Game Breaker/Video Games/Survival Horror

Game Breakers in survival horror games.

The small chainsaw in Dead Rising is nearly legendary for its gamebreaker status. Available fairly early on and then respawning at its original location when used up, this weapon combines one of the fastest attack speeds in the game with one of the highest attack powers. It attacks in broad swings that can wreck large crowds just as easily as single bosses, is one-handed (and thus won't be dropped when switching to another weapon or getting hit), doesn't have to be revved up like its larger cousin, and if the triple-book trick is used to increase its durability, a single small chainsaw can last nearly the entire game. Only a certain few psychopaths even stand a chance against the small chainsaw - no number of zombies are a threat, and most bosses will die in seconds as well.
- While not quite as broken, the Knife Gloves in Dead Rising 2 are superior to most other available weapons: they generally kill most non-boss enemies in a single hit and do large amounts of damage to bosses, are decently durable, can't be disarmed from you by bosses with the ability to do so and have easily available parts. The drawback is that they could be slightly faster, but this can be somewhat bypassed by their alternate attack.
  - If you have the Ninja DLC, the Laser Sword becomes this against bosses since the Ninja skillset replaces its normally slow combo with a much faster one, allowing you to remove a good chunk of their health in a few hits thanks to their normally high damage at a much faster rate and at an increased range compared to Knife Gloves. It's still Awesome but Impractical in most other situations because of the weapon's low durability and the overall lack of convinient flashlight spawn points though.
Eternal Darkness features a magic system centered around a rock-paper-scissors dynamic, with the magic of each god canceling out one of the other gods but being canceled by the third. The player can discover a magical rune of a fourth god, Mantorok, that is more powerful than all of them. An especially notable effect of the Mantorok rune is the ability to make yourself invisible, essentially rendering all non-boss enemy encounters optional.
- It also makes "Enchant Item" poison an enemy if you enchant the weapon you strike them with. Mantorok dispels ALL other magicks (you usually have to counter with the right color)...this can be embarrassing if you forget it dispels your invisibility too. Lastly, it also soups up your shield spell to poison any enemies who attack you. Normal shields just repel attacks without damaging the enemy. Truly a game-breaking rune. The game is hard up to Edwin Lindsay's level (the archaeologist...the rune is found in his level) After that, cake, baby!
- Easily Eternal Darkness's biggest game breaker of all is the Recover spell. With this spell you can use magik to heal your health and sanity. But since magik is itself regenerated though the simple act of movement, this essentially means this spell grants the player unlimited health and sanity. It makes what would be a challengeing game a piece of cake.
Parasite Eve's Game Breaker is special in two ways. First, it is not possible to have one in the first playthrough. Second, the game does not actually have a single overpowered gun, but features a "weapon modding" systems to allow players with enough time and patience to craft their own personal Infinity+1 Sword. Tools and Super Tools are single-used items that can transfer Stat Bonuses (+ damage, + capacity) or other features (Critical up, Burst fire, etc) from a weapon to another, destroying the original in the process (in case of Tool). These items (especially Supertools) are rare in the first playthrough, so how powerful the player's gun is depends for the most part on how many weapons (and tools) they manage to find and strip the bonuses from. The second playthrough, however, features a brutal Bonus Dungeon, where players can collect Rare Trading Cards to trade for "Tool Kit" (unlimited Tools) and Supertool Kit (unlimited Supertools), and a ton of new weapons with bigger and better bonuses. After piling up stat bonuses on their favorite weapon, players can then supplement it with devastating features, such as more Critical, Command x2 or Command x 3 (allowing you to take 2 or 3 actions each turn), Burst (hit multiple enemies), etc and especially Cyanide rounds (each bullet has a chance to One Hit KO) ... Also, the gun can be carried over to subsequent playthrough, and thus can be as powerful as the player is willing to spend time to upgrade it. Players can choose their favorite guns based on Base Damage and Range(Rifle), Aiming Time - Time between shots - Time between turns (Pistol or SMG) and number of feature slots available.
- Parasite Eve 2 has a cleverly disguised game breaker, which may or may not be intentional. The game is generous with one type of ammo: 9mm parabellum. The critical hit mechanism seems to be this: the lower the firing rate, the higher chance you have at a critical hit. For example, if you want more critical hits, use single shot instead of three round burst for the M93R or M4. However, the "most powerful" weapon in the game is the paltry P8, where 70% of all shots are critical hits. So while the M4 will rack up about 30 damage for a 3 round burst, the P8 will be getting in the neighborhood of 10 per shot on a critical hit. Couple the P8 with the Spartan round, you'll be doing 30 damage.
In the earlier Resident Evil games you could one shot any zombie with the shotgun by using the simple trick of aiming as high as possible and then firing as soon as the zombie was about to lunge. It feels sort of awkward at first and takes a little practice. Once you have the timing down you'll be able to kill the vast majority of the enemies you face and still have piles of shells left over. All the power weapon ammo can be set aside to cheese the bosses and the few stronger enemy types (that would probably represent a much greater threat if ammo was as scarce as it was intended to be).
- In the Resident Evil 1 Remake for the Game Cube, using the Grenade Launcher Glitch could give the player unlimited grenade launcher ammo, as all they have to do to get more is repeat the glitch process. This made the entire game ridiculously easy. Well, if you are playing as Jill that us.
In Resident Evil Code: Veronica, the knife. Yes, THE KNIFE. In CV, the knife has the interesting property of multi-hitting on a downward slash. While slashing at a zombie at normal level is pretty much useless, slashing at a zombie downwards hits the zombie for massive damage, hitting enough times in one shot to knock him down, and you can stab him to death on the ground at leisure. This also allows you to easily attack zombies on a lower level. Even Hunters can be easily taken down this way. This means that you can save your ammo for nastier enemies. It's a piece of cake to beat the game this way with handgun or even shotgun ammo in the triple digits.
In Resident Evil 4: The Mercenaries, you have Wesker and Krauser. Wesker has a semi-auto rifle that just kills grunt in one hit, a magnum that two shots most bosses, silenced handgun that leads to melee, tons of grenades and healing. His melee moves tend to kill instantly. His only weakness is that he doesn't have a knife. Krauser has the highest HP, a fast run, an arm that kills everything, arrows that do high damage, good melee, a knife that really hurts, and flash grenades. His weakness? Wesker's just better at killing things.
- In Resident Evil 5, it's all about the Weskers. Midnight Wesker is the current score holder. Basically, you shoot grunts in the face to set up for the Cobra Strike, which instantly kills. In Resi5, you get time bonuses for melee, a mere 5 seconds. The top players can chain melee kill after melee kill and basically get infinite time to kill the grunts. And if you run into the boss? Magnum + Melee until the boss dies. And if you gets swarmed, there's always the 5 starting grenades. S.T.A.R.S. Wesker is even stronger, he substitutes the grenades for the HYDRA shotgun, which boasts a range comparable to a sniper rifle with none of damage degrading. He also gets the Samurai Edge, which two shots most grunts. Wesker's weaknesses? No first aid sprays, which the bosses drop.
  - It isn't all about the Weskers. Tribal Sheva is often considered broken due to her extremely powerful infinite ammo weapon, the Longbow, and her personal boss and mob killer, the Grenade Launcher. Since her primary weapon has infinite ammo, all ammo drops will be for the Grenade Launcher, so she can replace the Nitrogen Rounds with something more effective against the "boss" enemies. Her only real issue is that the Longbow lacks a laser sight and is, therefore, harder to aim than everyone else's weapons.
  - And with the newest patch and DLC comes the Mercenaries Reunion, the same Mercenaries mode as before but with new characters. One of these is Fairy Tale Sheva, a Sheva that starts out with the Handcannon, the most powerful weapon in the game except for rocket launchers. And to top it all off, she also starts with 5 (5!) Golden Eggs, which fully restore health. Combine this with Online or Offline Co-Op and both using her, and anyone can easily get an S rank on all of the levels. And then theres Heavy Metal Chris with his Infinite Ammo Mini-gun, which is possibly the most broken weapon in the game.
  - Possibly? There's no hunting for ammo and no need to reload; you can grab several time extensions at the start of the map, and then just camp in a safe place and rack up enormous combos.
    - Rebecca Chambers. She wields a powerful machine gun, an auto shotgun for close up work and stacks of ammo. What's more, thanks to the crosspad inventory, she can just tap up or down to instan-heal, which makes sense.
      - Actually, Fairytail Sheva and Rebecca are sure good at survival, getting SS ranks is quite easy, but if you're going for top scores it's completely a different story... performing Rebecca's Flame Spray melee is tricky compared to Excella's or Barry's ones, and her other melees suck...
Cryostasis, in its original release, was a tough game, chiefly due to frequent occurrences of That One Boss together with some semi-nerfed weapons, not to mention a non-adjustable difficulty level (example: one boss comes at you with dual, continuous-fire machine guns and more hit points than a medium-sized continent, and all you've likely got is a flare gun, a bolt-action rifle that takes an age of the world to cock and ready between shots, and one sub-machine gun with maybe ten rounds left in it if you've been really careful). When the developers released a patch, among performance increases and the addition of Phys X components, they added a "water cannon," presumably in an effort to rebalance gameplay and also show-off PhysX on the weaponry. This weapon massively breaks the entire game, since it fires continuously without reloading, pins any enemy in place whilst dealing damage and so stops him from firing back, and uses icicles as ammo, which you can find stuck to the walls, floor, ceiling and pretty much everything else in every single area. In short, this patch-applied weapon took a game that was brutally, gruellingly difficult (almost a broken game, in fact, through the sheer difficulty of beating some of its overpowered enemies using only slow-firing weapons with a chronic shortage of ammo), and swung it ridiculously far in the other direction, making it almost insultingly easy.
If you're willing to pony up a measly $4, you can utterly break the original Dead Space by downloading the Advanced Unitology Suit, which is not available in the normal game. The suit itself is heavily reinforced and features 60% damage resistance, which is twice as much as the next most-powerful suits (the Scorpion and Astro Suits, which are DLC releases). It makes the post-game unlockable Military Suit look like a joke, and it comes included with three extra weapons that deal more damage than their original counterparts. It essentially turns the game into a cakewalk, as players will be able to stand around and let Necromorphs wail on them for extended periods of time, rendering the entire "survival" part pretty much trivial... and don't forget, you can access this DLC content right at the beginning of the game. Have fun.
The Crush Lens from Fatal Frame II, which one-shots pretty much every ghost in the game, even on Hard mode.