found on its sides) past all the machinery and guns.
• Hell Is That Noise: They tend to roar and moan very loudly over the sound of their propellers. Listen here.
• Mini-Boss: Similar to the Striders, they're pretty much always encountered as a massive obstacle that needs tons of firepower to bring down. The game is usually generous with the amount of rocket ammunition sitting around to help with this, though that often means having to run through the rain of fire to restock.
• More Dakka: Their guns sport a ludicrously high fire rate, always fired in long bursts that forces its targets to take cover.
• Post-Defeat Explosion Chain: It explodes multiple times when defeated, with the final explosion tearing it into pieces.

Dropship

Dropships are synths used by the Combine to transport troops, equipment, or other synths between their areas of operation.

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• Awesome Personnel Carrier: The Dropships themselves are extremely durable, and their personnel transport containers are equipped with pulse cannons that can shred apart anyone in front of the container while it's being carried.
• Cutscene Incompetence: In-game, they are completely invulnerable to Gordon's attacks, though their cargo can be destroyed with the right equipment. The only time they're not invincible is during scripted segments; one can be seen in the Citadel during Episode One grazing a wall and crashing, and in Episode Two, Resistance sentries posted outside White Forest manage to shoot one down when it gets close to the base.
• Cyborg: They're large crab-like creatures fitted with thrusters and repurposed for aerial transportation.
• Demoted to Extra: While they're very frequently encountered throughout Half-Life 2 and the Episodes, they're only seen twice during Half-Life: Alyx — in the first chapter, where they're transporting materials to the Citadel, and in "Revelations", where one can be seen dropping Combine soldiers into the tanker yard.
• Drop Ship: Unlike most examples, they might not be fit for space travel, given their biological components, though they otherwise fit the bill with their ability to transport Combine troops into battle.
• More Dakka: The personnel containers they usually carry are equipped with a pulse cannon that protects the troops within with a barrage of fire, allowing them to be deployed safely.

Hunter

Hunters are tripedal alien cyborgs that were first found in the forests surrounding City 17. They're fought as pack hunters who try to stalk and ambush their targets with superior numbers and agility, with their primary weapon being an explosive flechette launcher.

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• Achilles' Heel: They have high damage resistance to most weapons (they take 60% damage from bullets and 50% damage from shotguns), but are vulnerable to physics damage and being hit with their own flechettes, meaning the Gravity Gun can swiftly counter and kill any Hunter with its own explosives along with a heavy smack to the face. They also don't resist magnum rounds or explosives, and can be killed instantly by the pulse rifle's energy orb alt-fire.
• Artificial Brilliance: Try to run them over with the Muscle Car? Sometimes, they'll play chicken with you and jump out at the last second, wasting your time at best and making you crash at worst. In general, they take advantage of their agility to flank and ambush their targets, fighting them in positions most favorable to them before bolting in another direction once they're receiving fire.
• Combat Pragmatist: Hunters love to ambush their prey, and they always make sure to outnumber them.
• Cyborg: Just like the other synths, Hunters are alien creatures that have been modified with cybernetics for the sake of combat.
• Early-Bird Cameo: A Hunter was first seen in Episode One, as part of a Combine attack on a Resistance base, where it busts through a wall and smashed the camera. They wouldn't be fought as proper enemies until Episode Two.
• Establishing Character Moment:
  • The first Hunter is seen stalking Gordon and Alyx from the distance, before pouncing on Alyx once she's alone and skewering her, then beating her to a pulp for good measure. She's barely clinging on to life by the time help comes in the form of the Vortigaunts, and the experience temporarily instils in Alyx a fear of them before she overcomes it.
  • Their first encounter as proper enemies has a pack of them trap Gordon and Alyx inside a very rickety shack before blasting down the doors.
• Elite Mook: Hunters are among most dangerous forces faced in the Half-Life series; they are the most capable of the Combine's Synths, being fast, deadly, durable, and smart. They are always the most important foes to take care of in any battle featuring them.
• Hell Is That Noise: The eerie, stretched out groaning they make in areas you can't even see them in, such as the first area of Riding Shotgun.
• Hoist by His Own Petard: Equip the Gravity Gun, shield yourself with a suitably large object from their flechette attack, and launch it back at them to deal huge damage with their own projectiles. There's an achievement for doing this, which just hammers home the tip that these things are vulnerable against the Gravity Gun when all else fails..
• Lightning Bruiser: These guys are incredibly fast and sneaky. Combine those qualities with super tough armor and deadly explosive flechettes, and you got a deadly living weapon that also comes in packs.
• Sadist: Implied Trope. Along with their purpose of ruthlessly pursuing Resistance members, Hunters make a sinister giggle whenever Gordon's health is low. The possibility of this trope is all the more horrifying when Hunters are more than just animalistic weapons, they take pleasure in hunting down their terrified prey.
• Savage Wolves: Hunters essentially are Synth attack dogs, and use pack tactics like wild wolves. Also notable is their sheer brutality in combat, sparing no expense once they catch their prey.
• Stuff Blowing Up: Their flechettes will explode for a while upon impact. However, their flechettes can be used against them if Gordon throws a flechette-covered object at them with his Gravity Gun.
• Tripod Terror: Similar but smaller when compared to the Striders, but they make up for it in speed, numbers and stealth capabilities.

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