As someone who haven't played a lot of traditional top-down shooters I wonder if there is any kinds of combo mechanics commonly used in such games. Are there any such shooter that features combos you guys know of? Is there maybe some combos you guys know have not been used in a shooter but would find interesting in one?

Reason I ask is because I have some very vague ideas in my head, but they're too vague for me to even prototype (I got the animation in my head but no idea how that would be performed in practice that would require skill or luck by the player).

Bulletstorm scores players based on "creative kills". I've never played it so I can't say much for it, but that's an example of one if that's what you had in mind. What did you have in mind for combos?

What do you refer to as 'combos'?

Some games focus on the amount of kills you've done within a short amount of time and tend to trigger something based on that (an adrenalin rush / frenzy mode).

If, on the other hand, you are referring to how gameplay ingredients can be used to affect one another (positively):

using a flashbang grenade will confuse enemies, so combine that with a standard firearm and you have a 'combo' (you can efficiently decimate forces without fear of retaliation).

You could twist this further, say, your frag grenades reduce the opponent's defenses as well as damaging it?

Without a clearer understanding of what you mean by 'combo', it is very hard to help.

My definition of combo would be: a sequence of moves causes more damage/different effect than the moves would individually. Bulletstorm may count, although I didn't play it enough to tell if the creative kills were more effective or simply more fun. I did enjoy the whip. I don't quite count kill-streaks as in some games, I think that it's both on too large a timescale, and the effects are unrelated to the individual moves used.

I like jefferytitans' definition, I mean something you need to do either by skill or luck to perform more damage on enemies. I've not played Bulletstorm but it seems to have a different kind of combos, more like in Quake where you get rewarded after you perform a skillful frag and an announcer gets played, I am thinking more of fighting game combos where you have to be skilled or experienced to do something that both looks cool and is more effective than usual means of combat.

No ref games pop into mind, but a few concept do.

Could you have the combos applied to the region of the body you are hitting?

I think the best way to make good combos is to not specify combos per se, but making sure there's a lot of room for player creativity.

For example:

- Hitting an opponent's leg will slow them down because of the injury

- Hitting an opponent's primary hand will reduce their accuracy

- Anything close to the head causes a sense of disorientation

- Hitting the heart causes a critical.

etc.

So, while enemies may be hard to take down, you can mix and match these weaknesses as a player to make them easy targets. I can see skilled players coming in, mafia-style, taking a shot to the hand, then the leg, then the neck, and then hammering the heart until death insues.

Add that to a system where secondary weapons (grenades, etc.) have different effect and you have a form of emergent combo game.

While most shooters have something similar, they generally do a bad job at communicating it to the player, thus fail to integrate it to the player's strategy. (GoldenEye 64 did particularly well though, by letting you shoot soldier's hands to delay their ability to fire)

I like those, would be quite cool to have that in a FPS game. Especially the one hitting the head, in most game the head is a critical but in fact most soldiers wear helmets (I would presume this it would be an instant gib in real life, but for the sake of fun gameplay having some kind of effect similar to flashbangs would be pretty cool).

Some ideas that popped up in my head, more applicable to top-down shooters:

• Electricity weapon chaining through enemies (donno how to make this a skillful move though, but I imagine the animation would pretty nice)
• Sticky grenade making the foe run away, in a direction where more enemies are so you get more than one kill (this could be made skillful by making the grenade a slow moving projectile that needs to be a direct hit to stick)
• Sniper shooting through enemies, so you can take down several if you manage to hit them in while they are lined up

Could explore bullet deflections off surfaces as well (a la Metal Gear Solid Ocelot battle).

I always thought it would be fun to have a weapon reload animation that seconds as a melee combat, a timing skilled melee. For example shoving the clip in an enemies mouth and pistol wiping him in the face to load the clip.

Getting a multiplier for piling enemies in the same spot would be kind of fun. Maybe against a robot enemy, piling them on a conveyor belt that dumps all the busted junk into a garbage trash compactor. The Sarah Connor multiplier.

Could use a multiplier for knocking back an enemy with a weapon, switching to another weapon while the enemy is stunned and knocking them back again and again with new weapons. The more weapons the player uses on the same enemy the higher the multiplier. The Whole Arsenal multiplier.

Rhythm based combat could be fun, killing to the beat, not only skill shots but landing the shots to the rhythm of bad-ass tunes.

The all too common remote controlled projectile, the batman games have this as do many shooters. The electricity weapon you spoke of could be a timed event requiring the player to pick enemies to chain the electricity to which an ever diminishing amount of time as it hits each individual or group of enemies.

Plenty of TPS action games give combos for air juggling. Bayonnetta comes to mind, again I haven't played it. Apparently this is a part of Bulletstorm as well.

Arena Commander the first module released for Star Citizen scores players for making skilled shots. Its a space sim but its first person as well and since each ship is comprised of litterally dozens of individual system and multiple sections of the ship that can be disabled and destroyed the player is awarded for "taking their enemy apart" or hitting key systems.

Kill streak combos and perks like Call of Duty

Environment kill combos, where the player is awarded for using destructible or triggered event involving the environment to make kills.

Slow down time, each kill slows down time, but each kill needs to be a bigger chain or a higher scored skill kill which could include anything above.

As others have said, a variety of weapon types that would cause certain effects on enemies would help generate a "combo" feel, as long as players can switch between weapons/playstyles quickly. Additionally, environmental elements that can be triggered by weapons would also make that feeling, i.e. , shoot machines that go haywire and attract metal objects. Suddenly, you whip out a nailgun and you can start shooting around corners at any enemies in an arc towards the machine, etc.

Just experiment with different types of weapons and think of how you can mix them together to create a sense of connection or flow from one weapon to the next. What would be really interesting is if you could have a relatively small handful of weapons, but make each of them combo with the others in different ways (shooting enemies with the SMG enhances the power of your next shotgun blast / increases the blast radius of the next grenade, etc. Then the player would have to strategically think about which weapon they wanna switch to next for the situation they are in. You could even develop it so that there skill trees of this kind, and the players would have to make decisions about what kinds of benefits they want in their weapon swaps on the current playthrough.

If going top-down, enemy placement is one way to make it skill-based.

To go further with your chaining idea, you could have a grenade that has the inverted effect of AoE repulsion. It would, instead, draw all enemies closer (whether this is because they are curious, or just because this is a portable-black-hole), then, a chain-lightning reaction with limited range would become particularly potent as all enemies are there.

So yeah, use enemies movement and positions (and ways to alter them) as much as possible.