Super Soldier / Video Games

Super Soldiers in video games.

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• Abomination: The Nemesis Project: The U.S.A.'s Nemesis Project created 8 bio-augmented soldiers who each possessed one specific ability ranging from Superstrength to causing small explosions at a distance. Good thing too as the world then gets hit by an invasion of cultists and ancient biotech monsters. Sadly, should you lose your Nemesis Project soldiers, you'll have make do with police and regular military personnel.
• The two heroes, Reno Washington and Kelly Doyle, from Assault Retribution, are genetically enhanced human soldiers in peak condition, which serves as humanity's last hope in a Bug War where mankind is near the brink of extinction.
• Bionic Commando (1988) has the extensively bionic Rad Spencer as the titular Bionic Commando. Besides being extremely durable due to a cybernetic shell, he's also got an extendable arm to grapple onto things to swing from - which is his most notable trait.
• The setting of C-12: Final Resistance has the Earth trying to fight back against an Alien Invasion with the creation of cyborg soldiers including your character Lt. Riley Vaughan.
• Call of Duty: Black Ops III: With the advent of cybernetic technology, the most elite soldiers from every army are turned into "Cyber Soldiers", walking death machines with mechanical limbs connected through Direct Neural Interface systems. Even "normal" soldiers are equipped with exo-suits that augment their combat capabilities; these exo-suits are much smaller and less noticeable than the ones from Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare, and can be "hacked" with the right Cyber Core upgrade.
• Chainsaw Warrior, Rebellion's video game version of Games Workshop's tabletop game and its video game-only sequel Chainsaw Warrior: Lords of the Night features the eponymous Chainsaw Warrior. The guy was already a highly trained black-ops special forces soldier but in one mission gone wrong he's almost blown apart by a tank. The American gov't has him rebuilt with advanced bionics which not only make him much stronger and tougher, they also keep him from feeling fear.
• City of Heroes, being a game about super powered individuals, is full of this trope. Crey, the Council, the 5th Column and Arachnos all dabble in making Super Soldiers in the traditional sense. Other groups like the Vahzilok and the Freakshow dabble in giving themselves superpowers, but they lack the military organization of the big four.
• In Civilization: Beyond Earth this is what your infantry eventually turn into, one way or another. They start out as guys in NASA space suits with guns, but by end game... well, it depends on which tech affinity you adhere to. With Harmony they are bio-armor wearing Half-Human, Half-Alien Hybrids that heal by breathing in poison gas. With Purity, bio-augmented seven-foot-tall giants in Powered Armor that are about one step removed from 40K Space Marines. With Supremacy they are insectoid-looking more machine-than-man Cyborg shock troops. The Rising Tide DLC adds hybrid affinities. Supremacy-Harmony infantry look like biomechanical alien Cyber Cyclops. Harmony-Purity looks like an Ancient Egyptian holy warrior in gleaming gold-and-purple armor, genetically engineered to be godlike. Purity-Supremacy has a "perfect" human soldier operating an advanced armor with animal-level AI.
• In Colossatron: Massive World Threat, Dropships will deploy units literally called Super Soldiers if not destroyed quickly. Wearing Powered Armour with a pair of Shoulder Cannons these guys pack far more firepower and damage resistance than the regular infantry you face.
• In Command & Conquer: Red Alert, the Soviets created Volkov, the precursor to Nod's Divination and Cyborg program. Volkov is supposed to be an answer to Tanya, the Allies' mercenary commando, but far exceeds expectations since he can devastate tanks in addition to infantry and buildings. His metal endoskeleton also makes him impervious to being crushed and can take a lot of punishment, far more than the human Tanya can. However, only one was ever made as the process was exceedingly expensive (and it's implied everyone else they tried this on did not survive the skeleton transplant). Volkov was paired with a super attack dog, Chitzkoi, who underwent the same augmentations that he did. In game mechanics, Chitzkoi behaves like a regular attack dog (instantly kills infantry, useless against anything else) but has almost ten times the health and can leap much further.
• Command & Conquer: Tiberian Series:
  • The Brotherhood of Nod likes to experiment with Tiberium on humans (and weapons) attempting to create Super Soldiers. This is especially relevant for Renegade, which features several mutant mooks in the later levels (which tend to be immune to Tiberium weapons, or are healed by it), as well as a boss. Which is somewhat of a parody of the original, the smallest character in the game. Havoc notes that "at least he's taller".
  • GDI took a much more simple approach to the thing in Tiberian Sun — they hired a Forgotten (humans mutated by Tiberium exposure, granting some degree of resistance to further damage from Tiberium exposure and accelerated healing when near Tiberium) veteran and gave him a railgun.
  • The Tiberium experiments Nod did during Renegade eventually lead to the creation and mass production of Cyborgs (who were already super soldiers by infantry standards) and among them certain ones were upgraded with Scrin technology, creating Cyborg Commandos. These were powerful enough to level entire bases on their own and their plasma cannons can destroy the Mammoth MK2 in just three hits.
  • In Tiberium Wars, GDI developed a much simpler super-soldier program for their commandos. There's no cybernetic enhancements or biological modification here, just extremely harsh and brutal training coupled with advanced armor and an automatic railgun.
• Contra: Even as far back as the original Bill Rizer and Lance Bean claiming themselves as super-soldiers and then proving to be a pair of One-Man Army types, Team Contra has been really good at adding superhuman or top-notch elite warriors whether it's cyborgs, bio-engineered werewolves, sentient robots and etc. Even their human troops can go Transhuman such as Lance modding himself with alien DNA or Bill getting extensive bionics. Additionally, in Contra Returns, Team Contra develops Power Armor for its team plus Lance and weapon expert Sadie create a device that gives the Contra members psychic powers.
• The Silencer and his brethren in Crusader, whom you never actually fight in the games. However, properly equipped, a skilled player can scythe through hordes of lesser enemies, the implications being that a squad of Silencers would be both horrifying and overwhelming in a fight.
• Crysis's Delta Force nanosuits allow its users to turn invisible, survive a point-blank shotgun blast, to run as fast as a Humvee, and then flip it over by punching it, all through the use of reverse-engineered Ceph nanotechnology. The sequel shows that the suit is capable of becoming even more — Alcatraz, a regular US Marine, is mortally wounded, then placed in a nanosuit, which keeps him alive by growing into his wounds and eventually running most of his higher mental processes.
• Mukuro Ikusaba in Danganronpa: Trigger Happy Havoc is a Child Soldier with superhuman speed and reflexes that allowed her to spend three years on various battlefields without sustaining a single injury, earning her the title of "Ultimate Soldier".
• The entire plot of the Dead or Alive fighting game series is centered on Victor Donovan's attempts to create these by kidnapping Ninjas and cloning them. At some point Donovan had all four part-siblings of the lead family for three different projects: Hayate and Kasumi, the only true siblings of the quartet, were for projects involving this trope, whereas a new scientist in his employ during the events of 6 has Ayane, who shares a mother with Hayate and Kasumi, and Honoka, conceived by the same man behind Ayane's Child by Rape designation, used to test a revival project.
• The Guardians in Destiny were once dead humans and transhuman lifeforms who are resurrected by Ghosts, sent by the Traveler to raise soldiers to protect and fight for it and those it is protected (in this case, the rest of humankind). Every Guardian is empowered by the Light, granting them phenomenal powers, rapid healing, and Resurrective Immortality, and every Guardian is able to mow down hordes of opponents. Interestingly, the Guardians' methods of fighting don't focus on conventional warfare, because they don't have the manpower to take and hold ground or fight in open battles against enemy armies and navies; instead they capitalize on their strengths, with the Guardians focusing on precision attacks on enemy logistics and support, infiltration and sabotage of enemy ships and weapons, lightning-fast assaults against high value targets, and other forms of aggressive guerilla warfare that leave much larger and more powerful and conventional enemy armies leaderless and unable to attack.
• Deus Ex: Human Revolution:
  • Depending on play style, Adam Jensen can be either a super soldier or a super spy, or if you're really good, both. It's heavily implied in-game that he was bred to be more compatible with augmentation than the average human, and that he is the stock from which the Dentons were cloned.
  • There are also the tyrants, augmented mercenaries and the only enemies you actually have to kill for them to stay down.
• DonPachi features the DonPachi Squadron, an elite air force unit. Clearing the first loop reveals that in order for prospective members to be able to take on massive enemy forces, they are ordered by their commander to slaughter the entirety of their own forces, and that this training process goes on for at least seven years.
• The Doom Slayer of Doom (2016) at first just appears to be a really strong and fast guy who can run circles around demons and punch them to Ludicrous Gibs, but Doom Eternal goes into more detail about his past. It's revealed that he's actually the original "Doomguy" from Doom and, after spending years and years in hell slaughtering demons as a Badass Normal, he came to live on Sentinel Prime with the other Night Sentinels and became one of their best soldiers. However, at one point during a great war, a mysterious man named "Samur Maykr" put the Doomguy into a machine that gave him the power of the Maykrs, a race of hyper-advanced forerunner aliens. By doing this, he turned the otherwise unmodified human into a human-Maykr hybrid capable of the insane feats he's come to be known for.
• Dragon Age:
  • The golems of Dragon Age: Origins straddle the line between Super Soldier and Attack Animal with the reveal that they are created by entombing dwarves in stone statues and infused with molten lyrium. The golems' might gave the Dwarves a fighting chance against the Darkspawn, and losing the means to create more of them turned the tides of war against the Dwarves. Most of the few active golems remaining are kept on a leash via control rods, though a few still retain free will.
  • The Grey Wardens downplay this trope. Becoming one involves going through the Joining, a ritual that poses a significant risk of killing you. Surviving the ritual apparently gives you enhanced strength and durability, along the ability to sense the darkspawn, but it means you'll have a hard time having kids and you'll be dead in less than thirty years. However, Wardens are vital to fighting a Blight, as they're immune to the darkspawn taint and are the only ones who can permanently kill an Archdemon and end the Blight.
  • Fenris of Dragon Age II is another example, of the "angry victim seeking revenge on his creator" variety. He was originally a normal elf, but the mage who owned him as a slave had lyrium etched into his skin all over his body, an agonizingly painful process that gave him the ability to become partially insubstantial (and possibly made him stronger and more agile as well). He uses this power to resist injury... and reach into people's chests to crush their hearts.
• Dynamite Duke has the titular Duke, who's a bionic soldier with a blast-causing robotic arm and a submachine gun. Duke's so mighty that each of his punches and jump kicks deal far more damage than a single hit of his submachine gun.
• Fallout:
  • The Super Mutants are the product of a pre-war super soldier research project meant to create strong, aggressive soldiers resistant to injury, radiation and environmental extremes. They were later adopted by the Master as a new, superior version of humanity better suited to the nuclear wasteland of the post-apocalyptic future, meant to be able to easily overrun and replace regular humanity. They didn't come out quite as expected; their transformation makes them sterile as mules, and thus not viable as a self-sustaining species.
    • Notably, the two big flaws for the Master wouldn't have been an issue for the pre-War super soldier project: almost every human back then was, effectively, pristine Vault material, so no need to go hunting for subjects that turn into smart mutants rather than dumb ones, and the fertility issue is a perk rather than a flaw if you want supersoldiers rather than a race intended to replace baseline humanity.
    • As seen in Fallout 3, Vault-Tec performed similar experiments on the residents of Vault 87 with a modified strain of the FEV, and the resulting Mutants turned out even dumber than their West Coast counterparts, as well as having the side effect of increasing in size with age. Only Fawkes retained his human intelligence.
    • Even by the standards of Super Mutants, Frank Horrigan from Fallout 2 is a beast. Clad in the finest Enclave Powered Armor which doubles as life support, Frank Horrigan is one of the deadliest beings to ever walk the wastelands. That is, until he met The Chosen One, of course.
  • The rather aptly-named Deathclaws were created by the pre-Great War government using genetic engineering to replace human troops in battle, and further refined by the Master using the same FEV virus which created the Super Mutants. The end result is a ten-foot tall reptilian monstrosity with twelve-inch long claws which are capable of shredding through all but the heaviest body armor, and a thick hide which is impervious to small-arms fire and explosives. In 3, the Enclave tried to weaponize them for use as shock troops. Deathclaws are Shrouded in Myth and few people in-universe have even encountered them, but the ones that have invariably describe them as tanks with legs.
  • In Fallout 4, Institute Coursers are Terminator Impersonators designed to look exactly like humans but be superior to them in every way and tasked with hunting down wayward Synths. At one point in the game, you have to track down one of these murder-machines. You know the Gunners, those ruthless mercenary types who serve as Elite Mook versions of Raiders? The Courser you're looking for is inflicting a Curb-Stomp Battle on an entire platoon of them when you find him, and no, it's not Gameplay and Story Segregation; he's a hell of a fight, even with a companion and power armor. X6-88, who is a Courser you can recruit, has a SPECIAL stat total of 98 points, almost twice as much as your other companions' sums, and more than even a fully leveled player character can have.
• Final Fantasy:
  • The Empire in Final Fantasy VI uses drained magical power both to create magic-wielding super-soldiers (called Magitek Knights in the translation, but simply madoushi — mages — in the original) and actual Magitek. Celes is an example of when it goes right. Kefka is an example of when it goes horribly, horribly right. It's even worse with Kefka than one initially thought, as he was the first of the Magitek Knights.
  • Final Fantasy VII (and its associated Compilation works, including Crisis Core) include numerous Super Soldiers, many of which were created using Mako energy, Jenova cells, a combination of both, and/or other experiments, to produce superhuman fighters with greatly improved combat abilities, including (but certainty not limited to) enhanced physical strength and speed.
    • SOLDIERs, members of Shinra's elite military unit, are carefully selected humans treated with Mako energy and Jenova cells to produce superhuman combatants.
    • Sephiroth, Genesis, and Angeal, while generally called SOLDIERs First Class, are actually prototypes for competing Shinra research projects directed to infusing humans with Jenova's genes. Sephiroth was created by directly infusing a developing fetus with Jenova cells (Project S, headed by Hojo). Unlike Sephiroth, Angeal was indirectly exposed to Jenova cells because his mother Gillian was the one injected with Jenova cells before his birth, while Genesis was exposed to Jenova cells even more indirectly with his mother being treated with cells harvested from Gillian (Project G, headed by Hojo's rival Hollander). They also had radically different results. Sephiroth was by far the strongest of the three. Eventually, he gained the ability to control the Jenova Cells perfectly... in exchange for losing all his humanity. Angeal received a weaker power boost but inherited Jenova's ability to infuse other organisms with his cells to give them some of his power and vice versa. Genesis was a Flawed Prototype who shared Angeal's abilities but also suffered from degradation (as did his copies) — and boy, does these cause problems.
    • Zack Fair, probably the strongest of the officially and 'conventionally' produced (i.e., non-prototype) SOLDIERs.
    • Cloud Strife, while never an actual member of SOLDIER, has all the physical enhancements of a SOLDIER, thanks to Hojo's sadistic experimentation after the Nibelheim Incident.
    • Vincent Valentine, an ex-Turk who becomes a shapeshifter with superhuman physical abilities thanks to Hojo's and Lucrecia Crescent's experiments.
    • Dirge of Cerberus: Weiss, Nero, Rosso, Azul, Shelke, and the other members of Deepground, who underwent SOLDIER-type treatments as well as special individualized experimentation to develop unique powers. It was said they used Genesis as the basis since his cells gained the ability to use Mako similar to Jenova, but without the degradation, loss of sanity (Well, okay, he did briefly lose his sanity, but for different reasons), and having a desire to smash a meteor into the planet to eat it for breakfast.
  • Final Fantasy VIII: SeeDs, who are superhumanly boosted, cast powerful magic, and able to summon deific beings to smite their enemies. These guys are apparently so badass that nine of them (in three-man teams) are expected to hold off an entire invading army, complete with artillery and killer walking robots. Twelve more candidates to become SeeDs are expected to assault and clear out an entire city of enemy soldiers. Their single greatest advantage is actually the Guardian Forces, which allow, among other things, the casting of magic (which is insinuated as artificial and weak when used by anyone other than a Sorceress), the collection of magic, and the use of magic to increase abilities from well above average to omni-powerful. No other group specializes in junctioning magic, which is why SeeDs are so devastating. This makes a small, specialized group more than a match for most smaller armies, as long as they have specific objectives. The GF forces are capable of granting characters permanent stat boosts. If you assume the normal stat growth is "average" human stats, then it is the possible endgame for SeeDs to be 3-5 times stronger, faster, etc. using GF forces.
  • A slightly less traditional form of the Super Soldier would be the black mages from Final Fantasy IX. Both Zidane and Kuja would fit better as Super Soldiers in this game, but it was only because unlike the rest of the Genomes, they were given souls. Makes you think what would happen if the other Genomes had gotten their souls too...
  • The yin to Cloud's yang, Lightning from Final Fantasy XIII. She can fly (well, actually, manipulate gravity) while machine-gunning hordes of Mooks, and most amazingly do it all while protecting her modesty — and all that is before she gets her l'Cie powers. Lightning was actually more of a Mook herself, roughly equivalent to a police sergeant, so it can be inferred that the stuff she had access to was probably the standard issue. It is also revealed through the story that millions of l'Cie were created and trained to fight the ancient War of Transgression in secret bunkers. Eight of them were sufficient enough to bring down a planet, so only God knows what a full force was capable of.
• First Encounter Assault Recon is chock-full of Super Soldiers, including the Point Man and Paxton Fettel (products of Project Origin), Becket (product of Projects Paragon and Harbinger), and a mini-army of cloned Replica soldiers.
• Both sides' grunts in Fracture fall into this category while their more elite and powerful units can almost no longer be called human.
• Geneforge: Some factions attempt this with the canisters, but given that side effects include egotism, severe anger management problems, and Hallucinations, several give up and rely on Mons.
• Half-Life 2: The Combine Elites. The regular soldiers are transhuman specimens as well. They have simply received less augmentation, which is more in line with placing an untrained civilian on the level of your average soldier quickly rather than enhancing average soldiers to superhuman levels, like the Combine Elites. The only pure humans in the Combine military are the Civil Protection officers.
• Halo:
  • Master Chief Petty Officer John-117 and the other Spartan-II cyborgs. The program initially consisted of 75 trainees, chosen by way of genetic markers indicating for exceptional athleticism and intelligence, who were abducted and conscripted into the special forces at age six, trained into perfect warriors until age 14, and then subjected to a series of augmentations that rendered them practically invincible — before they got suited up with the MJOLNIR Powered Assault Armor, which further enhanced their abilities. Unfortunately, only thirty-something trainees survived the augmentation process unscathed (among them John, the rest of his Blue Team members, and Jorge-052); most of the rest died, and a handful were crippled...though some of the latter were later rehabilitated^note Halsey also confides in her journal that there were more Spartan-IIs than she led the "main" class, of which John and most of the Spartan-IIs were part of, to believe.
  • There's also the Spartan-IIIs, vengeful kids orphaned by the Covenant who were sent on suicide missions almost right from the moment they hit prematurely-induced puberty. They mostly lacked the exceptional genetics, MJOLNIR armor, and experience of the IIs, but mostly made up for it with less-lethal augmentations (with a roughly 100% survival rate), a poor man's version of active camouflage, and far greater numbers (300-330 per company). The newest company also received illegal drugs that further enhanced their aggression, strength, endurance, and tolerance to injury.
  • A handful of Spartan-IIIs, namely those who were good enough to meet the standards of the original SPARTAN-II program and therefore too valuable to waste on the standard S-III suicide mission, were taken out of their companies, reassigned to more elite units, and given the same MJOLNIR armor as the S-IIs (among the elite units were Noble Team, which had three from Alpha Company and two from Beta; players take the role of the new Noble Six, one of the Betas). Other Spartan-IIIs were taken out of their companies and paired up into two-man assassination-and-sabotage teams known as Headhunters.
  • The predecessor to both programs was the ORION Project, later known as the SPARTAN-I program. Unlike its successors, the project used adult volunteers; unfortunately, despite the effectiveness of the ORIONs, their abilities still fell short of what was hoped for, and they tended to both physically and mentally deteriorate later in life. The only confirmed Spartan-I seen in the games is Sergeant Johnson.
  • Unlike their predecessors, the Spartan-IVs introduced in Halo 4 are the first iteration of the program to successfully utilize adult volunteers, and are all equipped with an even more advanced version of MJOLNIR (GEN2, to be precise) in order to compensate for their relatively inferior (but more extensive and much better tolerated) augmentations. Pound for pound, they’re agreed to be less capable than the previous two generations, but they’re still well above human, far easier to mass produce, and above all stable: due to their comparatively normal backgrounds, the IVs are far more socially-adjusted than the IIs and IIIs.
  • Halo: Shadow of Intent reveals that the Covenant had their own super-soldiers in the Prelates, genetically modified Prophets capable of potentially matching even Spartans in a direct fight. Particularly impressive considering the average Prophet is a Non-Action Guy a Grunt could tear apart in a physical contest without their technology. However, they risk going into seizures if they remain in prolonged combat, making them useful only in short bursts.
  • While all Forerunner Warrior-Servants were this, the Prometheans were this even relative to other Warrior-Servants, as they had the Ecumene's most advanced combat armor and mutations. As seen in Halo 4 and Halo: Escalation, even a full squad of the best Spartan-IIs are no match for a single unarmed Promethean, although in fairness that one happened to be the Ur-Didact, the leader of and the best Promethean.
• Hitman:
  • Agent 47 is a clone with DNA donated by five high-profile criminals (a German mad scientist, a Chinese Triad boss, a Colombian drug lord, an Austrian terrorist-for-hire, and a Kazakstanian arms dealer). As a result, Agent 47 has slightly above human strength and stamina.
  • In Hitman: Absolution, 47's new handler is secretly heading a research project dedicated to creating a similar cloned assassin. The 14-year-old Victoria kicks serious ass and becomes the Living MacGuffin of the game when she's targeted by a South Dakotan arms mogul.
• Jak II: Renegade sets Jak up as one of these, Wolverine-style; experimented on against his will, he later breaks free and swears revenge on the people who did it to him. The experiments involved injecting him with Dark Eco, which gives him the ability to transform into Dark Jak. Dark Jak has enhanced strength and claws instead of nails, and (if you buy the upgrades) can: create an shockwave of Dark Eco by punching the ground; produce countless Dark Eco bolts; completely ignore all attacks; and transform into a gigantic form that's even stronger (capable of destroying vehicles with one or two hits). Jak 3 drops the last two powers but adds invisibility and the ability to throw Dark Eco blasts.
• Jumper: Ogmo is one, or at least supposed to be one. Aside from improbable jumping skills, he's also designed to survive without food or light. For long.
  The Boss: Ogmo is not the ultimate soldier! He's just the retarded monster!
• Left to Survive has Lee Jaein and Specimen N1010 as legendary tier heroes you can get. Lee Jaein is an experimental soldier from a cyberpunk future that's decades in the future of the Zombie Apocalypse setting of the 2030s, Lee was an orphan child bought by the Hattori Syndicate and augmented with bionics while getting historical battle information uploaded directly into her brain. She was a Flawed Prototype since she still retained too many emotions to be loyal to Hattori but she was instrumental to Hattori's conquest of North America. specimen N1010 was originally an elite soldier (implied to from the NER), until he was bit in an arm by a zombie. Doctors couldn't cure the effect as the soldier grew increasingly more infected, but they did create an injection harness that filled his bloodstream with chemicals that halted the infection's progress. Besides retaining his original mind and skills, he's got the benefit of an undead body and further more the chemicals in his blood have made it extremely corrosive - allowing him to weaponize samples from his bloodstream.
• Marathon has the Battleroids, dead soldiers reanimated with cheap cybernetics. They were first used in a dispute between two small asteroid governments, in which battleroids from both sides got inside their opposing asteroids and killed pretty much everyone, after which their use was banned and they were put in stasis for safekeeping. 10 "military Mjolnir Mark IV cyborgs" were smuggled on board the Marathon, but only 9 were killed when the Tau Ceti colony was blown up. It is all but confirmed that the player character is the 10th, which would explain his One-Man Army capabilities.
• Mass Effect 2 has three. First, Commander Shepard, who was killed and then brought back from the dead, and upgraded by use of what Miranda refers to as bio-synthetic fusion. Second is Miranda, who was genetically engineered to be the perfect woman (which apparently consists of the standard super soldier package, plus good looks). Last, is Grunt, who is genetically engineered to be the perfect krogan, or "Pure krogan".
  • Also, Jack, who was engineered to become a superhuman biotic. Also any of the kids in the original biotic training program, until Kaiden killed the turian instructor, and the project was scrapped.
  • Even regular mooks in the setting undergo extensive gene therapy to boost their strength, endurance and healing. Also standard is full-body heavy armor with full NBC protection and a sensor suite, plus other devices such as personal Deflector Shields that can take several hits from their own weapons and recharge within seconds, wrist-mounted nano-fabricators, and grenades many times more powerful than any modern ones. Their weapons are mostly coilguns with effectively unlimited ammo that fire microcaliber projectiles at hypersonic speeds, which despite not expelling propellant (being EM weapons) and having small projectiles, generate recoil comparable to modern firearms (indicating that the rounds they fire impact with several times the kinetic energy of their modern counterparts). These guns, from sniper rifles to heavy pistols to light machine guns, be easily modded on the fly to fire homing rockets and grenades or various ammo types (armor-piercing, poison, incendiary, electric, etc.) with a flick from their aforementioned wrist-mounted nano-fabricators. Many standard troops also have various other abilities, such as greatly enhanced shields, the ability to deploy autonomous drones, various heavy weapons spawned from the wrist fabricator, psychic powers, superhuman strength and durability, the ability to shoot lightning and multi-megajoule incendiary plasma rounds from their wrists, highly potent Power Palms, invisibility, and so on. The only reason they're not thought of as super solders within the setting is that every other military threat out there is just as deadly.
  • Alec Ryder and his offspring Pathfinder Ryder surpass them all due to them being intertwined with the Simulative Adaptive Matrix, or SAM, via cybernetic implants. SAM is an Artificial Intelligence who sees and feels everything the Ryders see and feel, and can enhance their physiology in a multitude of ways via Profiles. Therefore, Ryder can be enhanced with Improbable Aiming Skills one minute, switch to being a tech savvy combat engineer the next minute, become an unkillable Stone Wall the next, become an up close shock trooper the next, a stealthy ninja the next, a Gravity Master biotic the next and so on. Not to mention the Awesomeness by Analysis ability that SAM also grants.
• Metal Gear: Several of the villains. All were the products of genetic engineering, and many were just plain freaks of science.
  • Solid Snake himself. Big Boss was the single greatest soldier to have ever lived, but the Bikini Atoll atomic bomb experiment in 1954 rendered him sterile. The Les Enfantes Terrible project was an attempt to clone him, and Solid Snake and his brothers were the result. Snake is not explicitly superhuman, but he is a Genius Bruiser with an IQ of 180, fluency in six languages, a polymath with an impressive knowledge of military science, genetics, biology, firearms and philosophy. He is "the Man Who Makes The Impossible, Possible". In Metal Gear Solid alone, he faces a tank, a Hind gunship, a world-class Kurdish sniper, a renowned gunslinger, the world's most powerful psychic, a giant of a man who effortlessly wields a rotary cannon normally found on the nose of a jet, a Cyber Ninja, and a 100ft tall prototype Humongous Mecha with an arsenal of advanced weapons, and he beats all of them. While also infected with a virus that is specially designed to target, weaken and kill him. He survives that too. Now you know why Big Boss was.
  • Heck, Solid Snake's best friend was also a super soldier, as well, both during the events of Portable Ops (where he was a sole-surviving test subject of a CIA project to create the Perfect Soldier), and Metal Gear Solid (when he was made into a Cyber Ninja.
  • Metal Gear Rising: Revengeance: Cybernetic enhancements have become commonplace among soldiers employed by the world's Private Military Contractors, making your average soldier an Elite Mook. Player character Raiden happens to be a One-Man Army Cyborg Ninja capable of slicing up Humongous Mecha with his sword, however, so he can handle them quite easily in actual gameplay.
  • Metal Gear Solid V has the Skulls Parasite Unit led by Skull Face, the Big Bad and leader of XOF. They usually serve as a Hopeless Boss Fight whenever Snake has the misfortune to run into them during a mission, with good reason. They're effectively immortal (Snake can't kill them, only incapacitate them), have superhuman speed and agility, and attack in droves. They were created by implanting ordinary soldiers with an ancient Puppeteer Parasite, destroying most of their brain functions and effectively making them superpowered zombies. They're also The Virus, capable of infecting any ordinary humans in the vicinity. You're expected to run away from them.
• Metroid:
  • Samus Aran was adopted by the fantastically advanced yet consciously going extinct Chozo, who infused her with Chozo DNA to give her fantastic speed, strength, agility and sensory capacity, trained her as the last Defender (read: legendary universe-saving warrior/judge figure) and equipped her with a modular suit of Powered Armor that's the envy of the galaxy. On top of this, she's largely fueled by a burning desire to get back at the Space Pirates who trashed both of her homeworlds and left her orphaned twice over. If there's a better warrior in the series' galaxy, we haven't seen them yet.
  • Metroid Prime: The space pirates created Project Helix, a program to use Phazon to grow super soldiers that are much larger and stronger than normal. The end result was a series of Elite Pirates (who were the successful reproducible ones after being exposed to a "safer" variant of Phazon as embryos); Phazon Elites (even stronger with direct infusion of energized Phazon but losing most their higher brain functions and getting horrific tumor growths); and the Omega Pirate, an Elite whose natural tolerance for Phazon allowed him to get pumped full of enough to kill most others and granting him abnormal size and strength along with the ability to directly absorb Phazon in order to fuel a powerful Healing Factor. Samus ends up killing almost^note By technicality, since she only fights one Phazon Elite while its scan implies there were others all of them.
  • Metroid Prime: Hunters introduces six new bounty hunters, one of which is Kanden, the end result of the Enomema Living Weapons Project, designed to create an unkillable super soldier. Unfortunately for the program, Kanden escaped and destroyed the lab, killing everyone involved in his creation.
• Monster Hunter: It's stated by Word of God that the Hunters are all the descendants of these, who fought in an ancient war with the creators of the monsters. This explains their ability to wield weapons twice as large as themselves and withstand tail whips and bites from gargantuan wyverns and dinosaurs, previously written off as simple Charles Atlas Superpower.
• Mortal Kombat has the Special Forces starting with Sonya Blade and Jax but certainly not ending there. U.S. taxpayer dollars made a team with bleeding-edge technology including dimensional portals and advanced bionics. Additionally they tapped into The Unmasqued World to have soldiers with supernatural powers. These elements make them one of the most powerful factions in the Mortal Kombat setting.
• Nintendo Wars:
  • Caulder/Stolos' 'children' in Advance Wars: Days of Ruin. Intended not for the front ranks, but for the command room, as their ability to assemble and react on tactical information in the field, as well as their encyclopedic knowledge of warfare, is far beyond that of a normal human. Tabitha/Larissa is also implied to have physical modifications as well.
  • By extension of a little logic, Sami's Infantry can become this during her Super CO Power, which allows infantry of any health capture any property in a single turn. By graphical interpretation, a single, wounded infantry can fight against a heavily guarded opponent HQ in a single day... and win.
• Overwatch: Prior to the Omnic Crisis the USA had a volunteer super soldier project whose subjects gained enhanced strength and reflexes. At least two of whom, Jack Morrison and Gabriel Reyes (aka Soldier 76 and Reaper/Soldier 24), became founding members of Overwatch.
• [PROTOTYPE] has Blackwatch's Super Soldiers, soldiers infected with a modified form of the series' virus. They're bigger, stronger, and faster than the regular Mooks, they can sniff the Player Character out almost instantly even when disguised, and can easily go toe-to-toe with the opposite side's Elite Mooks, the hunters, and even The Protagonist himself when in small groups.
• Resident Evil: It could be said that just about everything you encounter in the series is either this trope, or an attempt or side effect of creating this trope — the various Tyrants, Nemesis, Mr. X, the rest of the T series, et cetera. The Tyrants are the best example of this trope in the whole series, created to be the most deadly form of such in all of Umbrella's library of B.O.Ws.
  • This was the basic idea behind the Tyrant B.O.W line as a whole, but the T-103 model was where they finally got it right. T-103s are controllable, reliable, and capable of being programmed to achieve relatively complex goals, from assassination to search-and-destroy to item retrieval, all without sacrificing durability or strength. For this reason, they were the first mass production model, and the most successful subsequent strains of Tyrant were typically born from experimenting and augmenting a T-103 base model.
  • The Hunters as a whole. They are faster, stronger, tougher and more mobile than ordinary human soldiers, with no capacity for fear or pangs of conscience, nor with the need for weaponry; their own claws are more than sufficient.
  • The Lickers seem to have originally been an accidental mutation, but were swiftly developed into a proper B.O.W by Umbrella when they realized the potential. This led to the development of the Advanced Licker and Licker Beta models.
  • Albert Wesker might qualify, seeing how he was injected with a virus that enhanced his strength, speed, agility, durability, and healing to superhuman levels, and in Resident Evil 5 it was known that the virus was given to Wesker Children (Albert Wesker being one of these) to create a "evolved" race of human for serving Spencer, who envisioned himself to be the god of the new world.
  • Resident Evil 6: J'avo are this to a T, having been made either from Hired Guns or have been given military training and are capable of standing on fairly even ground with the BSAA.
  • Resident Evil 7: Biohazard: The Big Bad, Eveline. The basic idea behind her creation was that she would be a newer, better way of pacifying large numbers of targets with minimal risk to either side. The end-result was a fungal Hive Queen that could assimilate anyone she could infect, making her perfect for all manner of subversion-based missions.
• Return to Castle Wolfenstein:
  • B.J. fights Uber Soldats at some points in the game, such as the first time in a Lab, and three at the same time near the end. He also fights prototype versions of the Uber Soldat.
  • B.J himself may as well be considered one, given how fucking unstoppable he is. In Wolfenstein II: The New Colossus, after he gets captured and decapitated by Frau Engel, he gets his head recovered by the Resistance and put on some kind of prototype Ubersoldat body, so he qualifies for real.
• Second Sight introduced two classes of super-soldier, created by the American Zener Project: the first is just an extremely well-trained marine that's been taught to create mental shields, which deflect bullets but not mind-blasts. The second — only encountered in the second-last level — are Superpowered Mooks, loyal soldiers that have been given impressive psychic abilities via implanted stem cells taken from the original Zener Children and John Vattic, the protagonist. By the end of the game, most of the two classes have either been killed in action, or never existed at all.
• Shadowrun Returns: Dragonfall features a Super-Soldier as a side character in a run: The MKVI prototype you're supposed to liberate from AG Chemie turns out to be a cyberzombie made out of a troll who's basically been hollowed out and had everything except his hindbrain and muscle memory replaced by cybernetics, making him so cybered that he doesn't even count as a metahuman but a drone and requires your decker to slave him to your deck and control him out of the building. The troll's soul is still attached to the husk that's left of his body, is fully aware of what's happening to it, and is not happy about it. Notably, the reason he was created wasn't to be used as a super-soldier at all, it was simply as a showcase of the immuno-suppressant treatment that allowed them to chrome the poor bastard up as much as they did in the first place, and your client only wants MKVI because they want to figure this process out. The Player Character is allowed to use that particular stipulation as an Exact Words cop-out to Mercy Kill MKVI and allowing his soul to pass on in peace, and handing the 'prototype' off in the form of a corpse.
• Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri: With all the cloning, genetic engineering, cybernetics, and Brain Uploading you can inflict on your civilians, your mid- to late-game soldiers probably count. The Spartan Federation in particular.
• StarCraft:
  • Most Terran units are far more heavily augmented than they appear, which is more evident in StarCraft 2 than in the first game. The Marine in the original SC2 trailer has multiple metallic sockets on his body and the Battlecruiser captain has a cybernetic eye.
  • Most Protoss. Zealots, the most basic protoss soldier, are nine-foot-tall cybernetically enhanced warriors with decades of training, plasma shields, laser beam Wolverine Claws, and apparently capable of walking as fast as a motor vehicle and charging much faster than that. Oh yeah, and they can absorb as much damage as a tank (and survive a direct tank blast to the face without even losing their shields — and a couple more when their shields are down!).
  • The Zerg, the entire frickin' species. The Zerg incorporate foreign genetic material, and then make it into something more useful — like purpose-built killing machines, of which they have plenty. A single Zergling has a fair chance against a trained, armored Terran marine wielding a gauss rifle.
• Star Wars Legends:
  • Dark Forces Saga: The Dark Troopers, although in practice the first two generations were battle droids, the third generation could function as Powered Armor, and the resulting combo could be called Super Soldiers.
  • Star Wars: Republic Commando: Delta Squad are described as deluxe models that are superior to their more common brethren. Indeed, the clone commandoes are equipped with heavy armor that features integrated Deflector Shields, a knuckle mounted vibroblade, and a Swiss-Army Gun. The player character, Boss, rightfully puts a standard trooper in his place when the trooper mouths off on his elite status on a mysteriously abandoned assault ship:
    Clone: Ah, one of those deluxe models, come to save us with your "superior training?"
    Boss: This "deluxe model" is the only thing standing between you and a bloody death, so you best be showing some respect, trooper.
• Stellaris has robots, clones, psychics, and genetically engineered supersoldiers (unlocked with "Gene Seed Purification" tech). Available first as attachments to more conventional armies and later as whole armies.
• SturmFront: The Mutant War: You play as one in the aftermath of a mutant apocalypse, where you wake up in the chamber you're created, grab firearms from the nearest armoury, and marches into the mutant-infested streets to begin shooting at stuff.
• Super Robot Wars: Original Generation:
  • The Boosted Children and later the Machinery Children are basically this — though the Boosted Children were mainly just experiments that produced some good results, the Machinery Children were the "real deal". Similarly, the W-Numbers and Biodroids used by the Shadow Mirror and Inspectors; however, the Biodroids were mindless creations used to replace actual human losses, and the W-Numbers/-series were similarly purposed, but the W-series ended up with personalities.
  • W00, the Prototype of the Shadow-Mirror's W-series, turns out to be a human (Haken Browning, if you must know). The project was switched to androids like Lamia when they realized that it takes too long for Super Soldier babies to grow up.
• SUGURI: The protagonists and bosses are all "altered humans" who have been modified to have superhuman strength, agility and durability, flight, and various other powers depending on the individual. The trope is emphasized more in sora, which takes place during a Forever War in which the major characters are all fighting; the titular heroine in particular was designed to be the ultimate weapon of her country's military.
• Sword of the Stars has a couple of examples:
  • The Zuul were made by giving a race of flesh-eating marsupials a human-like intelligence, Psychic Powers (including the ability to Mind Rape knowledge out of their victims), a Hive Mind, and a natural lust for exploration and conquest. The Zuul were created for exterminating any race that wouldn't be subjugated; cargoes of them were simply dumped onto any old planet whose inhabitants needed a good genocide. They became more wildly successful than their creators could ever have dreamed of, insofar they went on to voluntarily worship their creators as gods and view their genocidal purpose as a holy war against the unworthy. In the sequel, a Zuul splinter faction joins their former enemies the Liir in fighting the rest of the Zuul and their creators.
  • Hiver members of the Warrior caste. While a worker is around the same size as a human, warrior cast hivers are far stronger and tougher, highly armored with plating, and one of the largest among any of the species in that universe. In game, this is reflected in Hiver ships being the toughest to successfully board.
• Templar Battleforce: The titular battleforce is composed of these; each is a Space Marine with Genetic Memory that allows them to pilot their Powered Armor.
• Thunder Hoop have you playing as one, developed under the "Thunder Hoop" project to defend humanity against a Mad Scientist's army of mutant abominations. You're granted superhuman strength, reflexes, stamina, and the ability to blast energy projectiles to kick all sorts of ass.
• Vivisector: Beast Within: The bestial enemies are a rare animalistic version of this trope, being created as warriors for the main antagonist's private army. Doubly intimidating, as they have both animal and cybernetic elements to augment their fighting prowess.
• Warframe:
  • The Tenno sit between this trope and low-level gods; they're even called "warrior-gods" at least once. They have enhanced strength, durability, speed, and reaction times, combined with strange Void powers and the ability to revive easily on death. The Operators who pilot the warframes are just weak children with Void powers, but the warframes have the skills and physical enhancements to fight.
  • The Dax were the soldier caste of the ancient Orokin Empire. Not much is known about them, but they were extremely powerful, to the point that the Orokin felt the need to put in a Restraining Bolt: They cannot disobey anyone holding a Kuva Staff. At least one of the warframes (Excalibur Umbra) was forcibly converted from a Dax soldier who discovered secrets that Ballas didn't want uncovered.
• Werewolf: The Apocalypse — Earthblood: Later stages reveals giant soldiers who have been exposed to Endron's biofuel, which results in them becoming hulking powerhouses who have no problem fighting werewolves and carrying heavy weaponry.
• The Witcher: Witchers fit the trope: alchemically and ritually augmented, made stronger, quicker, tougher than humans, and somewhat alienated from humanity because of it. They're meant for hunting monsters instead of fighting humans, but Geralt oftentimes doesn't really see much difference between the two. They're explicitly defined as genetically engineered (via alchemy) in a couple of places.
  • Geralt can also brew potions that temporarily, or with rare ingredients permanently, further boost his augmented abilities. Unfortunately, they're also toxic to varying degrees, and deadly to non-Witchers.
  • There is also Leo from the first game, who is said to be an experiment by Vesimir to create a "pseudo-Witcher" with the physical conditioning and training Witchers go through, with help from the Grasses (herbal steroids), but not the now-lost mutation process. He can take on several human enemies on his own quite easily, but sadly unlike a "real" Witcher he cannot parry a crossbow bolt and the Professor exploits this to shoot him down dead.

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