Kill Streak

Let's be honest, anyone can get a couple kills by just mashing random buttons and hoping for the best. It takes an entirely different class of player to continue getting kills without dying or even taking damage. Because of this, many Video Games appropriately reward players who can perform these feats with special bonuses, exclusive titles, or even hidden content.

May overlap with Awesomeness Meter, Idiosyncratic Combo Levels, or Score Multiplier if an unbroken kill streak contributes to filling it.

Examples of Kill Streak include:

• Battlefield Bad Company 2: Rewards players with medals for Kill Streaks 6 or 8 kills long.
• Bug!! has hit streaks, every time Bug successfully jumps on an enemy without landing on the ground, he gains more points (1 hit- 50, 2 hits- 100, 3 hits- 200, 4- 500, 5 or more- 1000)
• Recent games in the Call of Duty / Modern Warfare series have deployable Kill Streak rewards for reaching certain streak counts in multiplayer:
  • Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare has three: a UAV (3), an Air Strike (5) and an Attack Helicopter (7)
  • Call Of Duty: World at War also has three: a Recon Plane (3), an Air Strike (5) and Attack Dogs (7)
  • Modern Warfare 2 introduces Death Streaks as well, giving a player who is suffering a string of losses a helping hand to turn the tide. While the player can only equip three Kill Streak rewards at a time, they have an expanded list to choose from, all the way from UAV's (3) and sentry guns (5) up to EMP's (15) and Tactical Nukes (25) (AKA, 'The "I Win" button')
    • This game's utilization and prevalence of streaks in particular broke the base.
  • And there's even a reward for players who kill others who are just a kill short of a Kill Streak reward (Buzzkill).
  • Call of Duty Black Ops also has an expansive list of Kill Streaks, such as a deployable SAM launcher that can destroy opposing killstreak rewards, and an SR-71 Blackbird, which is basically a better version of the Spy Plane which cannot be shot down.
  • Modern Warfare 3 expands on this with "Strike Packages", basically killstreak rewards tied to your custom classes - you can choose an Assault package to get the usual directly-offensive killstreak rewards, a Support package to get pointstreaks instead that don't reset upon your death and allow you to both help your team survive longer and see the enemy better, or a Specialist package to acquire additional perks as you make kills.
• The Club: Designed around this.
• Devil May Cry: Awards you for killing multiple enemies without taking any damage at all. Moreover, if you use the same moves too often, the counter stops rising until you shake it up.
• In Final Fantasy XII, you can chain enemies of the same type. Killing a certain amount will raise your chain level, and each level will increase the chances of getting a rare drop.
• Halo: the Announcer Chatter uses fictional adjectives involving the word "kill".
• House of the Dead: In Overkill, you can climb up the violence ladder the more kills you get without missing or being hurt. Extreme Violence, Hardcore Violence, Ultra Violence, Psychotic, and finally Goregasm (which is accompanied by a waving American flag) - each condition increases the amount of points a kill will net you, and as such a long Goregasm is a definite requirement for a high score.
• League of Legends: Racking up a killstreak without dying will cause the announcer to declare after 3, 4, 5, 6, 7 and 8+ kills respectively: killing spree, rampage, unstoppable, dominating, godlike and legendary. Getting a bunch of kills quickly after one another has her announce double kill, triple kill, quadra kill and penta kill. This provides no actual benefit to the player, though, and it instead raises the amount of gold their enemies will get from killing them as their streak rises. Likewise, dying over and over reduces gold gained from you by 70% each time.
• Pokémon: the ability Moxie increases the Pokemon's Attack by 1 stage for every opponent it defeats.
• In Purple, stomping enemies continuously without landing will yield bigger amounts of points and eventually 1-ups.
• Ratchet and Clank games since the second one feature a bolt multiplier (which multiplies the amount of bolts, the in-game currency, enemies drop) on a New Game+. It increases by one for every time you kill an enemy up to a maximum of x20, and resets to x1 if you get hit.
• In the arcade game Razing Storm, landing hits increased your combo meter, but it would get reset if you got damaged. You could get it ludicrously high if you manage to avoid all damage.
• Red Faction: Guerrilla awards an achievement for achieving 25 kill streaks throughout the game.
• Soul Calibur 2: Features a "Survivor" mode based on killing multiple opponents without dying.
• As seen in the pic, the Super Mario Bros. series, whether it be multiple Goomba Stomps or using a shell and can be used to create Infinite 1-Ups.
• Team Fortress 2: Some achievements involve this (often with extra conditions, such as using a particular weapon).
• Transformers: War for Cybertron
• Unreal Tournament: Features special names for the various numbers of kills, which the announcer calls out: M-M-M-M-MONSTER KILL!! and in later games, "HOLY SHIT!" It also reserves "MONSTER KILL!!" for sufficiently large combos. Huge runs without death end up with "GODLIKE!!" and in later games "WICKED SICK!".
  • Specifically:
    • Announcements for rapid kills: Double Kill, Multi Kill, Mega Kill, Ultra Kill, Monster Kill. Later games add Ludicrous Kill and Holy Shit.
    • Announcements for killstreaks without dying: Killing Spree, Rampage, Dominating, Godlike. Later games add Wicked Sick.
    • Unreal Tournament 2004 adds 5-kill-streaks with specific weapons: Bio Hazard for Bio Rifle, Flak Monkey for Flak Cannon and Head Hunter for five headshot kills with the Sniper Rifle.
  • The Warcraft 3 map/mod DOTA uses these sounds as well.
  • Ditto for some server-side Counter-Strike mods.
  • Ditto again for Team Fortress 2 server-side mods.
• While Assassin's Creed Brotherhood doesn't feature any extra bonus for its Kill Streaks (actually named that, it's a feature where you can one-hit-kill an enemy who is in range of you when you kill another), it's VR training does have a survival mode, that counts how many enemies you can kill before taking damage.
• Donkey Kong Country Returns: defeating 3 enemies in a row will reward 1 banana coin and more for every defeat after that.
• Getting a kill streak actually figures into Sewer Shark's plot. You need to pull in higher and higher numbers of "pounds of tubesteak" to maintain your job as a sewer jockey and, thereby, earn a ticket to Solar City as a reward. Later on, critters attack you to drain your energy reserves, meaning you're just shooting them to live longer... and even later on, they start One Hit Killing you, further boosting that second incentive.