10 Most Unique Upgrade Systems In Games

Player upgrades are what make video games so engaging and worthwhile, allowing you to unlock new sets of abilities to test out on enemies in thrilling ways during objectives. But these systems don't have to be just boring skill trees you can access from a game menu or through interacting with uninspired upgrade benches.

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Not all games use the tropes of potions or food items to heal you. Sometimes solutions are a little more creative.

They can get really creative and surprise you with their designs, leaving you in complete awe of how someone could've thought of having things that way. Whether it's horror games, fantasy, FPS, or third-person action-adventure, here are some upgrade systems guaranteed to wow you.

10 Getting Absorbed And Growing A Vessel

Grime

If you thought Blasphemous or Hollow Knight presented strange and intriguing indie Soulslike Metroidvania worlds, Grime has another thing coming. It offers a cosmic horror atmosphere and has you play an unusual protagonist with a black hole for a head that can absorb enemies while they themselves are able to be absorbed.

That's what will need to happen if you wish to upgrade your character's stats and traits. There are these giant amethyst quartz-like pillars called Surrogates where crowds of worshippers are gathered, serving as both checkpoints and upgrade stations. Upon interacting with one, you'll fuse into it and fuse back out of it when you're finished with upgrades for your vessel.

9 Tarsyu Plant Neural Connection

Avatar: Frontiers Of Pandora

Massive Entertainment found yet another ingenious way to incorporate the neural connection Na'vi have from the queue neural spindles of their ponytails, a vital aspect of the lore and their means of connecting to Pandora's Great Mother, Eywa. To access 'Ancestor Skill' upgrades, your Na'vi character must make this 'tsaheylu' connection with Tarsyu flowers scattered all over the map.

Avatar: Frontiers Of Pandora - All Tarsyu Flower Locations

Embrace your Na'vi heritage with Ancestor Skills!

Tarsyu plants have giant bulbous pods whose leaves come apart as you approach them to reveal a network of pink petals and plant fibers that your Navi's queue will attach itself to, taking you to a lotus flower-style UI menu of skills and upgrades. With keeping Frontiers of Pandora canon to the movies, this is only available for the video game's Sarentu Clan.

8 Recipe Crafting Resident Evil Merchant Style

Resident Evil Village

Resident Evil turned into a bit of Cooking Mama with its eighth mainline installment, Village, where you can now actually upgrade Ethan and give him abilities like increased health and speed or decreased damage on top of health aides. Putting the word 'survival' in survival horror, this is achieved through recipe crafting with the meat you get from hunting animals.

Unlike the shady merchant in Resident Evil 4, The Duke is a foodie and a culinary expert who can cook you up dishes such as 'herbed fish,' 'bird and breast pilaf,' or something more fancy like 'Sarmale de Peste,' with mouth-watering descriptions to follow them. The game treats you to some splendid meals and abilities courtesy of The Duke's Kitchen.

7 NORA The Upgrade Fridge

Atomic Heart

Atomic Heart aimed to be the successor of the original BioShock trilogy, and it certainly accomplished that with its premise, FPS gameplay, and the way it incorporates powers like shock and lifting enemies off the ground, here called Polymer abilities. What's different is the more blatantly explicit way of getting to them.

The machine responsible for your weapon upgrades and polymeric powers is an extremely inappropriate Soviet AI-powered fridge called NORA, which attempts to be as seductive as possible when accessing her menus and interface. Developer Mundfish even doubled down on this raunchy side character of a fridge and launched the Annihilation Instinct DLC dedicated to NORA.

6 Eliminating Visionaries Over And Over

Deathloop

Whenever there's a time loop mechanic in a game that features some form of combat, it means it's usually bordering on roguelike genre territory. You can certainly think that of Deathloop, based on how the upgrades work for Cole Vahn, but the game still puts its own unique spin on things.

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You have what are called slabs, which give different types of powers like teleportation, invisibility, and karnesis to lift enemies, but to advance the tiers for these and gain new abilities with them, you have to target specific Visionaries and keep killing them every loop to get the next slab upgrade. It's an unconventional FPS way of upgrading that works well with the story.

Defeating Julianna will also drop a random slab upgrade as an alternative to killing Visionaries.

5 DMV Slot Machine Jackpot Mechanic

Crisis Core: Final Fantasy 7 And Reunion

The prequel to the original Final Fantasy 7, Crisis Core and its 2022 remaster game adapt a casino-style slot machine system when it comes to unlocking new levels of abilities or using special moves.

Your party members' faces appear in the top corner of the screen, and whenever the jackpot of a 777 sequence comes, your protagonist gets a chance at an upgrade. This is almost the same in the remaster, though Crisis Core: FF7 Reunion decided to expand it to any sequence of three numbers and also connected it to the lore by labeling it a DMV (Digital Mind Wave).

Spinning a '777' automatically levels up the character in both Crisis Core versions.

4 Tatau

Far Cry 3

Tattoos are fairly common in games for cosmetic reasons. There are probably even plenty of video game protagonists you can think of that have iconic tattoos. Well, Jason Brody from Far Cry 3 might be one of them, but not for the reasons you might think. His tattoos signal skill upgrades.

You have three distinct upgrade tiers based on the Heron, Shark, and Spider skill trees, which count as tattoo designs (referred to as "Tatau" in the Rakyat culture of the Rook Islands) that fill out on Jason's arm with each acquired skill. Tatau aren't inked on by an NPC, but instead magically burned into the flesh, and you can also see the pattern from the menu.

3 The Upgrade Chair And Jars Of Green Gel

The Evil Within Series

While The Evil Within is already a disturbing survival horror game that learns from the genre's greats like Resident Evil and Silent Hill, it definitely did not need to have its skill tree and weapon upgrades be quite as disturbing. But alas, it was, and it's now one of the most memorable parts of the game.

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Basically, you collect mysterious green ooze dropped by enemies throughout the game, which already comes magically packaged in a jar for you. And you'll deposit the green gel when you take your seat in the creepy 'Old Sparky' electric chair, which offers the menu and straps Sebastian in with restraints and a helmet to administer a shock whenever a skill purchase transpires.

2 Lunchboxes, Words Of Power Graffiti, Flashlight, And Mindscapes

Alan Wake 2

Alan Wake 2 is an excellent achievement in survival horror, but it's also one of the weirdest games you can play because of its wildly out-there mechanics and upgrade systems from the Lynchian-inspired design by Sam Lake and Remedy. There's a live-action musical, a coffee-themed amusement park, and character-switching utilizing a janitor's bucket to portal between dimensions.

Since you play as two different protagonists, FBI agent Saga Anderson and titular troubled author Alan Wake, there are two different ways to upgrade, both incredibly unlike anything. Saga must collect manuscript pieces from fictional character Alex Casey-licensed lunchboxes (who's also her partner), and Alan has to shine a light on a graffiti spiral pattern of words like 'Words of War' or 'Words of Fix' hidden in areas around the Dark Place.

To get the upgrades, Saga has to enter the Mind Place in her head and interact with a counter where there are weapons and ammo magazines.

Alan, on the other hand, must enter his Writer's Room and access Words of Power note cards from a desk drawer to select upgrades.

The lunchboxes also hold a story connection.

1 Majima Everywhere

Yakuza Kiwami

The Yakuza games never shy away from delivering some very over-the-top skills and heavily unique ways of earning them. Just look at how Infinite Wealth's job system works. But the most hilariously outrageous and iconic of them all will always be the Majima Everywhere system in 2016's Yakuza Kiwami.

Goro Majima and Kazuma Kiryu are one of gaming's best duos and this is the fun game mechanic that proves it. Kiryu has to unlock his forgotten Dragon Style abilities only by engaging in a series of fights with Majima, who keeps showing up literally everywhere on the map, a mix of hiding in trashcans and putting on disguises.

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