Another Top 10 Brutal Video Game Deaths

It can’t be easy being Leon S. Kennedy, what with having to constantly face off against hordes of zombies or in this case just plain crazy people. While on a mission to rescue the President’s daughter, he comes across a remote village filled with folks who revere the cult responsible for the kidnapping. Unfortunately they don’t take kindly to outsiders, and turns out one of them has a chainsaw. Should Leon allow him to get too close, he ends up getting an instant game over via the grizzly loss of his head.

Turns out there’s trouble in paradise in the floating city of Columbia. Bound together by zealotry, violence and racism, Booker Dewitt doesn’t exactly get a warm welcome. When given the option to toss a baseball at an interracial couple for entertainments’ sake, Booker can outright refuse and turn on the announcer, only to find himself grabbed by the authorities, where he’s recognised as the False Shepherd. Booker’s way out of this jam is a rather…messy one. After distracting one of the guards, he gets his hands on a Sky-Hook…after slamming the officer’s face into it.

The Carmine Family probably has some of the worst luck in the entire franchise. In the first instalment, Anthony Carmine was sniped down by a Locust, while his younger brother Benjamin suffers what can be considered a far worse fate when he’s swallowed by a Riftworm. Despite Marcus Fenix and company’s efforts to save him, they find his body half devoured by the acidic and creepy as hell Nemacyst. Of course he doesn’t die immediately, with just enough breath in him to give Marcus a letter to hand to his last surviving brother Clayton. R.I.P Ben, you didn’t deserve to go out like that.

Nothing like a zombie apocalypse to bring out the worst in humanity. As Frank West cuts his way through a mall filled to the brim with the undead, he also finds himself encountering a whole plethora of psychopaths who have used the apocalypse to let loose their inner sadist. One such man is Adam; taking your childhood fear of clowns and making it a million times worse by adding two chainsaws to the mix. After defeating him, Adam decides to end his own life…by falling on his own weapons which start to cut him to pieces, all the while laughing like a maniac.

In this reimagining of Lara Croft’s origins, her exploits take on a much grittier turn as she has to survive the elements, push past a whole heap of pain and fight against an endless swarm of psychotic nomads armed to the teeth. If players aren’t quick enough on the draw they’ll soon find themselves watching Lara suffer some very unpleasant deaths. Out of all of them, the one that gets our skin crawling the most is when she’s sent tumbling down a river, and should she not swerve out of the way, ends up getting a spike through throat where’s she left dangling and gasping. That looked like it hurt…

In all honesty any one of Until Dawn’s death sequences could make this list, as their homage to camp, classic horror has provided some real winners that range from hilarious to excessively gory (xref). In the end we had to go with one of Emily’s more vicious ends during her escape attempt from the Wendigo. The bitch of the group gets put through the ringer as she tries to flee from the monster on a conveyer belt, which turns out to hold a rock crusher at the end of it. Should players fail the following quick-time event she ends up falling in and turned into bitchy mincemeat.

Now here’s a death we can get behind, well to be specific a whole bunch of deaths through the medium of a much-beloved weapon. In this latest reboot of the classic FPS, players not only get to pummel in the heads of demons with their badass new suit as well shoot them into bloody chunks, but also get to rip them apart with a chainsaw. After being recovered from inside a corpse, the Doom Guy has the option to let er’ rip and carve up any enemy he comes across with this magnificently barbaric tool of death.

Kratos is an artist when it comes to killing off gods, and just about anything else in-between him and his goal, though he saves the best deaths for those that lie at the peak of Mount Olympus. One such death is that of Hermes, the God of Messengers. After taunting Kratos endlessly about his quest for vengeance, the Ghost of Sparta gets his own back by cutting Hermes’ legs off in order to take his winged boots for himself. It’s not quick either, since Kratos makes him crawl away before slicing off the other, leading his body to disintegrate into a swarm of flies. Should have kept your mouth shut there Hermes.

Oh Mileena, so beautiful on the outside…until you look behind the veil. While her fatalities across the series have often involved her using those obscenely large and powerful teeth to devour her foes, her most vicious one came during the franchise’ latest outing. Out of her two newest fatalities, the most brutal comes from when she literally tears her opponents apart with her bare hands until they are practically split in two, leaving them to try and crawl away as they watch Mileena take bites out of their rendered guts. Nice.

Before we reveal our number one pick, here are a few honourable mentions.

Not a Fan of Death Metal
“No More Heroes” (2008)

Sweet, Sweet Revenge
“Outlast” (2013)

Isaac Clarke has seen some horrific sights during his time as an engineer, and experienced some of the goriest deaths in all of video games, but the blood-soaked crown belongs to this infamous moment from the series’ second instalment. In a bid to remove the Marker’s presence from his mind, Isaac has to crawl into claustrophobic machine where a needle slowly descends towards his eyeball. Should the player make one wrong move, the needle as well as the rest of the automaton comes crashing down through his skull, where we get to watch Isaac’s agony unfold. Gruesome yet unforgettable.

Do you agree with our list? What do you think is the most brutal death in video games? If you didn’t see a death you thought should be on here, be sure to check out our first list on the Top 10 Brutal Video Game Deaths and for more top tens published every day, be sure to subscribe to WatchMojo.com.