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"Naturally, you're not armed in church. The nearest blunt instrument is the processional cross - a good ten pounds of silver and mahogany. God will understand."

Improvised Weapons in Video Games.


  • Action Doom 2: Urban Brawl is all about these - you have fists and a gun, but most of the time you'll be using various weapons, though they break quickly. These include chains, pipes, knives, bottles, broken bottles, pool cues, sledgehammers, baseball bats, two-by-fours, bronze statues, and fire extinguishers that freeze enemies.
  • Akiba's Trip runs off of this, as your weapons are all improvised items you can find being carried by people in Akiba, like laptop computers, umbrellas, rolled-up posters, dolls, and other random items. Even the few actual weapons you can get in the game, like the anti-material rifle, are just used to hit people rather than for their intended combat function.
  • Alan Wake: Because your enemies are darkness, anything that creates light can be used as a weapon, usually your flashlight. At one point, the Plucky Comic Relief defends himself by wearing a headlamp ("It's my flaming eye of Mordor!") and wrapping himself in Christmas lights ("For protection. Like garlic against vampires."). The pyrotechnics of a rock stage help blast away the enemies' protective darkness.
  • In Alone in the Dark (2008), most enemies can only be killed by fire. If no fire is around, the player must use inventory items to improvise. Alcohol can be poured on bullets to make fire bullets, or the bottle can be thrown and shot midair for an explosive weapon. There are also classic examples, such as the flamethrower from an aerosol can and lighter, or using cloth and a bottle for a molotov cocktail.
  • Assassin's Creed II: Ezio can liberate people of items like brooms and farming implements and use them perfectly well as weapons. In Brotherhood you get an achievement/trophy ("Spring Cleaning") for killing a guard with a broom.
  • Your enemies in Batman: Arkham Series games will cheerfully pick up propane tanks and fire extinguishers to throw at you, and have no qualms about using car doors as defensive shields or wielding metal pipes as clubs. With takedowns, Batman then gets to improvise right back at them by throwing the propane tanks at the guy who just threw it or setting it off prematurely with a batarang, breaking someone's leg by wrapping it around the pipe, or even tonking them in the throat with the car door.
    • In Batman: Arkham Knight Batman himself can employ many of the improvised weaponry his enemies have used against him over the past 3 game. He can also utilize things such as overhead lamps or air conditioning units as weapons in environmental takedowns.
  • Battlefield:
    • Some of the seemingly benign assets offered to commanders in Battlefield 2 and Battlefield 2142 are supply drops, UAV scans, and vehicle drops. BF2 commanders learned early on that stray vehicles can ruin an enemy runway, preventing jets from taking off. Many a sniper or flag capper found themselves the victim of a precisely aimed supply crate. And rooftop soldiers in BF2142 fell to the otherwise harmless UAV, which either pushed them off or crushed them against the building. The most damning point is that many of these "attacks" were lethal in a way that artillery strikes weren't.
    • Battlefield: Bad Company and Battlefield 3 allow you to kill enemies with the repair tool.
    • The "XBOW" in BF3's Aftermath DLC is a crossbow made out of a broken HK417, allowing for easy addition of optics due to the full-length top rail.
  • Tundran tanks in Battalion Wars are farm tractors with guns slapped on. They still have their turnip-harvesting ploughs attached so they can go right back to being tractors after the conflict ends, according to flavour-text.
  • Bendy and the Ink Machine: Henry has to fight with whatever he has on hand, due to being trapped in an Eldritch Location. The "weapons" he uses over the course of the game include fire axes, plungers, and a syringe.
  • Pey'j's wrench in Beyond Good & Evil:
    Jade: I didn't know your wrench came equipped with the club option.
    Pey'j: Model D53, my li'l lady. Slices, dices — and pounds.
  • Big Fight: Big Trouble in the Atlantic Ocean has a big arsenal of weapons for an arcade game: in addition to more traditional weapons of the genre, you can use: a bucket, a frying pan, a football, a hammer, and a two-by-four table.
  • Biomutant lets you craft your own weapons using junk you find lying around the world, like attaching the blade of an old bonesaw to a baseball bat handle to make a DIY BFS.
  • BioShock includes a Telekinesis skill, which allows you to kill enemies by smashing a bag of potato chips into their heads at high velocity. Also, your first weapon is a pipe wrench.
    • How about killing someone by hitting them with their own hat?
    • It also features projectile weapons cobbled together from everyday objects, including a crossbow made of (among other things) a labelled cigar box, and security systems made of food crates, office chairs and tennis ball launchers. Most of the weapon modifications themselves are made from salvaged junk.
    • You can also make ammo out of junk like screws, petrol and rubber tubing with the U-Invent machines.
  • Bloodborne: The Amygdalan Arm and the Kos Parasite. The former is an arm ripped from an Eldritch Abomination which can either be used as a giant club or brought back to life and held out in front of you as it lashes out with its scythe-like appendage. The latter is... a bug-sized bug you hold in your hand, and punch people while it's in your fist. Which isn't much at first, but if you equip the Lumenwood Rune, it will mutate your hunter into a half-monstrous tentacle-whipping killing machine.
  • BloodRayne: In Blood Rayne 2, the eponymous character uses mounted animals' antlers/horns, a ventilation fan, and a garbage truck (which explodes after a certain amount of "feeding") to dispose of her enemies. Oh, and you get more powers(via the Carnage/Experience meter) the more enemies in a row you kill(with more unusual deaths providing greater base amounts to be multiplied), within a certain time limit...
  • Bully: since it takes place in a school, the great majority of weapons you use are not really meant to be used as such: stink bombs, itching power, bags of marbles, a rubber band ball and more are the kind of things you carry in your inventory. You can also pick up objects in the area you are to fight, like baseball bats, bricks, cafeteria trays, trash can lids, etc.
  • Command & Conquer: Tiberium Wars gives us the Global Defense Initiative's Sonic Emitter base defense. It was meant to combat the spread of the crystalline Tiberium by targetting its Achilles' Heel - its resonant frequency. This came in real handy when aliens partially made of Tiberium invaded, but it also turns out that Tiberium's resonant frequency at a high amplitude is lethal to humans and absolutely wrecks the structural integrity of vehicles.
  • The bread-and-butter of the combat system in Condemned: Criminal Origins, where the main method of arming yourself is by ripping something off the environment. Considering the game's themes and dark setting, not at all done for comedy (unless it's of the dead baby variety). Some of the more... memorable weapons include the "cutter" part of a paper cutter, the fireaxe, the sledgehammer, and the butcher knife. And also mannequin arms. See that gun, Officer Thomas? You can't reload it.
  • In Crysis, the player can kill people with almost anything, including floorboards and live animals. Building materials are also an easy way to go because an apparent lack of nails in the South Pacific makes the buildings rather flimsy.
  • DanMachi: Battle Chronicle: Ais melees using an innertube as a weapon when dressing in swimwear.
  • Dark Souls:
    • The Dragon Tooth, favored weapon of Havel The Rock. Note that the pointy end of the fang is used as the grip, with the base being used to bludgeon enemies (and players attempting to use the Berg/Basin shortcut) into dust. It's also one of the few unbreakable weapons in the game.
    • Varying examples include the weapons acquired by severing certain boss's tails. Some of them are quite weapon-like in form (such as the rather standard looking Gargoyle Axe) whereas others are barely more than a vaguely weapon shaped mass (ie. the Dragon Greatsword).
  • Dead Rising for the Xbox 360 has this as a main selling point. Any item that Frank can lift can be used to kill zombies, up to and including a deck parasol. An Xbox Achievement is actually called "It's Raining Men" and involves using the deck parasol to push a number of zombies out of the way. It's actually a great item to clear a path. Bowling balls will knock over zombies like bowling pins. In a pinch, park benches will kill a dozen zombies in a single swing - and then break. Now, burning zombie faces with a heated frying pan, throwing soda cans at zombies heads or embedding a ketchup bottle there... that's just silly. To say nothing of the Shower Head, now. Zombies seem to have High-Pressure Blood, so jamming one in their head causes them to give themselves showers. And at later skill levels, the player learns a skill that lets him pick up zombies and throw them.
  • Most of Isaac's weapons in Dead Space are modified mining tools (except for the pulse rifle). You can also use another tool, kinesis, to pick up and throw anything not nailed down. Including dead zombie babies at other zombie babies.
    • Dead Space 2 drives it even more, the plasma cutter, Isaac's main weapon is made from a flashlight and a surgical tissue laser. Isaac's kinesis module has been upgraded to seize anything pointy, aim it straight forward, and fire it like a javelin; you can rip an elongated claw from a necromorph's arm and pin him to the wall with it.
  • Def Jam: Fight For New York lets you use everything in the area as a weapon against the opponent, from beer bottles to sledgehammers. You can even win fights by throwing an opponent in front of a subway train on one level.
  • Devil May Cry 5: Done by Nero in the intro's slow-motion fusillade from him jumping out of the van - in typical Devil May Cry fashion, he does it by shooting the edge of a traffic sign flying upward instead of the Empulsa that's a foot next to it and Nero himself (Nero shoots that one with his next shot) and the scene reveals twenty slow-motion seconds later that his shot on the sign was to cause it to embed into another Empulsa's head.
  • Disgaea has many items classed as "Fun" weapons, such as sunflowers for swords, clothes hangers for bows, and giant paintbrushes for staves. These weapons have as much innate attack power as you'd expect, but they inherently come with powerful Unique Innocents/Specialists that require investing time into leveling up standard weapons to get for them. You can also pick up your allies and throw them at your enemies for damage. Some of your allies even blow up when thrown.
  • Mundane items in Divine Divinity, such as pots, pans, and brooms, are programmed so you can equip them as (not very good) weapons and armor. Ditto in Divinity: Original Sin.
  • Doom:
    • Doom has the trusty chainsaw as an upgrade to your melee attack.
    • Doom³ also has the flashlight. Since the vanilla version of the game makes it unfortunately necessary to tote the light around in place of a normal weapon sometimes, the dev team was at least nice enough to make it a decent bludgeon, usually taking out former humans in one or two smacks.
  • In Dwarf Fortress, if you can hold it, you can kill someone with it. This includes a handful of sand, a handful of vomit, a handful of gravel, and the enemy's own pants.
    • That applies mostly to throwing the improvised weapon (swinging a pair of pants does mostly what it sounds like it would do)note  However, throwing seem to turn even sand into deadly projectiles.
    • Or there's this little gem that was recently posted on the forums:
      My favourite thing in adventure mode is being able to take water out of a waterskin, throw it such that it spins, and then watch it break the arm of my target.
    • Also, miners' picks are not only usable as weapons, but very good when used as weapons, especially in Fortress mode, since it uses the same Mining skill, practiced every time a dorf digs a corridor or something.
    • Whenever a Bar Brawl starts, dwarves tend to use the first thing at hand, which is usually their drinking implements. Not too terrible if they're drinking with wooden cups, but it gets nasty if they've been given stone mugs, and Armok help them if you gave them +iron goblets+. Of course, dwarves are also significantly more aggressive now, so chances are if a sudden threat pops up they'll dogpile it and beat the piss out of it with those same mugs, so it's not always a bad idea to give them heavy ones.
  • EarthBound (1994) practically epitomizes this trope, as the main characters (all of them young children) have to defeat enemies using improvised weapons such as baseball bats, frying pans and bottle rockets, just to name a few. The game even goes one step further, when, during the final boss battle, the character must use the power of prayer to help them get an edge over the last enemy.
  • Elvira 2: Jaws of Cerberus allows you to use a mop as a weapon. It's not a very good one.
  • Fallout:
    • In Fallout 3, you can obtain schematics for various weapons to make out of the junk which litters the game's After the End setting. These weapons themselves qualify to a degree (such as a crossbow made from a paint gun and a toy car and a flaming sword made from a lawnmower blade and a petrol tank) but the straightest example of this trope is the Rock-It-Launcher, which can fire anything you put into it as a projectile.
    • In Fallout: New Vegas, the trend is continued, with machetes that are clearly lawnmower blades electrical-taped onto a wooden handle. Another is a "rebar club" which is literally a steel rebar with a chunk of concrete on the end swung as a club. There's also the Bumper Sword, which is literally a car bumper, license plate still attached, which has been fashioned into a massive sword. High ranking men of Caesar's Legion carry Thermal lances as melee weapons.
    • Fallout 4 has its own share of improvised weapons. The Rock-It launcher is back, renamed as the Junk Jet and can shoot any item classified as "Junk" (which includes bundles of pre-War currency), as well as most of the other improvised weapons from 3 (which is even less useful now that junk is used for construction). New to this game is the Syringer Rifle, which shoots syringes full of chemicals, with the effects depending on the chemical inside the syringe.
      • Also, the majority of raiders and settlers, at least early on, will be armed with pipe weapons, which are improvised firearms cobbled together from junk. Fittingly, they're also the weakest class of guns in the game. They're also strangely common in the exact same configuration, especially when it's still easy to find working pre-war weapons and ammo lying around. Is it really easier to engineer a gun out of scrap pipes that doesn't explode in your hand than to rummage through ruins for a more effective handgun?
  • In Fighting Force, the main character can use a lot of the level's objects to bash his enemies' heads in (both by smashing and throwing), including (but not limited to) handrails, girders, fire axes, subway tokens, luggage and fire hydrants. In an interesting twist, shooting a car with an explosive weapon will cause it to explode and lose its tires and engine block, all of which can be used as weapons.
  • Final Fantasy: Crisis Core manages this at one point of the story and in a few sub-missions at Costa Del Sol. Zack has to defend the area armed with nothing but a BEACH UMBRELLA. Which happens to be as powerful as his sword!
  • Since irreplaceable weapons can break irreparably in Fragile Dreams, the devs made it possible to defeat the final boss with a broken stick, just in case you don't have anything else. It won't be easy, mind you...
  • Freedom Force and its sequels, based on Golden and Silver Age Super Hero comics, has characters who can pick up pieces of the environment as weapons including electrical poles, cars and trees.
  • God of War: Kratos doesn't really need to improvise weapons, but he occasionally does anyway. Most notable might be from the second game, where he kills Theseus by repeatedly slamming a door into his face. Ripping off a Gorgon's head and using it to petrify enemies also counts. He'll also use an enemy's whole body as a projectile, ranging from kicking dogs across screen at someones heads to impaling footsoldiers and flinging them at larger groups.
  • Golden Sun: The Lost Age sees Agatio using the architecture of Jupiter Lighthouse itself as a weapon, successfully crippling Garet and stranding Mia by activating a drawbridge under them.
  • In Grow Cannon, the kid can use a lever as a weapon against a sleeping guy to wake him up, but he's a Heavy Sleeper and it's not very effective.
  • The Half-Life series has Gordon Freeman's trusty crowbar. Half-Life 2 turned this into an artform by adding to the player's arsenal the "Zero Point Energy Field Manipulator", more colloquially known as the Gravity Gun, which can grab objects and hurl them at enemies with considerable force. Obviously lethal projectiles, such as buzzsaw blades, propane tanks, and the ubiquitous Exploding Barrels, are littered throughout the game, but it's possible to kill enemies with wrenches, chairs, paint cans, live grenades, orbs of disintegrating energy, other dead enemies and yes, the kitchen sink.
    • There is a Steam achievement for killing an enemy with a toilet.
    • Father Grigori's various contraptions littered about Ravenholm, such as automatic choppers made out of sheets of scrap metal attached to a bar and a motor, and cars attached to pulleys that can crush zombies with the pull of a lever. Some of them need to be temporarily disabled in order to proceed.
    • At one point in the chapter "Highway 17", the player gets the chance to turn a gigantic magnetic crane into a weapon. Few things say "you're fucked" like having a shipping container dropped on your head.
    • You can also use the Dune Buggy (or the muscle car in Episode 2) for some Car Fu.
  • In Higurashi Daybreak, the fighting game of Higurashi: When They Cry, you can choose between having your character use his or her weapon and giving them another item that can be used in the same manner. And if Keiichi trading in his baseball bat for a golf club doesn't do it for you, you can go for a character without a weapon, who instead gets items associated with him or her and is forced to use these as weapons. Rika running around with a mop and spray bottle and Tomitake blinding people with the flash on his camera is fun. The anime is about to adapt this arc in its OVA.
  • The games in the Hitman series have increasingly featured outlandish methods of killing 47's targets. In addition to our bald friend's regular weapons, he can use anything found in a kitchen, crush people with falling chandeliers and, on several occasions, push them over railings to their deaths. Later games, like Hitman: Contracts allowed the player to use implements such as pool cues, garden shears and swords to kill targets with.
    • The 'Ave Maria' trailer for Hitman: Absolution contains this trope almost exclusively. In short order a guard is drowned in a decorative pond, another beaten with a walking stick, a third has his head slammed in a door, #4 is smashed over the head with a statue bust and then strangled with electrical cable torn right out of the wall, and finally a fifth is beaten before having his neck snapped using the sling of his own weapon. The many weapons in the game proper include a plunger. Yes, the toilet unclogger.
  • Hiveswap: Joey uses a simple flashlight as a weapon. She is also an Improbable Weapon user, as she apparently uses her dancing talents to get out of scrapes as well. She uses her dancing skills to escape danger, and her flashlight to distract or provoke enemies.
  • The final boss of Hours (2020), Resident Mind, attempts to crush you with a piano after phase 1.
  • I Was a Teenage Exocolonist: The illustration depicting Anemone and Kombucha facing the Faceless after its attack on the colony has been going on for a while shows Anemone holding a rake.
  • The Incredible Hulk: Ultimate Destruction featured "weaponization", which allowed the Hulk to transform various objects in the game's world into weapons. Examples include fashioning a pair of gauntlets out of a car or turning a truck into a shield/surfboard.
  • There's a few of them in Indiana Jones and the Emperor's Tomb, including a shovel.
  • Jade Empire: During the Tea House fight, You could backflip to break furniture and pick it up, the character shouting "I'll improvise!", and pummel the bad guys with chair legs and hams, but this was the only place where you could do this. Oddly enough, the improvised weapons were massively stronger than your legendary weapons and martial arts.
  • Justice League Heroes lets your chosen hero pick up a variety of items, from pipes and such (for heroes such as Batman and the Flash) to cars and dumpsters (for Superman and Wonderwoman).
  • All of the weapons in The Last of Us (as befitting a zombie apocalypse) aside from the guns, the Machete and the Axe are either random junk lying around in the ruins like bricks and pipes, or things crafted from everyday objects like shivs made from scissors or smoke bombs made from a bag of sugar.
  • None of the Left 4 Dead 2 melee weapons were originally designed for whacking zombies, to say the least. Especially the chainsaw.
    Ellis: (Upon picking up a frying pan) Spang!
  • The Legend of Zelda:
    • The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past: Although you're supposed to use the Master Sword to deflect Agahnim's magic blasts back at him, the bugcatcher net will do quite nicely at this, as well.
    • The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time: Link can use a Deku Stick as a Lethal Joke Item (it's twice as strong as the Kokiri Sword, which makes it on par with the Master Sword, and under certain glitches you can sometimes use a single stick indefinitely instead of having to pull a new one out after each hit).
    • The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild: Link can use nearly anything that isn't nailed down as a weapon, and most of his early gear consists of random items and farmyard tools scrounged for use as improvised weaponry, including tree branches and soup ladles used as one-handed weapons, farming hoes and boat oars swung like axes or claymores, pitchforks and mops thrust like spears, and the detached arms of skeletal Stal-creatures. This even ties into the game's backstory, since it's mentioned that Link was appointed as Zelda's personal bodyguard after he managed to knock back a Guardian's laser with a pot lid (and yes, you actually can do this in-game).
  • LEGO Indiana Jones lets you pick up random objects, and beat enemies to death with them if you fight while holding said objects. This includes a banana.
  • Like a Dragon
    • Kazuma Kiryu is capable of beating the crap out of people with a range of unconventional weaponry including, but not limited to: bowling balls, flowerpots, briefcases, traffic cones, tea kettles, and salt shakers. His Beast style, introduced in Yakuza 0, is specced towards improvised weaponry, allowing him to pick up something and immediately start attacking in one swift motion, and even lets him lug a motorbike onto his shoulder and beat a man over the head with it!
    • Yakuza: Like a Dragon and its sequel extends this to Kasuga and his compatriots (including Kiryu in the latter, natch), as they can pick up nearby weapons when their attacks are confirmed. The "Action Star" job from Infinite Wealth takes this concept and runs with it for one of its signature abilities, "Essence of Improvisation", wherein the Action Star uses various pieces of sitting furniture in painfully creative ways.
  • Lila's Sky Ark: Lila carries no actual weapons (barring the "Banshee" upgrade). Instead, she throws various items at her foes!
  • Manhunt teaches the player how to violently murder gang-bangers with just about anything including plastic bags, pens, fire extinguishers, flashlights and pliers. Weapons cut from the games goes an extra step further with things like dildos, a vending machine and newspaper rolls.
  • In MapleStory 2, certain scenery items such as signs, telephone booths, and chicken coops can be picked up and used as weapons.
  • The Matrix: Path of Neo has two examples of a tetherball/flag-pole being used as an improvised weapon.
  • Mega Man:
    • In the main series, many Robot Masters' weapons are actually industrial tools. Many character sheets show that their weapons were intended for entirely different uses.
    • Mega Man himself is a household assistant robot, designed to adapt to whatever tools he's needed to use and whatever chores he's needed to perform, using his Variable Tools System. When he's converted into a fighting robot, the VTS allows him to copy (usually imperfectly) the abilities of the robot masters he defeats. Mega Man X is what happens when the Variable Tools System is designed with combat in mind, becoming the Variable Weapons System and resulting in a terrifyingly effective increase in power and versatility.
  • Don't forget Metal Gear 2: Solid Snake, where you beat Big Boss with a lighter and an aerosol can used to make a flamethrower.
    • Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater gives us the fork, which is first used for hunting rats to fill up stamina and for self-defense. SIGINT even lampshades this by wondering why Snake continues to carry it around even after getting his gear back.
  • Metro 2033:
    • The first game has a host of improvised weapons fashioned by the inhabitants of the postapocalyptic Moscow Metro. There's the unreliable homemade assault rifle (It uses 5.45x39 bullets, so it's an AR, not a sub-machine gun), prone to overheating and known colloquially as the "Bastard", the shotguns — one of which appears to be made of some pipes — and the pneumatic spearguns and sniper rifles, which you will actually have to duck into a sheltered corner and pump up during a firefight, besides reloading the spears/ball bearings. It's pretty evocative and demonstrated improvised weaponry very realistically.
    • Metro: Last Light and its DLC introduces even more improvised weapons. The most triumphant example though, is the Bigun; a revolving shotgun that's built pretty much entirely from pieces of a bicycle; shells are loaded into cylinders made from a separate bike's frame and spun using the bike's gear cog, then fired by hitting the shells with the derailleur. It even has a bicycle bell!
  • Minecraft: ANYTHING you pick up can be used as a weapon, even blocks of dirt and pork chops. Anything that isn't a pickaxe, sword, axe, or shovel does 1 heart of damage only, but you can still kill any enemy with any item obtainable in the game.
  • Mischief Makers revolves around grabbing, shaking and throwing anything you can find, from guns, bombs and shuriken to enemy mooks, robot parts, bullets, lasers (as in grabbing laser beams out of the air and throwing them back), negative emotions...
  • Mr. Shifty will pick up broken pieces of furniture and statues to hit people with them. They break after a few uses.
  • NetHack permits you to use any in-game object as a weapon. Whack someone over the head with a potion of blindness, and the bottle will shatter, blinding the target — if the target monster has eyes. Tap them with a cockatrice corpse, and they'll turn to stone. Toss a boulder at them, and they'll go *splat*. Proper weapons generally do better than improvised ones, but there's just something satisfying about killing off the hardest monsters in the game with a can-opener.
  • There are so many improvised weapons available in Nexus Clash that the development team had to dial back the number of them in the game in favor of more normal weapons. Characters can pummel their enemies to death with fishing poles, frying pans, broken bottles, chunks of ripped-off coral reef, Hollywood Torches, and more.
  • One of the weapons you can acquire in NieR: Automata is an iron pipe you fish out of a sewer. It has the widest damage range in the game, meaning each hit can be anywhere from pathetically weak to skull-crushingly powerful.
  • Overland: Rocks, bottles, branches, wooden pallets, flare guns and metal pipes can all be found and used as weapons against the alien bugs. Their downsides are that they’re weak or breakable compared to sturdier weapons.
  • In Penumbra: Overture you fight using an ordinary pickaxe, hammer, and broom, or by throwing various physics objects. The rest of the series takes away all of these except the physics objects.
  • In Perfect Dark, the SpyCam is a tiny, floating camera that can be used to go into hostile territories. Once it's part of the mission is over, you can find some bad guys. Float in front of a guard's head and his partner will recognize the Spycam and SHOOT IT. The explosion kills the first guard.
  • In Persona 3: FES, the most powerful gloves in the game are... skulls. And appear to be able to be held without you ACTUALLY HOLDING THEM.
  • In Persona 4, the heroes can use (alongside swords, knives, kicks, bladed gloves, and guns (Naoto)) Baseball bats, golf clubs, kitchen knives, wrenches, shoes, wooden/paper fans, fans with blades, spiky-ball(?) glove, shields (as a bludgeon), folding chairs, and a school desk (note: the last 3 on the list are the only weapons that Kanji uses).
    • It gets ridiculous in The Golden. Some of the weapons you can use (in addition to the above) include: Shovels, brooms, a Bus stop sign, cheering flag, bass guitar, Beach Parasol, bowling pins, Pinwheels, Bones, Trout (as in the fish), Megaphones, Maracas, socks, animal slippers, Inline Skates, Spring Boots, a Frisbee, serving tray (made of good silver), Tambourine, rubber band gun, water gun, crab claw, a Reindeer hoof, a factory sign, a much bigger fish, Cymbal, a Casket lid, floor tile, drum, and even a fricken Christmas Wreath.
  • Persona 5 plays with this trope: the weapons the Phantom Thieves take into the Metaverse are, in almost everyone's case, model melee weapons and airsoft guns purchased from a seedy shop that aren't actually capable of causing serious harm in the real world. In the Metaverse, however, perception is reality, so as long as the intended targets think they are real weapons, they can cause real damage. Goro Akechi, code name "Crow", takes this to its logical conclusion by weaponizing toy Ray Guns and Laser Blades.
    • Due to preferring blunt weapons, Ryuji Sakamoto's melee equipment includes various types of bars, rods, metal pipes, and a wooden baseball bat.
  • Phantom Brave makes this an art form. Everything on a given stage can be used as a weapon, from swords and axes, to rocks, pillars, clumps of grass, and the bodies of your allies and enemies. Not only that, but these weapons and ordinary items have their own magic and special attacks. So if you pick up a log, for example, you can not only use it as a club, but if you level it up, it also becomes a BFG.
  • Power Stone allows players to weaponize whatever they can get their hands on: crates, chairs, pots — basically anything that isn't bolted to the floor (and under the right conditions, even a few things that are!).
  • Pokémon is full of these.
    • Cubone and Marowak use a bone (they're Ground-type because bones can be found underground; the Dark-type would have worked better, because Dark-type moves are all about fighting dirty, but it didn't exist yet), and Farfetch'd uses a leek, both of which became an actual item in Generation II.
    • Introduced in Gen IV is the move Fling, which makes you throw your held item- any held item- at the enemy.
  • Project Zomboid: Hammers, baseball bats, and boards of wood can be used as weapons. With some nails, you can put some spikes on the bat.
  • [PROTOTYPE] involved them sitting down and going "what if the player could weaponize himself? In addition to his powers, Alex can pick up cars and throw them at foes, as well as using them as a shield to charge through a crowd.
  • Psi-Ops: The Mindgate Conspiracy is another case of telekinetically-fueled improvisation, as anything not bolted down — including enemies, live or dead — can be thrown about with impunity. For bonus damage, set it on fire first You can even improvise a hovering power by standing on a crate, lifting it with TK and then surfing it across the room! Ditto with Second Sight where telekinesis is your very first power.
  • In The Punisher (THQ) videogame, many interesting objects can be picked up and used for a quick — and graphic — kill, including pipe wrenches, baseball bats, kitchen knives, beer-bottles, crowbars, billy-clubs... Oddly enough, all of these items — including the metallic ones — will shatter into tiny fragments after one use.
    • This was also present in the Capcom arcade game, in which players could use anything from baseball bats to bags of sand to flower pots as weapons. They all broke eventually, but at least they last more than one hit.
  • As the trailer for Psycho Waluigi points out: "With your newfound psychic powers EVERYTHING is a weapon!"
  • QUESTER: As your team is made up of Disaster Scavengers rummaging through the ruins of civilization for anything useful, the majority of your weaponry is made up of these. The Kitchen Knife Spear is a literal blade on a stick that's been strapped together; vacuum cleaners like the Easy Cleaning-kun have been transformed into makeshift flamethrowers; the Modified Brushcutter was once a hedge-trimmer; the Power Shotgun used to be a child's toy that launched soybeans during Setsubun; squirt guns now carry poisonous fluids... the list goes on and on.
  • Renowned Explorers has two types of offense items: gloves and books. While Books primarily boost a character's Speech stat (increasing the damage they do with Friendly and Devious abilities) they also provide a smaller boost to physical attack damage, implying that the character can use also the book as a bludgeon if necessary.
  • Also featured in Resident Evil: Outbreak and File #2, Brooms, Crutches and length of pipes can be used as improv weapons against the zombies and a certain character can combine these with other weapons to create Spears, Sledgehammers and Stun Rods.
  • In River City Ransom, you can use various objects like pipes, tires, trash cans, baseballs, boxes, rocks, even unconscious foes as weapons. You can either throw them or use them as a club, leading to tons of wonderful fights where you knock someone out by tossing a tire at their head, then picking up their body and whacking their buddy with it.
  • In Rule of Rose Jennifer is almost exclusively limited to these, from kitchen knives to steel pipes. The first weapon found in the game must be the most pathetic example in all gaming history, however: a dessert fork!
  • In Sa Ga Frontier Gen somehow cuts through a thick rope using a rusty length of pipe. Somewhat lampshaded when T260 remarks upon the absurdity of such a feat and nearly Logic Bombs itself trying to figure out how it's even mathematically possible.
  • Saints Row 2 gives you the option to use these lying around Stilwater. These can range from road signs, to chairs, to cash registers and toilets and TVs.
  • Shadow Hearts: Covenant has professional-wrestler vampire Joachim use whatever he can carry. He starts with a timber, and upgrades to a locker, a red mailbox, a frozen tuna, a giant earthen pipe, a clay idol (to the horror of Kurando, whose village venerates the idol in question)... You don't actually have to buy weapons for Joachim, as you can find them in various locations.
    • From The New World goes one step further. That swordfish stuck on the deck? Your Brazilian ninja will stick a sword hilt up its rectum and swing it around.
    • One of the high points of said Brazilian ninja's weapon-collecting tendencies is when the party finds the actual Sword in the Stone. Rather than pull the sword out of the stone, Frank (the ninja) attaches a sword hilt to the already-existing hilt of the sword. While it is still in the stone.
  • Every Stage in Shadow the Hedgehog has some bit of the scenery that can be broken, picked up, and used like a sword. Light Poles, Street Signs, Torch Stands, you name it. They are one of the weakest weapons in the game and break after four hits...
  • In Silent Hill: Origins, one of the tips from the beginning of the game is that you can pick things like TVs up and throw them at enemies...
    • All the Silent Hill games have at least one weapon like this; the most improvised of 'em all being the plank from Silent Hill 2, which James quickly plucks off a wooden barricade and uses to beat a monster's head in. The most disappointing being the "paper-cutting knife" from Silent Hill 4 (you'd think it'd be that enormous hinged blade like in Condemned, but no; it's actually just a dinky little box cutter).
    • It'd probably be shorter to list the melee weapons in the series that don't fall under this. In which case, there's the katana from multiple games, the Great Knife from 2, the mace and laser sword from 3, the spear from Origins, the combat knife from Homecoming, and... well, that's about it. The rock drill from the original and chainsaw from multiple games also fall under their own tropes, but are also improvised weapons, being that they're not intended for use as weapons and your character just picks them up from the environment because they might need them. (Once you unlock them, at least)
  • The characters in Siren 1 and Siren 2 generally use random objects they find as weapons. Examples would be umbrellas, wooden sticks, crowbars, fire pokers, shovels, hammers, wrenches, shoe horns, trophies, and pipes. Other characters might have guns or special objects instead, or might lack weapons entirely.
  • Slave Zero: The main character is a Humongous Mecha who can use metal girders, pipes, cars and indeed people as both thrown projectiles and melee weapons. It is not explained how holding a screaming, flailing tiny person causes a punch to deal more damage. Such things are obviously only good once if thrown, but will last for several hits if used in melee. Note that people who get thrown on walls leave a satisfying bloody mess. Also note that gravity has no influence on the trajectory of launched items: they all travel in a straight line.
  • Spelunky. If you can pick it up, you can throw it as a weapon. This includes Damsels in Distress, cavemen, valuable gold idols, treasure chests, stolen dice... and not only as weapons - you can also spring traps by throwing stuff, including the damsels. Ladies first...!
  • Star Wars:
    • Star Wars LegendsDark Forces: One of Kyle's ten weapons, the Jeron fusion cutter, is actually a portable mining tool used to cut rock that Kyle repurposes as a ranged weapon.
    • Star Wars: Jedi Knight: Dark Forces II had "Force Throw", which let you throw crates and other debris at enemies.
    • The Force Unleashed. Anything that isn't bolted to the floor can be lifted up with the Force, charged with Force Lightning and thrown into enemies. Anything. This goes up to grabbing a strafing TIE Fighter and throwing it at a group of enemies.
  • One of the ships in Star Control 2 is the Slylandro Probe, used by an alien race to scout around the galaxy and bring information back to them. The probe itself is, according to the game, equipped with an array of missile batteries to defend itself should it ever come upon a hostile target in its travels. However, due to some erroneous programming on the part of the Slylandro, each probe is set to prioritize self-replication over all else, which involves a specialized burst of electricity to deconstruct the target into component minerals to make more probes. That makes this electrical burst into the probe's weapon, ignoring its missile armament entirely.
  • Starcraft II:
    • Most of the new Protoss weapons are old work vehicles that have been repurposed.
    • The Warhound mech is a weaponized SCV upgraded with a railgun cannon and a pneumatic buckler it uses to Shield Bash melee enemies to death with. It also has acid-proof armor to protect against Banelings.
  • State Of Emergency practically had improvised weapons on every corner.
  • Subnautica's universe has such strict weapons control that your fabricators can't even create dedicated weapons beyond a heated knife. That said, you can get as creative as you want with the mining and construction equipment. Using a set of mining Powered Armor with a grappling hook to lasso a Leviathan and drill its skull for ores? Not a weapon!
  • AK-FU aside, the weapons of Sunset Overdrive include teddy bars strapped to sticks of dynamite with an egg timer as a fuse, bowling ball cannons, vinyl record launchers, and a fire-extinguisher powered spear gun that has a can of soda attached to distract enemies.
  • In Super Mario Bros. 2, Mario and his friends venture into a strange new dream world where the traditional Goomba Stomp doesn't work, and there aren't any power-ups to be found. So players have to defend themselves from enemies by using anything they can grab as a throwable weapon. Vegetables, POW Blocks, Bombs, and even other enemies can be picked up and used as projectiles. Boss battles often require using the boss' own ammunition and throwing it back to damage them.
  • The Super Smash Bros. series feature a large variety of items that can mostly be used offensively in some way. Among other things, a Paper Fan, Mr. Saturn (from EarthBound (1994)), parasols (from Kirby), Smoke Bombs and Pokéballs (not only to release the Pokémon inside, the ball itself can hurt characters). Even Springs can be thrown at enemies for some damage. And keys. Plus there are bananas that can be used as guns. And then there are characters that use things like turnips (Peach and Daisy), Pikmin (Olimar) or a chair (Mr.Game & Watch) to fight their enemies.
    • Every single one of Mr. Game & Watch's attacks is an outrageously over-the-top weapon, from his manhole cover to a can of bug spray to various hammers (grand total three... not including the hammer items) to cooked meat out of a frying pan and the frying pan itself to a turtle. And they're all taken from actual Game & Watch games. Mr. Game & Watch is the honest-to-god embodiment of this trope.
    • Wii Fit Trainer follows this trope by using yoga poses as improvised kicks and punches, push-ups for a downward dodge, and hula hoops and soccer balls for aerial attacks. "Feel the burn", indeed.
  • Most weapons in The Surge are re-purposed industrial tools such as large hammers, cutting tools, welding tools, and manipulator attachments. Justified in that the game takes place in a giant factory complex where all the workers went insane so most of them are armed with industrial tools.
    • Similarly, in The Surge 2, most of your weapons are tools or cobbled-together weapons made by the survivors of the apocalypse afflicting Jericho City. Some of the early-game armor sets are explicitly described as being cobbled together by gangs in workshops to outfit their members to fight in the abandoned city streets and alleys. However, there are more military-grade weapons available which can be looted from A.I.D. soldiers.
  • Oddly enough, the superweapon Belcrant was one of these in Tales of Destiny. It was originally conceived to create Dycroft and terraform a floating continent. It gets turned into a giant laser.
  • Despite them being intentionally equipped as weaponry, most of the melee weapons in Team Fortress 2 could be considered improvised. The Scout uses a baseball bat, the Soldier uses an entrenchment shovel (you can't actually entrench yourself in-game or anything...), the Pyro uses a fire axe, the Demoman uses a bottle of whiskey (he can drink from it in his taunt... even when the bottom of it is smashed open), the Engineer uses his wrench, and the Medic uses a bonesaw. And those are just the default weapons; some of the unlockable melee weapons are downright bizarre.
    • To date, some of the stranger melee weapons include a candy cane, a riding crop, a rake, a mailbox, a LIVE grenade on a stick, a golf club, and a bust of Hippocrates.
      • A fish, a roll of wrapping paper, jars of piss and milk, an icicle, and a frying pan, to name a few more.
  • Touhou Project is well known for being full of Improbable Weapon Users, but Elly flinging floor tiles at you in Touhou Gensokyo ~ Lotus Land Story probably qualifies for this trope.
  • In Transformers: The Game (Console) almost everything in the open world can be picked up and used as weapons, including street lights and trees that are wielded like baseball bats. Anything that can be picked up can be thrown, a necessary technique as many enemies possess attacks that can only be broken by throwing something at them.
  • The weapons in Tyler: Model 005 are made up of small, household items like screws and razor blades. Justified, since you play as a tiny robot.
  • Unreal Tournament:
    • The game has at least two weapons adapted from mining tools: The Impact Hammer (a pneumatic drill) and the Pulse Gun (specifically its alternate fire, a cutting torch).
    • The Translocator was originally designed as an emergency escape device to increase miners' survivability during cave-ins. In the game you can still use it to get to out-of-reach places, or to score a Telefrag.
    • A game mutator allows you to play with a chainsaw instead of the Impact Hammer.
  • In Unturned, virtually all of the melee weapons are improvised. Only the katana, police baton, and bayonet are weapons by design. Tools make great weapons—axes, picks, sledgehammers, even golf clubs. A few of the more unconventional weapons include the tree branch, blowtorch, and frying pan.
  • Vindictus runs away with this trope. The player can pick up virtually any object lying about and use it to beat the hell out of their enemies, including vases, sticks, signposts, cauldrons, boulders, small trees...needless to say, the results are spectacular. There are even several titles that can be earned this way. It's based on the Source engine, so perhaps the developers thought they'd pay their respects to Half-Life 2 in this way.
  • Clementine becomes an expert at using these in The Walking Dead: Season Two. The list of items she has used to defend herself from walkers and other people include but are not limited to: hammer, tree branch, rock, screwdriver, even cars keys. This continues into the latter two seasons.
  • Warframe: Many Corpus weapons are actually tweaked mining lasers, maintenance tools, and the occasional security cattle prod. Very few of them were designed specifically as military weapons. The Corpus do make plenty of weapons, but typically only when other people pay them to. Even their enemies.
  • We Who Are About to Die: On top of the regular weapons you can buy, the arena also comes with scattered implements and the crowd can toss in even more debris that can double as armaments. While they occasionally toss in training weapons, it's mostly all planks, tree branches, sharpened rocks, gardening tools, musical instruments and assorted jugs and cups for you to swing and throw around. They do help when you get disarmed at least.
  • The World Is Your Weapon is built around letting you pick up anything off the ground and giving your enemies a good whack with it as long as it isn't anchored there by some kind of mysterious magic, and when we say anything, we do mean anything.
  • In Worlds of Ultima: The Savage Empire, it is possible to build grenades out of clay pots and rifles out of bamboo.
  • World of Warcraft:
    • There are at least four daggers who use a model of a broken wine bottle.
    • In Varian Wrynn's short story, he picks up a shard of Deathwing's armor, and later in the story, uses it to kill a drakonid trying to assassinate him.
  • In War of the Monsters your giant monster playable characters can pummel opponents with a wide variety of building wreckage and detritus. These include girders, TV antennas, trains, explosive petrol tankers, water towers, and the wooden breasts of a giant cartoon woman used to decorate a casino.
  • Yoku's Island Express: While Yoku's primary weapon is his trusty ball, he also makes use of a party favor and exploding slugs to solve puzzles, overcome obstacles, and defeat enemies.


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