It wasn't a very good likeness, anyway.
Link: Dude, if I just thrash around in the grass, money appears. Money literally just shows up out of nowhere.
Citizen: I watched a living skeleton decapitate my parents.
Link: These vases, they have money in 'em too!
Citizen: I watched a living skeleton decapitate my parents.
Link: These vases, they have money in 'em too!
Blowing up plants, grass, walls, pots, etc. isn't just fun; it's profitable! Often a character will find health, powerups, and cash just waiting to be revealed after violence is administered to inanimate objects. Why these inanimate objects are present in the first place, why the NPCs never seem to notice the Kleptomaniac Hero smashing them up and running off with the valuables inside, or how the items inside survived the vandalism itself is rarely a concern.
Like Level Grinding, nobody but the heroes actually takes advantage of this. Any good that results from destroying a Load-Bearing Boss could be considered an extreme example of this.
Compare Die, Chair, Die!, Everything Breaks. If you're not just finding items, but being credited immediately with points or money when you break stuff, it's You Break It, You Profit. See also the Money Spider, a monster that is specifically hunted for the prizes it drops.
A sterling example of a Violation of Common Sense.
Examples:
- In The Adventures of Lomax, destroying pots sometimes causes an additional coin to fall out.
- In Airfix Dogfighter, you are free to smash every single breakable thing in the house to bits, and there are always some collectibles hidden in them.
- Alice: Madness Returns feature breakables that give teeth(currency) and roses(health).
- ANNO: Mutationem: In the Mysterious Console DLC, Noni can freely destroy all the furniture within the mansion's dungeon to acquire hearts and ammo whenever she needs a brief refill.
- Ascent Crash Landing: Smashing open crates allows Bluu to collect the items therein.
- Astral Chain is a subversion. It is indeed possible to smash items in civilian areas or crime scenes, but in doing so, one of your allies will call you out and some of your Duty Points will be docked. A small amount, but you have to remember that you're playing as an arm of the police force.
- The Bard's Tale has a barrel merchant who pays you one silver for every barrel you break besides his. The catch is that The town he's in, the very first one, is completely destroyed by undead about 3/4s of the way through the game. By the time most people think to go back and collect on the obscene amount of money, it's usually too late. Of course, by that time you never need to worry about money anyway, whether or not you have the Treasure Hunter talent.
- Batman: Arkham Series averts destruction of objects, as Batman isn't known for arbitrary property damage, yet still offers the chance to break through walls, windows, ceilings, and floors for takedowns, not to mention how collecting Riddler trophies will require the destruction of walls, grates and security terminals.
- In Battle Garegga, bombing allows you to destroy tons of background objects including but not limited to train tracks, bridges, water towers, enemy spawners, and houses of the oppressed villagers you're supposed to be fighting for, all of which harbor score medals needed to get extra lives and powerups. This applies just as well to its three sequels Armed Police Batrider, Battle Bakraid, and Ibara.
- Billy Blade and the Temple of Time: Billy can break open objects to get things that can charge up his weapons.
- Averted in Bioshock. Smashing up the stores in Fort Frolic immediately sets off an alarm, security bots promptly fly in to shoot you and a public service announcement will chime in to inform you that only parasites commit vandalism. The problem comes from anyone/thing breaking the glass, meaning you can get in trouble for a stray shot that a Splicer didn't hit you with.
- The game Blast Corps was built around destroying buildings. It was apparently the only way to keep an automated truck carrying defective nuclear warheads, which would explode on contact with anything more durable than a tree, from crashing into anything.
- In Cabal and Blood Bros, destroying the environment helps you get points, grenades, Power-Up guns, AND helps you complete the level faster.
- BloodRayne 2's Carnage meter filled a small amount with any environmental destruction, more for destroying things with flung bodies, and even more if the impact is what kills them. A filled Carnage meter awards Rayne higher maximum Health and Rage, making her and usage of her powers last longer.
- Somewhat justified in Buffy the Vampire Slayer (2002) and Buffy the Vampire Slayer: Chaos Bleeds. After all, if Buffy is in quick need of a vamp-dusting stake, what quicker way to improvise one than by smashing a nearby box or barrel for the wood?
- The Castlevania series is filled with candles and torches ready to be whipped. Doing so will yield currency and other items. note
- In Castlevania: Symphony of the Night, Alucard requires a Relic to accomplish the same feat, but that does not seem to be a problem for other non-Belmont vampire hunters in the castle.
- In Castlevania: Lament of Innocence, it was said that Walter left all those items lying around for the added challenge. Otherwise, adventurers died too easily.
- Averted in the original Castle Wolfenstein; blowing up a chest with a grenade causes everything within to be Lost Forever. Blowing up a chest with ammunition results in a Nonstandard Game Over.
- The Mayhem Missions in City of Villains, where you not only rob a bank and beat up the hero who tries to stop you but also gain extra time and achievement badges for beating up cops, destroying cars, robbing pawn shops and diamond stores, burning down buildings, and generally smashing everything in the area than can be destroyed.
- Hiding powerup crates in buildings is a longstanding Command & Conquer tradition. Usually, these feature most heavily in commando-style missions, where you have no base and must carefully manage a few units, and a bonus health or veterancy crate can make or break the mission. A particularly bizarre example occurs in Red Alert 3 when invading Santa Monica — a section of otherwise-perfectly-normal houses on the beach yield money crates when blown up despite being a traditional base-building mission. Presumably, this represents looting the Scrooge McDuck-style money caches in all the stars' homes.
- In the Crusader series of games, destroying the scenery is a feature...but you have to be careful. You might blow up a footlocker containing valuable equipment, though you'll never blow up anything vital. You can also blow up doors, but that sets off the alarm. In the plot, your character is basically out to annoy the hell out of the Big Bad, so destruction is a given.
- Darksiders: Apparently parking meters have souls...
- In most Devil May Cry games, breaking background objects yields red orbs, green orbs, or other collectibles. However, there are also times when this trope gets played with:
- An exaggerated example happens in Devil May Cry 4. In the first fight against Berial, the houses in the area yield green orbs after being destroyed. However, the player isn't the one doing the "vandalism", Berial himself would destroy the houses during the fight.
- It's Zigzagged in Devil May Cry 5. Ordinary background objects never have orbs in them so cutting them up results in no rewards (outside of the usual beating up on enemies, you only get orbs by breaking orb caches or just finding them lying around). However, there are several bonus rewards at the end of missions for destroying objects, including specific ones like the balloons in Mission 2, or coffins in Missions 9 and 15, which not only give these bonuses but also have red orbs in them.
- The Diablo games are loaded with destructible crates and barrels. Diablo III has "killstreak" XP bonuses for destroying large quantities of scenery and even an achievement for wrecking 50 items in a row.
- Dirty Harry: Much of the game aside from beating up mooks consists of breaking into rooms to find useful items inside closets and nightstands. Hilariously, many items are crowbars and bombs so you can break into more rooms and steal more crowbars and bombs.
- Dragon Quest games since III has pots, drawers, dressers, etc. in people's houses and dungeons containing items and money. Nobody seems to mind you breaking into their houses opening their drawers if anything value inside. With the "nose for treasure" ability, you can find how many treasures left unopened. In IX, items can appear again in the same pots and drawers previously searched if you wait for a while.
- Zigzagged in Drakensang. The first game played this trope straight, with breakable barrels, crates, and jars containing useful materials and sometimes even gold. In the second game, useful stuff is mostly found inside normal chests and barrels, with gold available only in large chests. Breakable containers are usually filled with trash, though the jars in certain ruins will have ancient coins (worth a lot) inside.
- Played straight as an arrow in Dungeons & Dragons Online where a "breakables" bonus is given at the end of quests. It has three different tiers: Mischief, Vandalism, Ransack, reached at different levels of destruction (or in some cases not possible at all) depending on the dungeon. Breakables even have a random chance of dropping a small amount of cash, gems, or - more rarely - a random loot item.
- Dungeons of Dredmor has statues of Dredmor littered about. Smashing one gives you EXP in accordance with the floor you are on, every floor they are worth 50 EXP more than the previous. You also get a cheer of "Heroic vandalism!" each and every time by the announcer.
- DUSK has items inside many destructible objects, including barrels. They're usually minor items such as a single bullet or a small healing item.
- In the Dynasty Warriors games, you can pick up things like health boosts, extra arrows, and temporary buffs by smashing crates and urns found around the battlefield. Somewhat justified in this case, as it's not entirely implausible for the various armies to keep supplies like this on hand. Also, only about one in every three or four smashable objects holds an item.
- Pretty much the premise of Elebits, which involves throwing furniture around to find the eponymous tiny hidden electrical sprites. Some stages force you to not smash too many breakables or make too much noise, but generally you can be as chaotic as you like. Eventually you can start throwing cars and entire houses around too. Then the Black Elebits come for making too big a mess, and they are more than willing to break you...
- Enshrouded is filled with pots, jugs, carts, structures and walls of all kind. Breaking them can give all sorts of items ranging from basic resources to potions.
- Epic Mickey plays this trope literally, as you can (and are encouraged to) literally erase parts of Wasteland to find pins, E-tickets, etc. Or if you just want to be a jerk to your former co-workers... Of course, you can just wait for the Blotacles to do that for you.
- Played straight in Fable, where breaking barrels and pots would get you gold and/or basic items. Lampshaded and averted in the sequel, where a loading screen says something along the lines of "You didn't think you'd get anything out of those random barrels, did you?"
- Fighting Force Gives you points for breaking things such as vending machines and control panels.
- Final Fantasy:
- Most of the battlefields in Dissidia Final Fantasy have elements that can be destroyed in the heat of battle ranging from statues to walls to roofs to whole cliffsides. Certain items can only be obtained by actively destroying the surrounding environment.
- Christmas involves unwrapping presents in boxes, right? Well, when Final Fantasy XI had its 2008 You Mean "Xmas" event, they decided to let the players get such action by... er, beating up giant crates until they exploded, sometimes dropping sweets or event items.
- Fin and the Ancient Mystery: Fin can break barrels to get experience points.
- In the first dungeon of Forge Quest, you can break giant jars for hearts.
- Ghostbusters: The Video Game has the achievement "The Destructor," which is rewarded to the player upon completing the game with over $3,000,000 in property damage.
- Ghoulboy: Thulgar can get items by breaking things.
- Gladiator: Sword of Vengeance has pots, ceramic vases and assorted ornaments everywhere which you can smash and destroy for points and gold.
- Goblin Sword: The swordsman can break objects to get items.
- In The Godfather: The Game, breaking stuff in a shop allows you to put extortion pressure on their owners. You can also gain a bit of cash from the cash register. You can destroy certain objects to deny enemies their use as cover. Some crates in certain missions also hide extra moneybags.
- In God of War, Kratos receives power-ups in the form of red orbs for smashing anything that can be smashed, which is practically everything, including civilians. He's that kind of protagonist.
- In both Goosebumps: Night of Scares and it's sequel, Dead of Night you're required to destroy everything breakable in R.L. Stine's mansion, from mirrors to plates to vases and porcelain Chinese lions, in order to find the missing manuscripts to recapture Slappy and the monsters.
- The online mode of Grand Theft Auto V features "Criminal Damage", a periodic free-mode event to earn in-game prize money for players who cause the most expensive damage in the space of 5 minutes. In many missions, smashing or blowing up the target is pretty much the objective. Other than that, running down lamp posts, traffic lights and plate glass doesn't attract police attention. Smashing or blowing up cars does, though.
- In Gruntz, destroying rocks, candies, bricks, dices, and sugarcubes with the steel gauntlets is not just rewarding, it's very often essential to your progress. But beware of the hidden bombs...
- Gungrave encourages you to shoot any objects in the environment, which keeps your Beats going. This allows you to gain enough power for Demolition Shots and gives you a good score at the end. Objects even go through several states of breakage before they are destroyed completely. One early stage in the second game has you wreaking major havoc in a ''supermarket...''
- Half-Life:
- Half-Life uses this straightforwardly - any objects you need to maneuver around Black Mesa's Elaborate Underground Base are indestructible, so smash away! The sequel, however, occasionally forces you to use destructible items to move forward, so you need to be more careful where and how you swing your crowbar.
- In Half-Life 2 (and the episodes) you just ignore the larger crates most of the time and destroy the smaller "supply" crates (a couple whacks with the crowbar or a short toss into the ground/wall with the gravity gun will do it).
- The Harry Potter games involve, peripherally to the story, smashing up vases, cauldrons, suits of armor, and so on, for a cascade of Bertie Bott's beans, cauldron cakes, pumpkins.
- The Order of the Phoenix game is weird about this - it rewards you for tidying up Hogwarts, but you also get to rebel against Umbridge by vandalizing the school.
- Vandalism is actually required in the final boss fight of Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone. Harry has to cast magic spells at the decorative pillars in the room to make them fall on Voldemort.
- Haunted Halloween '86: The Curse Of Possum Hollow: Sometimes, breaking a crate will reveal an item for Donny and Tami.
- HROT' features trash cans and cardboard boxes that often contain items when destroyed.
- Inexistence Rebirth: There are floating blocks in the game that Hald can break to get coins.
- One of the largest examples is in Into the Breach, where the game actively discourages you from taking out buildings...but mountains are fair game, and destroying them will net you not only more movement space in the map, but a chance to unlock certain pilots, namely a Mantis, a Rockman and a Zoltan from FTL.
- Jade Empire gives you money and gems for smashing earthenware vases. And tombstones, which is odd, given that the Player Character is a Psychopomp who's meant to be helping the dead.
- Jak and Daxter: The first game rewards you with health for randomly smashing barrels and crates everywhere. The second game has health and ammo in specific Krimzon Guard crates, and in the third, breaking pots reveal hidden Precursor orbs and Metal Head skull gems.
- Jazz Jackrabbit scores lots of points for razing the structures of Devan Shell's turtle army.
- The entire premise of Katamari Damacy. Find whatever public or private property (or animals, or people, or gods, or countries...) that you can and roll it up to add it to an increasingly huge ball of junk. And then let your father set it all on fire and put it in the sky.
- An element so prominent in Just Cause, that it becomes a mandatory action in order to progress through the story in its sequel. Mostly justified in 2, in that the Big Bad has spread around tons and tons of propaganda items, and smashing them lowers enemy morale.
- Kao the Kangaroo: In the first game, you can destroy many of the scenery elements, and they sometimes contain collectibles and secrets. In the second game, there's lots of crates, barrels, and pots that contain coins.
- Kingdom Hearts franchise:
- Olympus Coliseum also has a lot of smashable objects in its many appearances, from barrels, to pots, and even urns. They even have mini-games dedicated to smashing them within the time limit, with one being to smash more objects than Hercules.
- Kingdom Hearts: Chain of Memories has smashable objects, but also some that he had to jump instead. Since both types reset when you leave the room they are identical in effect.
- Kingdom Hearts II: Sora gains power-ups from smashing fireworks in the Land of Dragons. He also gets those power-ups by smashing suits of armor in Beast's Castle.
- King's Knight had power-ups hidden among the environment, which you had to shoot in order to uncover. The four spell tokens required to complete the last level are also hidden this way and need to be collected by all four characters in order to be used at all.
- Kirby and the Forgotten Land has many pieces of scenery that give small pickups like star coins or food when destroyed.
- The Legend of Zelda:
- In The Legend of Zelda and again in the The Legend of Zelda: Oracle Games, it is possible to burn some bushes/saplings. Some of them have old men who yell at you for burning down/destroying the "door" to their hiding place and will take some of your money to have it repaired. This is justified because most of these people were probably hiding from all the monsters roaming the overworld: with their door gone, they are completely exposed. There are also Moblins who, if you find them, will bribe you not to give away their hiding place, accompanied by the words "It's a secret to everybody."
- The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past: There are thieves who, if you use a bomb to destroy a wall and reveal their hiding place, will give you 500 rupees and the words, "Let's keep this between us, okay?"
- The Legend of Zelda: Link's Awakening: when Marin is following you around, she'll call you a bad boy if you break jars.
- The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time:
- In Hyrule, money literally grows on trees. And under bushes. And, um, inside pottery and rocks. They have yet to perfect a method of getting into any of these without destroying them in the process. According to The Minish Cap, the Minish put them there.
- A room off the drawbridge to Castle Town contains nothing but several dozen jars and boxes... and a bored guard who is happy to let you smash them to let off some steam. It only appears when you're a kid, though.
- During the final battle (and during the Iron Knuckle fights in the Spirit Temple), you can trick the boss into smashing some rubble for powerups.
- The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker
- A guy charges you if you break his things. (The trick is to do it when you're broke.)
- A number of underground grottoes contain pillars and Darknuts. Using the Darknuts' swords to smash the pillars tends to release large amounts of Rupees. You could also use the Skull Hammer.
- The Legend of Zelda: The Minish Cap explains that there are tiny little people called the Minish who hide money under plants and other objects for heroes to find.
- The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess
- The game lampshades the tendency for players to smash jars to find what's inside by having one shopkeeper note that some people like to smash jars. If you bump into the walls to try to get the jars on her shelf to fall, she'll kick you out and won't let you back in until you apologize.
- There is also an old man who will berate you if you smash a pumpkin near him.
- The game has a minor tweak on the Die, Chair, Die! pattern: a few barrels, usually located around goblins, are marked with a big white X and apparently contain gunpowder (they explode when disturbed, which causes damage if you're standing too close).
- Part of the final stretch of battles in the game has the boss running around smashing pillars in the room that also leave behind power-ups.
- The Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword: Breaking the chandelier in the Lumpy Pumpkin earns you a heart piece... And a job to pay off the damages you've just incurred. Eventually double-subverted, since completing all the (rather trivial) jobs given by the owner of the Pumpkin earns you another heart piece, and you can't get either one without breaking the original chandelier.
- The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild: This trope is so ingrained in the series that it was considered a big deal when this one mostly averted it. There are some crates to smash (usually with semi-logical contents) and ore chunks to mine, but smashing pots usually won't get you any useful items in this game. Cutting grass won't grant you the usual rewards either, though it does sometimes expose bugs for you to catch. Chopping down trees (or blowing them up) does let you gather wood, which you can use to start your own fires and to turn in (in large quantities) for a major sidequest.
- A significant feature of the LEGO Adaptation Game series, in which many things can be reduced to their component Lego bricks for fun and profit, which you then rebuild into something that lets you proceed further into the level.
- Justified in Lil Gator Game, where everything breakable is actually made of cardboard and placed there specifically for you to break.
- Little Big Adventure: Averted. In both games, you just have to stop and jump in front of objects - trash cans, wardrobes, bushes, etc - to get money, energy points or vital items. And if you return to the scene after a while, the same objects will give you stuff again.
- Lost Planet rewards vandalism with thermal energy. Destroy cars, trucks, and even Akrid eggs to find more energy.
- MapleStory 2 has a variety of Trophies and Exploration Goals related to destroying the environment, both of which can award prizes of varying degrees of utility.
- Master of Darkness: Being an Alternate Company Equivalent to Castlevania, it replaces the candles and lanterns of that series with floating masquerade masks that you destroy to collect items.
- In the Metal Slug games, destroying background objects will usually yield useful items such as weapons or grenades.
- The Metroid Prime games have crates, pots, Stationary-non violent Ing, etc... that provide ammo and health scattered everywhere, often with reasons why (and in one case, why you sometimes don't get an item).
- Mighty Aphid: Avery "Aphid" Cavor can shoot crates and red bottles to get items like gems and hearts from them.
- A Flash web game called Minotaur China Shop has you playing as a minotaur, staffing a shop in a mall that sells glass- and earthenware to various other mythological creatures. Normally, knocking over display items on the shelves on the way to getting them for the customers takes money away from your score. But break enough things, and the store gets to collect on its insurance policy, netting even more money than just filling orders. Though, once you reach that point, you have to fend off mall security, sent in to stop your rampage.
- Moon Raider: You can shoot and destroy crates and giant crystals in the game to get items out of them.
- Certain statues in NetHack have a chance of containing a spellbook which can be retrieved by smashing the statue with a pickaxe.
- Ninja Clowns: You can get items in the game by breaking things.
- You can find rewards in pretty much anything in Ōkami, but things grow back, no matter how many times you destroy them.
- Aside from the typical goodies-in-containers, Outcast lampshades this with a pottery merchant that rewards the player for having destroyed so much pottery and encourages him to do so in the future as well. After all, people always have to buy new ones to replace the broken ones...
- Justified in Overlord. The major point of the game is to lead your army of goblins, plundering and looting your merry way across the land. The game doesn't quite explain who exactly you pay with the gold when you spend it. But who cares? It's loads of fun!
- The video game adaptation of Over the Hedge shamelessly encourages players to smash everything that isn't nailed down, often yielding health pickups or collectibles. Some levels even have bonus objectives requiring the player to go out of their way to break stuff.
- In Painkiller, from Exploding Barrels, to trash cans, from pallets to pots - if it can be destroyed, it spawns coins.
- Paperboy: Judging from the points gathered by smashing stuff that belongs to people who didn't subscribe to the newspaper, it makes one think the gameplay is less "give the newspapers to the subscribers" and more "annoy non-subscribers enough that they'll subscribe just to avoid your vandalism". However, vandalizing a subscriber's property results in them cancelling their subscription, so be careful who you vandalize.
- Appears in Path of Exile in the same sense as the Diablo series. Crates, barrels, jars, and so forth all have a chance to drop items when smashed. Since containers typically show up in clusters of 3 or more the most common tactic is to blow them up with fireballs or other area skills.
- Parodied/Deconstructed by Penny Arcade in this strip.
- In the Xbox Live version of Perfect Dark, you earn an achievement for destroying Carrington's wine collection.
- In Persona 5, inside the Palaces, there are decorations that net you Shop Fodder when destroyed. Justified in that the main characters are thieves, and the stolen objects don't actually exist in reality, only in the Palace owner's mind. One of Futaba's ability is to randomly restore the decorations, allowing you to destroy them for loot again.
- Portal:
- Portal has an achievement for dislodging a certain amount of Aperture Science Surveillance Cameras from the walls.
- Portal 2 has a similar achievement for destroying Test Chamber Monitors in the second half of the game. Some of them are pretty tricky to destroy; if the achievement isn't enough to tempt you, the increasingly annoyed responses from Wheatley are hilarious.
- Pot of Legend is built around smashing pots for money, which you use to upgrade to richer pots and stronger weapons for your army to destroy them with.
- Primal Light: Smashing torchlights, vases, and barrels can yield coins for Krog to collect.
- In Purple, you can destroy TVs (which are everywhere) to get food and hearts.
- Quest for Glory IV downplays this trope, as you don't get any physical rewards for burning down the Creepy Cathedral devoted to an Eldritch Abomination. On the other hand, what you do get is a bonus to your Karma Meter.
- Raptor: Call of the Shadows gives you money for every building you destroy in a level. Justified as you're a mercenary who's been hired to destroy all the competitors of your employer, MegaCorp.
- Most visitable locations in the Ratchet & Clank games are just full of stuff that releases bolts (the game's currency) when destroyed. From light fixtures to innocent cars flying by. The games often even have an item whose sole purpose is to allow the player to smash every object in sight with one Ground Pound. You can occasionally earn Skill Points by breaking everything in a specific area.
- Parodied in Tools of Destruction. At one point in Apogee Station, breaking a pile of boxes causes one of the crotchety war bots trying to keep Ratchet out to complain "I just stacked those, you vandal!"
- Inverted in A Crack in Time, where you can repair things by using Clank's chronostaff to reverse the flow of time. And yes, you do get bolts by doing this.
- Rampage, the granddaddy of all Rewarding Vandalism games. Punch out windows, steal the valuables inside, and eat innocent bystanders, all while mutated into a giant lizard or ape = win.
- Destroying large chunks of terrain in the Light Gun Game Razing Storm will cause them to fall on top of multiple enemy terrorists, killing them at one go and saving time (for more points). Destroying parts of terrain may also net dog tags which will allow you to take extra hits during the Spider Tank's Taking You with Me missile assault (failing to survive nets you the Non-Standard Game Over Downer Ending).
- RemiLore: Lost Girl in the Lands of Lore has barrels, bookshelves, and desks that you can smash for dessert points.
- Red Faction: Guerrilla: In addition to providing salvage, the closest thing the game has to money, destroying certain buildings or objects can raise morale or lower EDF control — both essential to success. Additionally, since nearly everything short of the actual terrain is destructible, it's also rewarded in less concrete ways, such as being able to knock down a wall for an ambush or quick escape or break fences or pipes to find alternate entrance to a secure area.
- Resident Evil:
- Resident Evil 4: Subverted on occasion, when snakes are in the crates instead of money or bullets. Killing the snake gets Leon an egg, though.
- In Resident Evil: The Umbrella Chronicles and Resident Evil: The Darkside Chronicles, you need to shoot stuff in order to reveal and grab files. In Umbrella Chronicles, "Items Destroyed" even goes towards your end-of-level score; the better your score, the more stars you earn to upgrade your weapons with.
- The 1991 Atari driving game Road Riot 4WD rewards drivers for running over things, as evidenced by the recurring phrase "Hazard pay for Red/Blue!"
- In Rock of Ages, rolling your boulder into your opponent's soldiers and structures (except for cows and elephants) gives you gold.
- In Rogue Legacy, strewn throughout the castle are various pieces of furniture that you can break to get health-restoring roasted chickens or mana potions.
- Parodied in College Humor's "RPG Heroes Are Jerks".
- In the Runabout series of driving games, the player is rewarded money for crashing into things. The car also takes damage for running into things, and the physics could lead to a damaged object spectacularly destroying your car (especially in the subway tunnels of Super Runabout: San Francisco Edition, where subway trains are some of the most costly objects to destroy).
- Justified in The Saboteur as the player character is... well... a saboteur working for the French Resistance and is rewarded for destroying Nazi lookout posts, turrets, tanks, refuel depots, checkpoints, loudspeakers, and other such installations.
- The Zelda-knockoff Sacred Odyssey: Rise of Ayden allows you to destroy pots, vases and random objects to obtain loot and power-ups.
- Saints Row:
- Saints Row: The Third has Mayhem and Tank Mayhem missions whose purpose is to destroy as much as possible to reach a property damage value goal. Mayhem missions are on foot with temporarily infinitely-stocked explosive weapons, the tank version is the same thing with a tank. If you happen to have a tank handy, you can turn one into the other.
- Saints Row IV brings in Mech Suit Mayhem which lets you wreck shit inside your robot/power armor/mech, UFO Mayhem which lets you wreck shit in a Zin Void, and TK Mayhem which lets you throw shit with your mind to wreck shit. In the non-vehicle Mayhem missions you can use the whirlwind upgrade to Super Sprint but it's a lot easier without it as you can just as easily use explosives while not being hit by the cars you sucked up behind you that are now suddenly flying in your direction.
- Samurai Revenge: You can gets coins by breaking crates and vases.
- Destroying tables and potted plants in Shadow of the Wool Ball sometimes yields bonus items.
- In the Shantae series, the titular character can break pots to find the Gem currency, or Hit Points / Mana restoratives.
- Slave Zero rewards the player for destroying certain buildings with health, ammo, and pieces of said buildings that can be grabbed and used as clubs.
- Sly Cooper can get health and cash from smashing up random bits of furniture and other objects.
- One of the best ways to crank up your Tequila Bomb meter in the John Woo game Stranglehold is to shoot up the environment in ways that take out bad guys in the process. To facilitate this, everything you come by in the game can be destroyed.
- The Sonic the Hedgehog series started out with power-ups contained in monitors. You then broke those monitors to get the good stuff. Subverted to an extent in the case of the Robotnik/Eggman monitors, which, when destroyed, damaged you as if you were hit by an enemy or spikes.
- In Shadow the Hedgehog, if you fire rapidly at everything you see, you'll smash an awful lot of scenery and charge up your Chaos Blast gauge - which, by using, smashes more scenery and charges up your gauge a bit more. Incidentally, by the time you come back they've fixed it all - so you can do it again.
- In Spelunky, there is often gold or gems locked away in pots and in the walls. By destroying these objects, you can get more money. In the City of Gold level, all the walls are made of gold, so destroying them is extremely profitable if you don't mind destroying the archaeological dig of the millennium. Be careful though as pots sometimes contain enemies. If you are too close when breaking one you will take damage. You also generally don't want to throw pots to break them, as a spider coming from one can be a real nuisance. It's a mistake you won't make many times.
- In Spyro the Dragon games, most things Spyro absolutely needs, i.e. quest objects and treasure, are free-standing or found in things you can reasonably expect to be allowed to open, destroy or otherwise mess with. But in the third game, Year of the Dragon, there were Skill Points, extra lives you got for doing something particularly "skillful" or unexpected. A few rewarded vandalism, such as "smash all Piranha signs" in a swamp level where there were many warning signs telling you the water contained piranha.
- In Stampede Run, breaking police barricades, barrels, traffic cones, boxes, and hay bales in your path will earn you stars. In many cases, you'll earn more stars by breaking stuff than by simply running through the tracks of stars.
- In Star Fox 64, the Star Fox team is written a check based on the score you got, which went higher the more things that got destroyed. Now, most of the time you are vandalizing the enemy, not the people who paid you, but I'm sure the Cornerian citizens are probably at least a little unhappy that their tax money went to paying a bunch of mercenaries who blew up just as many buildings, if not more, than the invaders.
- A Pinball example appears in Gottlieb's Street Fighter II. The "Car Crunch" Mini-Game drops the ball into an embedded playfield, then gives the player eight seconds to smash a red sports car for points.
- The Streets of Rage series always had boxes, garbage cans, tables, chairs, or barrels that contained food, money, and weapons. Though one has to wonder if eating an apple from a garbage can was really worth it and how could you stuff a money bag in a chair or hide any of the above items inside a visibly empty phone booth? The third in the series actually has some of the enemies eat foodstuffs. Most frustrating if it was the full heal chicken.
- The Stretchers gives you bonus points on rescue missions for destroying various structures while driving back to the nearest medical center to cure the Dizzies you rescued. You can even get stickers for destroying a set number of certain types of structures (fences, billboards, stalks of wheat...).
- Played straight and averted in The Simpsons Hit & Run. You get coins from blowing up cars, and some missions actually require destruction— but do it too much, and the police come after you and potentially take coins/destroy your car.
- South Park: The Stick of Truth: Lots of environmental objects are breakable in most areas and will usually give a bit of Shop Fodder. Because objects repair after you leave the area, you can return to break everything all over again, effectively giving you an unlimited source of cash if you're patient. Money, however, is pretty easy to come by already.
- In Steven Universe: Unleash The Light, you can break pots to get items and money. One Jade seemingly calls you out for it, but she actually likes it because to her, breaking pots is breaking the monotonous way of living in Pyrope's World. She even encourages you to break 50 pots as a Sidequest.
- Smashing blocks is common business in the Super Mario Bros. universe. You're often times rewarded with coins from blocks that are ? blocks, just unmarked and made to look like bricks. Now if only real life worked this way...note
- Subverted in Super Paper Mario, where upon destroying a vase, Mario is forced into indentured servitude to pay for it.
- Mario & Luigi: Bowser's Inside Story: Mario gets major complaints for hitting ? blocks, mostly because the person in question is a large sentient block himself whose major problem with Mario's power-up gaining antics is the fact that hitting them decreases their value, which he doesn't approve of because he collects them.
- Sydney Hunter and the Curse of the Mayan: There are plenty of vases scattered throughout the various temples that Sydney Hunter can break open for gems and coins.
- In Target Terror, destroying sufficient objects and windows earns you medals such as "Duke of Destruction" and "Window Wrecker".
- Any inanimate object (and plenty of the animate ones) which can be destroyed in Team Buddies will grant you ammo, health, or frequently both. One of the few games in which the enemies take advantage of this as well.
- Shooting harmless objects in Time Crisis earns you a few points and keeps your combo going. In fact, it's how some of the best players achieve high scores, particularly in Time Crisis 4 where you get a bonus for every 10 hits. If you destroy explosive objects, they kill nearby enemies and, in titles with point systems, earn you a point bonus.
- In Tomb Raider: Underworld, secrets can be found by smashing various pots and things in the ruins around the world.
- Trick or Treat Beat!: You can get candy by smashing garbage cans.
- In Twisted Metal, you are encouraged to destroy the arena. Doing so lets you access hidden areas and power-ups.
- An Untitled Story lets you destroy pots strewn throughout the game world to earn money.
- Uphill Rush: Later games would reward you with money for breaking things.
- Valkie 64: Like the game that inspired it, this one has items hidden in tall grass and jars, and you have to cut the grass and smash the jars to get them.
- Wallachia: Reign of Dracula: You can get items for smashing objects, such as barrels.
- Warcraft Expanded Universe:
- Warcraft III: Only some crates and terrain elements are destructible, the important goods are presumably kept in the invulnerable boxes. On one level, vandalism is a good strategy: skeletons are hiding in crates, destroying the crates one by one allows you to take them out more easily rather than falling into an ambush.
- In World of Warcraft during the yearly Midsummer Fire Festival, you are given a chance to vandalize the opposing side's bonfires and gain a large amount of experience from doing so.
- War Dogs: Red's Return: Red can get items from crates he destroys.
- The Warriors gave you points for simply smashing anything that could be broken. Trash cans and the like always dropped more weapons like bottles when broken.
- Weird Al's Museum of Natural Hilarity provides a pinball example. This Week in Pinball's "deep dive" on the game states that the player can smash various objects in the museum by hitting the side targets. Doing this 27 times lights Hardware Store Multiball.
- In Will Rock, you can gain treasures if you destroy statues. However is slightly justified, as sometimes the statues will try to kill you with huge, explosive boulders, fiery disks, and laser beams.
- In the first level of Wings of Liberty, destroying holograms of Arcturus Mengsk is a side objective. Of course, he is a brutal dictator you're rebelling against and the holograms are repeating his propaganda, so it's justified.
- World of Mana Series:
- In Dawn of Mana, there's destructible terrain and throwing things at enemies panic them and cause them to drop more stat-boosting items. Mana spirits (needed to cast spells) also reside in things like bonfires, so you have the incentive to destroy everything.
- The remake of Trials of Mana features large easily-broken vases all over the map. Breaking a green one restores some HP for your whole party, blue ones restore your CS gauge, purple ones MP, and brown ones will sometimes contain items that aren't tracked by Li'l Cactus's treasure-finding bonuses (he only tracks actual treasure chests).
- Yellow Taxi Goes Vroom has destreuction bonus for destroying 50 environmental objects without dying. The bonus manifests in spawning several currency bags around the Taxi.
- Zombies Ate My Neighbors grants you a "Massive Destruction" bonus if you blow holes in enough stuff pre-stage.
adnjkwfbkaALK83robfwqi2rdhoHOWQHRWQNlafwafib43u923fh...... Where's my reward?
