Reactor Boss

It seems that the final battle in many First Person Shooters these days consists of you trying to blow up the enemy base's main reactor. This is usually done as an attempt to have a climactic action sequence while avoiding having an obvious Final Boss battle, either because it wouldn't fit with the tone of the game, or because the design team's philosophy is that "boss battles are stupid".

When done well, it can give an action game a satisfactory final confrontation without having to rely on dropping in a 50-foot tall Giant Space Flea From Nowhere, or having the enemy General inexplicably turn out to be Made of Iron and capable of surviving a few dozen rocket launcher shots to the face.

When done badly, it can be an extremely unsatisfying and anticlimactic conclusion to an otherwise exciting and action-packed game of blowing crap up. Can often be considered an Anticlimax Boss.

See also Cores and Turrets Boss. Very common in a Shoot'Em Up. This is a common justification for a Load-Bearing Boss.

Examples of Reactor Boss include:

• Gang Garrison 2 has an original gamemode not in Team Fortress 2, where the goal is to destroy the enemy team's generator while defending your own.
• Halo: Combat Evolved's final battle consists of you trying to destroy the 4 cooling vents in your starship's engine room, in order to make the ship's reactor melt down and obliterate Halo. Meanwhile, Flood and Sentinels are attacking you the entire time you're running around the engine room trying to do this. In an oblique way, the final battle is against Guilty Spark, since he and his Sentinels are in the engine room trying to stop you, and defeating him is the reason you're trying to nuke Halo in the first place.
  • Similarly in the penultimate level of Halo 3, you have to destroy the reactor of the Flood-infested High Charity, setting off a chain reaction to destroy the massive ship. Could be considered as a fight against the Gravemind itself, as the ship is literally covered wall-to-wall in Flood biomass.
• Half-Life 2 ends with you blowing up the Citadel's main Teleporters and Transporters. It's a Timed Mission because you're trying to prevent Breen from teleporting away, and two gunships come in to shoot at you, but the teleporter itself does not move or defend itself.
• The objective of Guild-VS-Guild gameplay in Ragnarok Online is to destroy the enemy guild's Empirium Crystal, which is the core of the castle.
• Your final mission objective in F.E.A.R. is to destroy the Origin Facility's main reactor. However, there's a final "confrontation" with Alma shortly after this.
• The final "boss" of the First-Person Shooter Area 51 is the alien spaceship's main reactor. It puts up slightly more of a fight than the Half Life 2 reactor, but not by much.
• Resistance: Fall of Man ends with you and a squad of British commandoes attempting to destroy the Chimera Master Tower's main reactor. This is actually one of the better Reactor Boss fights out there, as it involves a small war between the British commandoes and a small army of Chimera Advanced Hybrids, a couple Titans, and even an Angel or two.
• The final battle against Nexus in Breakdown is in many ways a Reactor Boss fight, since he's essentially a giant red ball in the center of the room (which you punch to death after breaking out of a hallucinary LSD sequence it tries to send you into).
• Instead of a straight-out duel against the Big Bad, like in Legend and Aniversary, in Tomb Raider: Underworld, the "final battle" is basically Lara running around the building-sized Forgotten Superweapon dismantling it keystone by keystone, while the invincible Big Bad Natla flies around tossing fireballs at her.
• Star Fox 64 had a Reactor Boss late in the game, with the Bolse satellite. (Any remaining members of the Star Wolf team—all of them, if you didn't take a route through Fortuna—would also appear). This reactor would eventually start fighting back, as any panels on the core that were blown up would start firing lasers. Arguably, the mothership from Katina also might count, since it doesn't directly attack, instead just releasing Mooks and then revealing its core after you destroyed the four hatches or took too long, at which point you had all of one minute to destroy said core. (Yes, it would eventually reveal the core even if you didn't shoot the hatches, presumably to keep you from running up the score. Which was annoying, since it was tough to hit the medal total before this happened.)
  • Its predecessor, Starfox had two reactor bosses. One in the Space Armada and one in Sector Z, which was twice as hard. Macbeth's boss could also be seen as a reactor boss.
• The arcade rail shooter Starblade has two of these. Galaxian ³, which is basically a six-player Starblade, has one as a Timed Final Boss.
• Kirby Super Star and its remake have the Halberd's Reactor as a boss. Defeating it requires getting it to shoot lasers at itself.
  • And in Milky Way Wishes, you have an Unexpected Shmup Level inside NOVA ending with you destroying his heart.
  • Revisited in Kirbys Epic Yarn with the Halberd reactor and the Shmup level at the same time.
• The first three levels of each planet in Descent II, and all but two of the levels in Descent featured reactor "bosses"; after destroying them you had a limited time to find the exit and escape. However, these battles were hardly anticlimactic: as there was generally a huge number of guard robots in the same room as the reactor, and the reactor itself wasn't defenseless, as it fired slow-moving but very powerful energy blasts of its own.
• The Final Boss of Thundercade is a literal nuclear reactor.
• The boss of Sonic Adventure 2 level "Eternal Engine" is the power generator of the space colony ARK, which you fight as Tails riding his missile-equipped mecha.
• The Final Boss of Xenosaga Episode I is a giant reactor fused with a giant gnosis. Defeating it is necessary to shut down the Proto Merkahba and save the planet of Second Miltia from it.
• The first two Xargon games literally had a reactor guarded by swarms of Mooks as the "final boss." The third & final game looked like the reactor was the final boss, but then you got to keep walking and face Xargon himself.
• Inverted in City of Heroes where the final mission of one trial requires you to defend the reactor for 30 minutes. Generally considered one of the most boring missions in the game.
• In Gunstar Heroes, you destroy one after docking with the spaceship.
• Super Star Wars, Super Empire Strikes Back and Super Return of the Jedi had the Tractor Beam Generator, Carbonite Freezing Chamber and Endor Shield Generator as bosses.
• Most levels of P.N.03 (other than the true boss battles) have these at the end.
• Bionic Commando. "So you think you can destroy the main system? You have no chance!"
• The derelict Reaper mission in Mass Effect 2 ends this way.
  • The final mission is initially presented this way, before the human-Reaper turns out to be able to move around and hit things.
• The final Gummi Ship mission in Kingdom Hearts II, "Assault of the Dreadnought", has you flying inside a huge battleship and destroying the core. You don't actually need to destroy the core to finish the stage, but it does gets you bonuses.
• The Raiden series has the crystal-powered Cranassian Fortress as the Final Boss of most of the games.
• The final boss of Fester's Quest is the spaceships's core, which is defended by several turrets, as well as the core itself firing homing bullets.
• One possible path in R-Type Final has you facing off with the source of all the enemies in the game: a stationary generator which can spontaneously create every single type of enemy and object in-game.
• The final boss of Chapter 5 of Mother 3 is Mr. Genetor, which is Thunder Tower's generator.
• The second half of the final boss battle in Ys: The Ark of Napishtim.
• Chapters 15 and 16 of Kid Icarus: Uprising (i.e. the Aurum chapters) feature these. Pit even lampshades the lack of a traditional boss. Chapter 17's counts too, but with a twist: you're technically fighting the Aurum Brain, but Pyrrhon is controling it. Or is it controling him...
• Might and Magic VI plays with this trope. The final quest is to enter the main Kreegan hive, destroy the reactor, and (preferably, though you can skip this step and get an alternate game-over video for the trouble) perform a ritual that'll keep the resulting explosion from destroying the world rather than merely the hive. You fight through hordes of Kreegan and their confusing architecture, destroy the Kreegan reactor in a suspiciously easy battle... and are promptly teleported to right in front of the Kreegan Hive Queen, the actual final boss of the game, backed up by a horde of lesser Kreegan.
• The sixth boss of Chimera Beast has your eater character attacking humanity, culminating in a fight against a nuclear reactor. From the outside.
  • And using your "eat" move on it will give you the Cancer ability.