The Ten Best Gaming Moves... Ever!

Four: Kratos’ Grab Attack

As featured in the God of War series

The concept behind the God of War games is simple: you play the Spartan warrior Kratos, who has to fight through a brutal version of ancient Greek mythology to take care of business for the gods. Kratos is, putting it simply, the hardest man in gaming. He makes Master Chief look like a lollipop man, and he could make Nico Bellic fix his sink. He is Zeus’ hitman, and his targets are the gods, titans and monsters of mythology. He makes it look easy. He makes it fun.

There are no heroics and no punches pulled – Kratos just takes out the trash. This could nurture feelings of guilt or remorse if you were disposing of human prey, but the enemy are such a grim bunch that you feel nothing towards them. In fact, thanks to the narrative of the games, you learn to hate your enemies and love the way that Kratos destroys them. For this reason, the mere act of playing Kratos could be listed as a great move in its own right. Playing God of War provides the same type of simple, harmless and destructive joy that a dog gets from shredding a newspaper.


Of course, the default attack of waving two blades welded to your arms is fun, and there are also good times to be had when you’re charging at the enemy like a whirling dervish, chopping them up, flinging them around and generally ruining their day. However, that’s not what makes Kratos such a memorable character, or what makes him so fearsome. The best moves in God of War can be made when Kratos isn’t flailing his blades, but when he gets to go hand-to-hand and grab his biggest and boldest foes.

In most games such as this, you might want to keep your distance from the monsters, but not in God of War. When a Minotaur gets up close, Kratos jumps on it and rams a blade through its face. When he catches up with a harpy, he puts a boot on its chest and rips the wings off. When a siren’s song lures him towards her, he grabs that witch and snaps her spine like it’s as natural as asking the time. The guy faces some of the deadliest creatures of world mythology, and he takes them apart like a force of nature.

Some of the grab attacks in God of War are also quick-time events, which adds to the challenge of the combat, while also giving you the satisfaction of a job well done when you dispatch them. Kratos’ grab attacks easily earn their place among the greatest gaming moves, simply by showing that style is important, that pathos is more than just feeling bad when Bambi’s Mother dies, and that unspeakable acts of violence towards unspeakable enemies can be spiritually rewarding.

Three: The Face Hug

As featured in Alien vs Predator 2

The face hugger attack from the Alien Lifecycle mode in Alien versus Predator 2 is a truly classic move when it comes to deathmatch demolition. You can kill people in plenty of games, you can kill people in some truly horrible ways in some of them too, but nothing compares to this.

The Lifecycle mode enables you to control your face hugger until you find an enemy player, and you can then spring onto the victim like a rocket-powered tarantula, attach yourself to their face, ram an egg down their throat and later spawn in their guts as a larva and chew your way out. After that, you need to hide, in your wiggly form, until you grow into a big, ugly alien, with your form depending on the species of victim you decided to munch.


The face hugger is small and fast, and it’s also able to crawl on ceilings and walls. It’s hard to see, harder to hit and it’s basically your opponent’s worst nightmare. However, this is balanced out by the delay between laying the egg and bursting out of your victim, which gives your unfortunate foe plenty of time to spam his team’s chat to alert them to the news, or run around like a headless chicken waiting for unavoidable death. If you’re unlucky, a bunch of his friends will group up around him, take careful aim and shoot you to bits the second you pop out. However, even this fate is a small price to pay for executing such a great move. There’s killing people, and then there’s breeding with their face before killing them

Alien vs Predator 2 is among the tiny number of multiplayer games in which fear plays a role, particularly in the Lifecycle mode. Many multiplayer games are tense, and sometimes they can make you jump, but few turn the players into a monster and victim in this way. Even the fully grown Aliens and Predators aren’t scary in the same way as the face huggers, despite being every bit as lethal and often even uglier.

The face hugger makes every nook, every patch of darkness and every corner a potential ambush point. Few attacks in a multiplayer game have the power to make your opponent shriek in terror while sat at their computer, but this attack manages it. Never in the field of online combat has something so imaginably unpleasant been inflicted on one player by another.