Sometimes game makers want to show how epic a battle is by having the arena you're fighting in slowly fall apart as enemies (or you) launch attacks or get tossed around. Sometimes they want to show off their awesome physics engine, and sometimes... sometimes they just think being able to blow everything up is really, really cool.
Enter the Everything-Is-Smashable Area, a location where environmental and structural objects can be shot, smashed or blown apart just as easily as the mooks guarding them. Usually this is done for the purposes of collecting points or items, but occasionally destroying objects or walls en masse is necessary to progress or, in more cathartic instances, the whole point of the game.
See also: Rewarding Vandalism, Everything Breaks. A video-game version of Kung-Shui.
Examples:
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Action Game
- Blast Corps is made of this, except for the trees.
- Most of The Force Unleashed is like this, until the Disappointing Last Level. The Kashyyyk prologue is especially notable, though, crammed full of trees you can cut down with your lightsaber and throw around with the force, and grass that ripples as you blow things over it. Also Wookiee-tossing.
- Every level in the 2009 Ghostbusters video game. But especially the hotel level, which is a Continuity Nod to the movie, where they destroyed goddamn everything in a hotel.
- More or less the entire point of Space Invaders Get Even: Every destroyed building and enemy increases your timer by varying amounts, which also doubles as your lifebar. As might be expected, abducting cows and visiting Stonehenges (yes, it's a plural, for whatever reason there's one in pretty much single level) increase it the most.
- In The Matrix: Path of Neo in most levels you can punch, kick or throw enemies into walls to smash them. You don't get anything for it, it's just fun to do.
- Plus in the courtyard battle with the Smiths you have to complete destroy all the nearby buildings to end the fight.
Action Adventure Game
- The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time:
- The storehouse just outside of Hyrule Castle Town in child Link's time. An NPC in the room hangs a lampshade on it by mentioning how Link can "let off some steam" by destroying the jars.
- You can maneuver the final boss into smashing the various bits of rubble around his arena, releasing item pickups for you. Handy.
- The Overlord series of games allows you and your ravenous horde of gremlins to smash just about any and every inanimate object aside from trees, bushes and rocks. In fact, doing so is often necessary to find treasure. Plus commanding a ravenous horde of gremlins to tear apart a tranquil village including burning down the houses is immensely entertaining.
Action RPG
- Downplayed in Kingdom Hearts II. There's a minigame wherein you have a room full of boxes to smash, but you have to be strategic about it in order to get any sort of reward.
- The boss fight against the King of Toys in Kingdom Hearts III takes place in a "city" of buildings made from blocks. The tallest will tip over just from Sora running up the sides while the boss's tendency to stay low to the ground as it moves causes blocks to fly everywhere. The boss's Tornado Move even sends all the blocks flying off the edges of the battlefield, after which they reset to an intact state so they can be flung about all over again.
Arcade Game
- This was the entire point of classic arcade game Rampage.
Fighting
- There's a game-mode in Godzilla Unleashed where you get points for...well...destroying a major city. Certain buildings are worth more points than others and famous landmarks (e.g., the Tokyo Tower) are worth the most points.
- Similar to the above, War of the Monsters features several city levels that have buildings you can break apart and eventually destroy completely, replete with debris you can use as weapons.
- Dead or Alive 5 has a few stages that serve as this, most noteworthy being a house full of destructible pottery, furniture, walls and even floors.
- In Stick Fight, most stages have at least one element that can be destroyed with your guns, and in ice stages, the entire stage can be shot to pieces.
First-Person Shooter
- Half-Life has a few rooms filled with nothing but smashable crates.
- Half Life 2: Episode 1 features a duel between Gordon Freeman and a Combine gunship in a large, rickety wooden building which is slowly reduced to rubble by surface-to-air missiles and heavy machine-gun fire. The fight gets progressively more difficult as available cover is destroyed. Or easier, depending on your playing style. After all, if a part of the roof covers you from the gunship's fire, it covers the gunship from your fire too.
- Left 4 Dead 2's Swamp Fever had a level where the survivors must make their way across a rickety, highly destructible bridge. The structure is slowly chipped away at by gunfire and zombie attacks, and god help you if you throw a Molotov. Lots of fun on Versus on the zombie team.
- Overwatch supplies a large amount of environmental objects per map that serve no purpose other than to look pretty and get destroyed by being shot at. On almost every attack/defense map, the first attack-side spawn rooms contain plenty of destructibles since players have to wait for the 60-second setup time and won't really have much to do anyway. Special examples include Hanamura (an arcade with plenty of machines to smash up) and Junkertown (which includes Roadhog's bike, which you can blast apart to pieces like a Street Fighter II bonus level).
- Red Faction and Red Faction 2 live on this trope, such that it shocks you when you finally come across a surface that you can't blast your way through.
- Later on in the game, in Serious Sam III BFE, you go through some Egyptian ruins where all the pillars, archways and most of the walls are destructable. Very fun with crates full of infinite rocket launcher ammo and C4.
General
- Many games that advertise themselves as featuring destructible scenery will have a few of these and make sure they're prominently featured in the trailer. The rest of the game? Not so much.
Hack and Slash
- The Baldur's Gate: Dark Alliance games are pretty heavy offenders.
- No More Heroes 2: Desperate Struggle has the room where you fight Matt Helms. In it, almost literally the only things you can't break are the floors and the walls. There is, however, one wall in the corner that's indestructible, creating a pocket. Helms is smart enough to herd you into this pocket, so be careful.
- Metal Gear Rising: Revengeance: Slice and dice your way to victory with an Absurdly Sharp Blade.
MMORPG
- The "Mayhem Missions" in City of Villains.
- The Barrel Full of Barrels in Kingdom of Loathing.
Platform Game
- Earthworm Jim 2 has the level "Lorenzen's Soil", where Jim has to shoot a path through dirt.
- One of the castle levels in Wario Land II consists of Wario smashing through a bunch of walls.
- The bamboo forest in the second part of the fight against General Tsao in Sly 3: Honor Among Thieves.
Third-Person Shooter
- Red Faction: Guerrilla ups the ante even further than its FPS predecessors by setting the game on an Everything Is Smashable Planet.
Wide Open Sandbox
- The main way of getting studs in almost every LEGO Adaptation Game is to attack stuff made of LEGO bricks. It's also the best way of handling puzzles. When in doubt, attack the scenery! The bonus levels are made entirely of LEGO and thus almost entirely destructible.
- The Japanese game Hakaioh - King of Crusher is based on this trope. Your character usually has violent rampages in which he smashes everything in the room, brought on by some kind of a weird talking flying demonic beetle with bat wings. In later levels the main character is turned into a werewolf of some kind, a dinosaur, a Godzilla expy and finally a dragon, just so you can destroy bigger stuff.
- The Incredible Hulk: Ultimate Destruction lives up to the name: if you can see it, you can destroy it. If you can't destroy it, you can pick it up and use it to destroy other things.
