Revolvers Are Just Better

aka: Revolver Good

"This is the greatest hand gun ever made: The Colt Single Action Army. Six bullets. More than enough to kill anything that moves."

— Revolver Ocelot, Metal Gear Solid

In the world of firearms, there is one gun that we can all agree is cool: the Revolver. As the famous saying goes: "God created all men, Samuel Colt made them equal."

In fiction, revolvers often shown to be better than any other handgun. In video games, they may be the most accurate, most powerful, and rarest of all handguns. In a Wild West setting, The Lone Mysterious Gunslinger is always slingin' a six-shooter or two, which he quickdraws in less than a second. While in modern or futuristic settings, the Loose Cannon Cop is packing serious heat in form of a Magnum that can blow heads clean off.

During the American Old West period, single action revolvers like the Colt Single Action Army and Smith & Wesson Schofield were the preferred handguns of cowboys and outlaws, with semi-automatic pistols only appearing during the latter years of the 19th Century. After the end of the Old West, .38 caliber double action revolvers were very popular among law enforcement and civilians. The advent of the S&W Registered Magnum in .357 Magnum and S&W Model 29 in .44 Magnum ushered in the era of very powerful handguns, and handgun hunting as a sport was born.

While cowboy films and tv shows first picked up the mystique of the revolver, the film Dirty Harry is responsible for popularizing Magnum-caliber revolvers as the Hand Cannons of choice.^note this has faded a little in recent years, with the choice for movie hero personal artillery more likely to be a .50AE Desert Eagle, much to the annoyance of gun enthusiasts.

An enduring legacy of Dirty Harry is that it's often assumed that every revolver is a Magnum, which is simply not true as many are chambered in non-magnum calibers like .38 Special, .45 Colt, .44 Special, etc. all of which are comparable to low energy semi-automatic calibers like 9mm and .45 ACP.^note "Magnum" does not mean "really powerful;" it refers to a longer (and yes, inherently more powerful) cartridge version of an existing caliber. The .454 Casull, for example, is a magnumized version of the .45 Colt and was the most powerful handgun caliber for many years, yet doesn't even have "Magnum" in its name.

While the revolver is the Boring, but Practical counterpart or Hand Cannon to a regular semi-auto pistol in most media productions, one shouldn't expect to see a semi-auto pistol as the Hand Cannon to a regular revolver. This is particularly evident in videogames, where the revolver will always outclass a semi-auto shot-for-shot: after all, if the revolver didn't have that advantage, then it would be totally useless.

For a more detailed look at the advantages and disadvantages, see the analysis page.

For a competing product, see the shotgun (particularly the Sawed-Off Shotgun) or the katana. Tends to be a Punch-Packing Pistol or a Sniper Pistol when not a Hand Cannon outright.

Compare and/or contrast with Revolvers Are for Amateurs, where they're just better for someone inexperienced.

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Examples:

Anime & Manga

• Justice in Afro Samurai dual-wields a set of revolvers. He's a Cowboy.
• The titular character in Akagi asks for one from the Yakuza, supposedly for self-protection. Russian Roulette and False Roulette follow soon after.
• Hades from Appleseed uses an implausibly large six-shooter as his sidearm... even when in the middle of a military formation where everybody else has assault rifles.
• Train Heartnet from Black Cat goes with this trope... and damn does he make it look hot.
• Dutch from Black Lagoon has one (though he's also used a shotgun as well). Chaka (the asshole from the Yakuza arc) also uses one. Revy derides Chaka for being a poser for using one for show more than effectiveness and uses a pair of custom Beretta semiautomatics herself.
• David from Blood+ wields a revolver as his weapon of choice. A very large, high-powered revolver. Presumably because smaller bullets hardly even count as an annoyance to Chiropterans, but David's revolver doesn't do much better.
• Jo from Burst Angel uses two revolvers, though usually only one at a time, and through her Improbable Aiming Skills it's shown to be good enough to take out most anything. Takane also has a revolver.
• City Hunter: Ryo Saeba's personal arm, Colt Python .357 Magnum, seems to be superior to most types of weapons in the manga. With Improbable Aiming Skills and surprisingly powerful bullets, Ryo can disable a car or a helicopter with one precise hit. Even armored attack drones are not completely immune as seen in City Hunter: Shinjuku Private Eyes.
• Cowboy Bebop:
  • Cowboy Andy from the episode "Cowboy Funk" uses a revolver as opposed to the usual semi-automatics everyone else uses. Of course, this fits with his intended theme.
  • The missile launchers on Faye's ship Redtail are a Rule of Cool mashup of revolvers and pump action shotguns.
• All of the cops in Death Note.
  • Also used during Takada's abduction; one of her bodyguards points a revolver at Mello in the manga. In the anime, he instead points a semi-automatic pistol at him.
  • Japan is one of the few countries in the world, including Hong Kong, where its police departments (singular in the case of HK) still issue revolvers for patrolmen.
• Resident badass Cross Marian of D.Gray-Man uses a six shooter, as do Jasdero and Devit.
• Digimon:
  • RizeGreymon from Digimon Data Squad (though in the dub his bullets are energy lasers).
  • Revolmon/Deputymon from Digimon Adventure 02 and Digimon Fusion is a revolver armed with revolvers (though in Digimon fusion his guns and body are modified to look like toys and he fires energy lasers)
• In Getter Robo, both Texas Mack and the Black Getter carry western-style revolvers scaled up for use by a 40-meter-tall Super Robot.
• In Ghost in the Shell, Togusa uses a Mateba Autorevolver instead of the standard-issue semi-automatics of the rest of Section 9. The explanation for this is somewhat complex:
  • In the manga, the Major questions why he uses a revolver when he should be afraid of it jamming, even if he carries a semi-automatic as backup. On the Major's request, he uses the semi-automatic throughout the manga. For some added irony, a semi-automatic of the same model jams in a later issue... In addition, Togusa is presented as someone with an odd gun choice, using an AS-11 shotgun in addition to his two handguns.
  • In one Stand Alone Complex episode, Togusa testifies in court that he prefers a revolver to an automatic because revolvers don't jam. It's implied that this is just him rationalizing and that he really prefers them because he thinks they're cooler. He probably wouldn't have been so defensive if the guy asking wasn't acting as if this was case-turning material. In a different episode, Togusa is able to quickly load a bullet containing an electronic tracer into his revolver and fire it into the bumper of a fleeing vehicle.^note He uses a similar trick in the first movie, with another character pointing out that had he been using the standard issue semi, he could have planted two trackers on the car at the same time. Ultimately, in Solid State Society, Togusa has succeeded Kusanagi as the commander of Section 9, and has received cybernetic implants and, at the same time, replaced his revolver with a semi-automatic. He himself lampshades the symbolism behind this.
• In GoShogun: The Time Étranger Remy Shimada's favourite weapon is a Smith & Wesson .44 Magnum.
• In Grenadier, Rushuna defeats hundreds of people that are armed with various automatic weapons and exotic weaponry with just a six-shooter. Her schtick involves popping bullets out of her boobs and into her gun in a single motion.
• Subverted in Gunsmith Cats. Two times revolvers are used they fail noticeably (because of things like lead buildup after rapid-firing causing the cylinder to gunk up—although Rally admits on that case that the fault was using ammo made for target shooting (with extra-powerful magnum loading and no rifling to fit the armor-piercing heads) and not regular bullets), and when Rally gets hold of one she is visibly disgusted with it (although she's justified because the revolver was a "Saturday Night Special" she nabbed from a random crook—seriously insufficient firepower for the trouble she had at hand). Doesn't stop her from doing rapid five-pulls with one to scare the hell out of someone she's interrogating though.
• Haruhi Suzumiya's Day of Sagittarius video game features, at least in the characters' minds, revolver spaceships loaded by smaller spaceships.
• JoJo's Bizarre Adventure:
  • In Stardust Crusaders, Hol Horse's Stand, The Emperor, takes the form of a handgun that resembles a very elaborate-looking revolver. It doesn't need to be reloaded, and Hol Horse can control the trajectory of its shots.
  • In Golden Wind, Guido Mista uses an actual revolver in conjunction with his Stand, Sex Pistols. The fact that there are six Sex Pistols makes it synergize very well with a six-shooter, especially since they can each quickly load a round into the gun's cylinder for very fast reloads. At one point, Mista is forced to use a Beretta when his revolver breaks, and the Sex Pistols note that it's harder to reload due to using a magazine.
• Jigen, gunslinging sidekick of Lupin III, uses all manner of firearms during his career, but seems to prefer a .357 Magnum Smith & Wesson Model 19 revolver as his sidearm of choice.
• In Lyrical Nanoha, Devices can get "cartridge systems" that allow them to fire powerful bursts of magic. The titular character's staff loads cartridges from assault rifle-style magazines and the Wolkenritter's Devices have shotgun-style brute-force mechanisms... but guess what Fate, the former Dark Magical Girl who gets the really cool gear, gets for hers? Yup, six-shot revolver cylinder.
  • The Revolver Knuckles of Subaru and Ginga's devices (Mach Caliber and Blitz Caliber respectively) load cartridges via a revolver cylinder, hence the name.
  • Runessa Magnus, Teana's partner in StrikerS Sound Stage X, wields a revolver with projectile ammunition.
• High Class Demon Commander Scanty from Panty & Stocking with Garterbelt is very fond of her revolvers. Granted she has been shown capable of turning them into a shotgun, and unlike most revolvers Scanty doesn't seem worried about reloading them.
• Princess Principal everyone uses a Revolver, except Chise, who is a Ninja who uses a katana. Justified, as its set around the first decade of the 20th century.
• Patlabor: The AV-98 Ingrams use "Revolver Cannons", which are actually giant versions of standard police revolvers. Apparently, the rounds are so expensive that speedloaders aren't issued, the operators instead being required to get out of their Labor and load the gun by hand.
• Mukuru, vicious pirate from Samurai Champloo, uses a single-action revolver. However, although he is certainly an "accomplished" pirate and killer, all the killing we see him do is not so much Improbable Aiming Skills as it is him simply plugging samurai who only have swords.
• Sunday Without God has four characters with revolvers: Hampnie uses a Smith & Wesson Model 29, Julie uses a Ruger GP100, Alice uses a Enfield No.2 Mk1, and Dee uses a snubnosed Smith & Wesson Model 66.
• In Trigun, fitting the Western-influenced setting, revolvers predominate. They're not the only kind, though — nearly every cool-looking gun made without plastics has a counterpart on The Planet Gunsmoke, along with a few sci-fi ones and some outright crazy designs. However, Vash and Evil Counterpart Knives use distinctive large, super-accurate (when appropriately serviced) six-shooters with a few special features.
• Sumire in Venus Versus Virus has a revolver in the manga. In the anime, she only has a cheap, dime-a-dozen semi-automatic for a weapon, however, the Elegant Gothic Lolita Lucia (who gets all the awesome gear in the series) sports a revolver.
• In Yu-Gi-Oh!, "Bandit" Keith Howard's flagship monster is the Barrel Dragon◊, a giant mechanical dragon made from three enormous revolvers. Revolvers that are loaded with three bullets each, and play Russian Roulette pointed at the enemy monsters. What's not cool about that monster? Other than the fact that the head revolver is really goofy? That all said, when Keith holds a gun to Pegasus' head, it appears to be a Glock.
  • This gets confusing as there is a monster named Revolver Dragon in the English version, who has a revolver for a head and has an ability similar to Barrel Dragon. The difference being that Revolver Dragon is basically a Nerfed Barrel Dragon. Note, however, that the original◊ had much more realistic revolvers.

Comic Books

• Atomic Robo carries a Webley Mk VI for much of his career, eventually replacing it with an anti-material revolver cooked up by one of his action scientists.
• The favored weapons of Superhomey Single Action in Empowered.
  Thug Boy: What kind of idiot would make his energy weapons single action? Having to manually cock hammers started going out of fashion in 1892, asshole — not that hammers are relevant to the operation of plasma guns, of course—
  Single Action: Reckon ah jest thought it was plumb cool... anachronistic, but cool...
• Hellboy has the Good Samaritan in the comics, and in the films, he has the Big Baby◊ too.
• After Jonah Hex is transported to the future in Hex, he acquires a pair of Ruger Blackhawk .357 Magnums. He chooses these because they are single-action revolvers like he was used to in the Wild West, but he still manages to outshoot everybody armed with more modern weaponry.
• In The Killing Joke, the Joker uses a revolver (drawn in loving detail by the great Brian Bolland) to cripple Barbara Gordon.
• New Gods: Serifan, a young member of the Forever People, has a pair of six-shooters with self-styled "Cosmic Cartridges" with the most unusual and unexpected functions.
• Preacher:
  • The Saint of Killers is appointed as the replacement for the Angel of Death, who melts his sword down into two revolvers for the Saint to use. Said revolvers can kill absolutely anything, are enchanted such that they never miss, never need reloading and each shot will never be less than fatal. In fact, the first person he kills after getting the job was the Devil himself. The last is God.
  • Subverted near the end of the series with Herr Starr, who starts carrying a huge revolver around to substitute for his missing genitals. In the next to last issue, during his final duel with Tulip, he manages to nail her in the shoulder, get her against the wall with his revolver to her head and... click. If he'd stuck to an automatic, he would have won.
• Sam of Sam & Max: Freelance Police uses a gigantic revolver. His partner Max favors a Luger.
• The Simping Detective, in spite of the fact that he lives in Mega-City One, carries one and it packs quite a wallop. It's likely a nod to his Film Noir roots.
• John Hartigan uses a revolver in Sin City and seems to be the only character to do so. Then again, he is based partially on Dirty Harry.
• Defied in The Walking Dead. Rick Grimes has a couple of chances to grab a revolver in the first volume but sticks to his hatchet for taking out zombies and uses semiautomatic pistols or long arms when he needs a gun.
• Wonder Woman: Etta Candy's father Hard (their whole family has Punny Names) is a Texan rancher who always carries an etched revolver, and he's not afraid to use it.

Fan Works

• Averted by Apple Bloom in Bad Future Crusaders, despite being otherwise completely western-themed, who prefers semi-automatics to revolvers because she finds the latter are simply too clumsy to load. Peppercorn, her friend/lover, played it straight with a "Lucky-7" revolver.
• Justified in Old Soldiers Never Die, as Harry is given his grandfather’s Webley Mk. VI to touch off the events of the story, while Hermione is assigned a Royal Irish Constabulary by her grandfather since the regiment that Harry was putting together was being supplied with old surplus equipment.

Films — Live-Action

• Alien Nation: Sykes is worried about aliens getting hopped up on space PCP and becoming virtually Immune to Bullets, so he upgrades to an enormous .454 Casull revolver Hand Cannon. It uses bullets so big that it can only fit five, but it blows holes through a Bulletproof Vest.
• Subverted in Back to the Future Part III. Marty is given a Colt Peacemaker for his shoot-out with Mad Dog Tannen and is thrilled about having a real revolver, which he is shown to be incredibly accurate with (thanks to hours of practice on arcade games). Along the way, he gets a reality check, doesn't use it in the duel, and gives it away completely unused.
• In Batman (1989), Joker brings down the Batwing using a revolver with a really Freudian barrel.
• Inverted in The Boondock Saints. The main characters berate their friend, David Della Rocco, for bringing a revolver to kill nine people when his revolver only has six bullets. Rocco had been told there were only two or three men in the room; Rocco's boss, Papa Joe Yakavetta, was actually setting him up to be killed during the assassination so that it couldn't be traced back to the boss.
• Boyz n the Hood: Tre's father, Furious Styles, uses a .357 when trying to kill an intruder in his house. Later in the movie, Tre uses his father's revolver to engage in a revenge plan with Doughboy after his friend Ricky is murdered, but is stopped by his father before doing so.
• Subverted at the start of Crank: High Voltage. A mook fires on Chelios with his revolver, as Chelios takes cover. As the revolver runs dry, the mook starts cursing, clumsily trying to eject the spent cartridges and load in new ones. As the mook is fumbling with his revolver, Chelios casually walks up to him and beats him down.
• Dirty Harry famously uses a gigantic Smith & Wesson Model 29, which chambers .44 magnum bullets. The gun is extremely powerful, and the long barrel plus adjustable sights make it basically a pocket-rifle. Around the time the movie was filmed, some police actually did carry such large revolvers, but they eventually proved excessively powerful. In Magnum Force, the "rookies" carry revolvers that stand out (.357 Magnum loads), and Dirty Harry explains some technical details of his gun such as the specific load he uses (probably an effort of the writers to justify his use of a powerful handgun like a water pistol).
• Disturbing the Peace: When Dillon decides to strap on a gun again and confront Diablo and the gang, the gun he retrieves from his house is a Colt Single Army (a.k.a. 'the Peacemaker'). Using this, he takes on a gang armed with fully automatic weapons.
• Faster seems to be all about Dwayne Johnson, a revolver, and revenge!
• Ghost in the Shell (2017): When it's time to take on the Big Bad, Chief Aramaki wordlessly places on the table a Smith & Wesson .44 Magnum encased in a leather holster, a noticeable contrast to the high-tech autos wielded by his subordinates. He can use it, too, as he subsequently demonstrates against a hit team. When fighting a similar hit team, Togusa uses a Chiappa Rhino 60DS, the updated equivalent of the Mateba autorevolver he carries in the anime.
• In The Good, the Bad and the Ugly, Tuco enters a general store and is unimpressed by the storekeep's selection of revolvers. He breaks the guns down and assembles a new gun from the parts that meet his high expectations. In reality, this would have been fairly improbable; gun parts at the time were rarely interchangeable even between guns of the same model.
• Inverted in The Great Silence, in which the western gunslinger packs a hyper-modern Mauser C96 semi-auto pistol.
• In Guns, Girls and Gambling, The Cowboy uses a pair of Colt Single Action Army revolvers and is at least as good as the film's other gunslinger, The Blonde, who wields twin Glock 17s. The Blonde's only advantage is the Glocks' higher ammo capacity, but as The Cowboy specialises in the Instant Death Bullet, this isn't really an advantage at all.
• In Halloween (1978), Dr. Sam Loomis packs a Smith & Wesson while hunting for Michael Myers, and empties it into him at the climax. Although he survives all six shots, Michael does flee for the first time in the movie.
• In Harley Davidson and the Marlboro Man, Harley prefers a revolver over an automatic pistol — a Hand Cannon that he can't shoot very well. This gets him in trouble more than once and causes the Marlboro Man to berate him.
• The Heat: Despite her extensive arsenal, Mullins seems awfully fond of her Smith & Wesson .38 Special.
• Although Hellboy has been seen to use a wide variety of firearms in the comics, in Hellboy (2004), he carries the Samaritan, a huge and massively holy four-round revolver that fires equally huge and holy bullets. When that's not enough, Hellboy II: The Golden Army introduces the Big Baby, a grenade-launching revolver that can kill tree elementals. Ironically, it's mentioned that Hellboy can't aim worth crap — most of the time, he doesn't need to, since his targets are usually really big and at really close range.
• Zizagged in The Highwaymen. While Gault and Hamer favour Colt Single Action revolvers, Hamer makes sure to buy some automatic weapons for More Dakka and because he's not as accurate as he used to be, though he also includes a lever action rifle so he'll have one weapon that he can be sure won't jam.
• In In Bruges, Ray blinds a man with a blank-loaded revolver then loads it with live rounds nearly 3 minutes later. Yeah, versatility! Revolvers don't need any modifications to fire blanks. However, he does lament carrying it, referring to it as "a bloody girl's gun" when compared with Ken's silenced automatic.
• Indiana Jones: The revolver is as much a part of Indy's image as the whip or the bag, but not the hat. Nothing beats the hat. He mostly uses a double-action .455 Webley (logical since his adventures mostly take place in/around what was then the British Empire), but also used a .38 Special in the opening of Temple of Doom and .45 ACP at the beginning of Raiders of the Lost Ark.
• In Johnny Dangerously, the villain packs an enormous revolver, proclaiming "It shoots through schools!"
• In Last Action Hero, the Big Bad, Benedict, uses this trope to maximum effect in one scene in the "real world". Benedict fires at Slater with his revolver until the hammer falls on an empty chamber. When Slater comes out of cover and points out that guns need to be reloaded in the real world, Benedict replies that he merely left one chamber empty and then shoots Slater with the bullet still left in his revolver.
• In The Last Stand, The Dragon Burrell wields a Colt Dragoon modified to fire standard metal cartridges. In addition, Lewis Dinkum wields a Smith & Wesson M500 through much of the gunfight with the bad guys which is later picked up by Sheriff Ray Owens which he uses to kill the aforementioned Burrell.
• Played with in the Lethal Weapon series: Riggs, the hotshot badass, packs a slick automatic while Murtaugh, the aging family man, packs an old-fashioned revolver. Riggs notes that "Lotta old-timers carry those". However, a running gag in the series has Murtaugh display sniper-like accuracy with a single aimed shot — a bit of Truth in Television, since Murtaugh is carrying an adjustable sight Smith & Wesson revolver, which is much better suited to carefully aimed shots than Riggs' fixed sight Beretta. Murtagh does start carrying a semi-automatic in the later films, most notably using it in the third film in conjunction with his signature revolver.
• The Mummy Trilogy: Rick O'Connell, as well as the Americans, loves to use revolvers. O'Connell is shown to be an aficionado of many types of firearms, however. Early in The Mummy (1999), O'Connell uses semi-automatic pistols vs. the horsemen in the desert — inappropriate weapons for the conditions, being prone to jamming from dust and dirt. In the commentary on the DVD, Brendan Fraser, who played O'Connell, confirmed that the weapons kept jamming due to the dusty conditions. In The Mummy: Tomb of the Dragon Emperor, there's one scene where Rick and his son, Alex, are comparing their handguns (a Colt Peacemaker revolver and a Walther P38 pistol respectively). Rick boasts of the superior reliability and bigger size of the revolver, but Alex claims that size doesn't matter.
• In Planet Terror, when Wray and Abby take out the grotesquely mutated Lt. Muldoon, Wray fires a revolver, while Abby fires an automatic. Both of them actually seem to be equally effective.
• Point Break (1991): Bohdi uses a Freedom Arms Model 83 revolver when robbing the bank and uses it on an off-duty cop by shooting him point blank in the heart.
• Six-Shooter of the Puppet Master movies carries tiny revolvers that carry a big punch. Because he's, you know, a cowboy. A cowboy puppet. With six arms.
• The Quick and the Dead: The Kid runs a gun shop and shows off a series of increasingly cool revolvers to Cort, who must ultimately take the cheapest and ugliest gun in the store.
• In Rogue One, Orson Krennic carries the closet thing Star Wars has to a revolver, a high-powered blaster pistol with six shots. However, it turns out to be a defiance of the trope. All he really manages to do with it is pin down Jyn for a while, and it doesn't do anything standard blasters can't also do. As with everything else in Krennic's repertoire, it's used thanks to Rule of Cool.
• Subverted in Shanghai Noon when the gunslinger Roy grabs the villain's cool top-breaking revolvers, but can't seem to figure them out. When Chon Wang asks what's wrong, Roy protests, "These guns are really weird!"
• In Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow, the Sky Captain keeps a revolver tucked into his boot, where he can easily grab it if seated in a cockpit or hoisted into the air by a Killer Robot. For some reason, though, he's changed to a Colt .45 automatic in the uranium mine scene.
• In Three Kings, PFC Conrad Vig has a Thunder 5 pistol, even though using a short-barrelled .410 revolver in the desert makes no sense at all.
• V for Vendetta: Mr. Creedy uses a revolver in his final confrontation with V himself. However, it is ineffective, because V is wearing a breastplate. He does die from his wounds afterwards. Also, ideas are bullet-proof.
• Xander Cage in xXx wields a revolver with several specialty bullets, including incendiaries, distance listening device, blood splatter/tranquilizer...

Gamebooks

• Freeway Fighter: While your hero likes machine guns on his car, when it comes to shooting at people he prefers revolvers. The only gun that he upgrades to is an old Magnum revolver if he encounters and kills a wannabe cowboy bandit.
• Gary Chalk's Gun Dogs: Your Boxed Crook protagonist has been entrusted with some nice hardware as the government wants him to succeed in his near-suicidal missions. So among his equipment, he gets a "cutting-edge" Clock Punk precursor to the revolver and gatling gun. It's a tri-barrel pistol that's been preloaded with bullets but requires putting in a firing cap per shot. The barrels rotate out of the way as they're fired, similar to a revolver's drum. So your Gun Dog can fire his 3 shots in a somewhat quick succession but it requires a skill roll as he needs to put in new firing caps. This gun can be upgraded to perform better by going to the local University and having its gears replaced with those made from metal out of a meteorite.

Literature

• Any British action-adventure children's book from the 1930s or '40s can be relied upon to use the word "revolvers", almost invariably carried by the villains (whereas if the good guys use guns, they're typically rifles or shotguns) — for example, several books by Enid Blyton and Arthur Ransome. The logic behind this probably runs that if someone has a revolver, with its easy concealability and inadequacy for gamekeeping, hunting, or any other non-criminal/law-enforcement use, then they're probably up to no good. In contrast, rifles and shotguns are common things for any farmer/landed gentry (heroes in classic British adventure fiction tending to fit into the latter category) to have lying around as a matter of course.
• In the Aubrey-Maturin series, Stephen Maturin has one of the earliest "revolving pistols", in around 1812. Note that these were flintlock rather than percussion cap, required you to spin the drum by hand, and had a tendency to jam. Matthew Hervey also gets one a few years later in Alan Mallinson's books.
• In Cell, the revolver is this by default, as it ends up as the only gun to ever actually kill anything.
• In The Dark Tower, Roland's revolvers are significantly more badass than the automatic handgun Jake brings from Earth. They're also cooler than the blunderbusses and semiautos that show up on occasion. Given that the metal of the revolvers was obtained from a melted-down Excalibur, one can hardly expect them to be otherwise. After using an automatic, Roland describes it as little more than a toy, and making him feel "dirty".
• The Dresden Files:
  • Wizards aren't allowed to kill with magic on pain of beheading, so Harry sometimes carries a gun — and because he's a Walking Techbane (against anything with a tech higher than the 1950s, mechanical^note Mechanical does have a better chance of working if its more advanced, just it isn't perfect. or electronic), he uses a revolver in preference to a semi-automatic specifically because it's less likely to jam or misfire. He also mentions on occasion that he specifically picked the "Dirty Harry" type. He originally carried a Colt Detective Special, i.e. that snub-nosed pocket pistol that plainclothes cops are invariably seen with in Hollywood movies made before about 1995, but upgraded to an unidentified "medium-barrelled .357" after a run-in with a loup-garou. After running with the .357 for a while, Harry loses it during a fairy battle (seeing a pattern?) and upgrades again to a .44 magnum. He sticks with this one until after the 12th book, when, still later, he borrows a Smith & Wesson Model 500 from Karrin Murphy.
  • Lieutenant Murphy often berates Harry for his choice of gun, noting that her SIG semi-automatic carries 20 rounds to Harry's 6, and Harry has no speed-loaders, only loose rounds in his pocket. When he remarks that he uses a revolver because of the Walking Techbane issue, she suggests that he get an older semi-automatic, like her own M1911. Harry goes on to note that he likes his revolver just fine; it makes him feel like Indiana Jones.
  • Every other character in the books subverts this, as Harry is the only person with a revolver. Marcone uses an Assault Rifle and a Shotgun, Hendrix uses an assault rifle the size of a motorcycle, Murphy has her semi-autos and a P90, Sanya has his Kalashnikov, Thomas uses shotguns and a Desert Eagle, Ramirez also uses a Desert Eagle as his side-arm of choice (Dresden having apparently sparked a trend for using side-arms in combination with magic swords and sorcery among the younger White Council members — especially Wardens) and Kincaid uses whatever he feels is the best gun for the job.^note Although he notably packs one set of "big-ass revolvers" to go up against Mavra in Blood Rites. Of course, Harry only carries a firearm as a backup and does most of his combat with magic.
  • Harry himself has subverted this trope more than once, using shotguns in several books (though typically double-barreled break actions) and an AK-47 at least once during the war between the White Council and the Red Court.
• In Brian Daley's Floyt/Fitzhugh stories, the bureaucrat turned reluctant adventurer protagonist Hobart Floyt has access to a whole galaxy's worth of futuristic weaponry but he chooses to carry a reproduction Webley revolver for its simplicity and reliability (although he did regret not having boosted ammo like depleted transuranics when fighting the Implacable Man, Gentry Standing Bear).
• In The Half-Made World, many of the Guns manifest as revolvers. Like all Guns, they never need to be reloaded and usually kill in one shot.
• In August of 44, Tamantsev uses two Nagant revolvers in the final skirmish. He prefers them for reliability, and reloading is not an issue: first, the fights against highly trained paratrooper agents are so short and frenzy-paced that they tend to be over by the time you need to reload; second, Nagant holds 7 rounds (only one round less than semiautomatic TT used by other heroes) and Tamantsev has two of them and is a renown Guns Akimbo user.
• James Bond keeps a long-barreled Colt Single Action Army in his car whenever he needs more firepower during car chases. When John Gardner took over, he had Bond use a .44 Super Redhawk in place of the Colt.
• The Satanic Archetype of The Lightbringer Series styled his weapon after a revolver because even a Fallen Angel who lives outside of time thinks they're the coolest type of weapon. It isn't actually a revolver, though; it's fired dozens of times without reloading in the final book.
• In the novel that inspired Logan's Run, the sandman guns are six-cylinder revolvers, each cylinder loaded with its own special cartridge. The homer would follow and kill the runner. The tangler was a webbing bomb, the ripper would go through armor, the nitro was self-explanatory, the vapor was a gas bomb, and the needler, which function was not explicitly stated, could be conjectured to be a needle slug filled with an anesthetic.
• Very early in the run of Perry Rhodan, one of the "tests" set by the sufficiently advanced alien known as IT on its own homeworld involves an authentic Western-style gunslinger who laughs at modern energy weapons and can only be defeated "in his own time" — which is to say, by being shot with an old Colt Peacemaker one of the protagonists has conveniently "accidentally" found earlier in the same issue (after which his body quickly disappears). As a clear mythology gag, the same character reappears once in a great while when somebody is looking for IT for some reason or other; he usually ends up getting killed in the exact same way.
• Inverted in The Shadow. The titular vigilante uses a pair of .45 semiautomatics, whereas most of the crooks are described as using revolvers.
• Skulduggery Pleasant uses an older style revolver (give him a break, he is over 400 years old), and at one point he uses two of them, emptying both guns into the chest of one enemy, and then sticking a spike bomb in said wound before it could heal. The resulting explosion still didn't kill said monster.
• In David Gemmell's Stones of Power series, Jon Shannow, a.k.a. the Jerusalem Man, carries a pair of percussion cap revolvers. These represent the cutting-edge firearms technology in the post-apocalyptic world in which he lives and make him far deadlier than most of his opponents who are armed with single-shot flintlocks.
• In Time Scout, given that most gates lead to times before automatic and semiautomatic weapons, this is just plain sense. Why carry anything but a revolver when nothing but revolvers exist?
• The UnGun in Un Lun Dun is a revolver that takes anything as ammo and magnifies or replicates it. Even when it's empty, it still will unfire and produce a vacuum.

Live-Action TV

• Played with in Blue Bloods. Frank Reagan still uses a .38 Special revolver despite his father Henry telling him he'd have more firepower with a department-issue Glock semiautomatic. Frank's reasoning is simple: "I like carrying your gun, Pop." This gets even more heartwarming when we learn that said .38 belonged to Henry's father as well. Notably, Henry is once seen not to follow his own advice; he carries a .357 Magnum. In "Re-Do", Frank proves pretty conclusively that he doesn't need a Glock — that ancient .38 Special has all the firepower he needs.
• In one episode of Bones, Bones carries a S&W Model 500, having gone with the "bigger is better" idea after being attacked in a previous episode. Unfortunately, she can barely lift the gun, let alone fire it, so Booth has to take the piece. Subverted during a shootout between Booth and the episode's Monster Clown (who's wielding a Sawed-Off Shotgun) when the clown criticizes Booth's 5-shot capacity and taunts him by pointing out that he only has One Bullet Left; Double Subverted when the clown takes cover behind a steel door and Booth merely blasts right through it.
• Criminal Minds:
  • Several of the UnSubs use revolvers, The Reaper being one of the more notable ones. The BAU believes that the UnSubs favor them because it ensures they won't leave bullet casings behind.
  • The UnSub in the episode "Revelations" plays Russian Roulette with a kidnapped and tortured Reid using a revolver. SA Reid later gets the revolver away from him and shoots him with it. Some time later, it becomes apparent that Reid has started using a revolver as his service weapon.
• Daredevil (2015): In the third episode, John Healy pulls a gun on a man that Wilson Fisk has hired him to kill. As he's about to pull the trigger, the show suddenly cuts back in time 36 hours earlier, when Healy is buying the gun from Turk Barrett:
  Turk Barrett: [smells the pistol] Mmmm. Love that smell. Metal and oil. Fresh, never been fired. Take a whiff. [Healy picks up the gun and holds it in a firing stance]
  John Healy: I'd like a good revolver better. No chance of jamming up.
  Turk Barrett: Man, look at this! [racks the slide] This is top of the line. I guarantee, this baby will not jam, or my name ain't Turk Barrett.
  [cut to Healy pulling the trigger in the bowling alley, and it jamming on him]
• A couple times in Deadliest Warrior. In the "Jesse James Vs. Al Capone" episode, the Colt Revolver is tested against the Tommy Gun, and the Colt gets the edge for better accuracy and the Quick Draw. In the "Back for Blood" special, the IRA's Webley revolver is matched up against the Spetsnaz' Makarov pistol and the Makarov gets the edge due to its higher rate of fire and faster reload.
• In Firefly, Jayne Cobb's sidearm of choice (though not his very favorite gun) is a revolver, and Wash uses a few of them over the course of the series. On the other hand, Mal's pistol is a semi-automatic and sees a lot more use. However, it's worth noting that the real-world prop for Mal's pistol is based on the five-shot Taurus 38 revolver.
• The scene in Knight Rider where Michael Knight is shot with a revolver has the shooter miming reloading the gun in the same way as the Preacher example. I believe there actually is some obscure revolver that loads like this, but it's doubtful the creators of the scene knew that.
• Lennie Briscoe of Law & Order uses a snub-nosed .38 Special until the day he retires, while Mike Logan uses one until he transfers to the Major Case Squad. Captain Cragen keeps a spare one in his desk, and gives it to ADA Cabot when she's threatened (along with a permit in her name to carry it). In a subtle Shown Their Work touch, the older detectives tend to use snub-nosed .38 revolvers, and the younger ones use 9mm semi-automatic because the NYPD allows any officer who purchased a revolver prior to 1994 to keep it rather than upgrade to a SIG-Sauer P226 or Glock 19.
• Gene Hunt of Life on Mars (2006) and Ashes to Ashes (2008) prefers a revolver to the standard police-issue semi-automatic handguns. Then again, he is a Cowboy Cop... Jokes aside, Gene is shown to be a huge fan of The Western, and thinks of himself as The Sheriff, so his preference for a revolver is understandable.
• In the Quantum Leap episode "MIA", when Sam leaps in, he cowers in the middle of the gunfight he's caught up in. When it's revealed that he's a male cop in drag and not a woman, his partner asks him if his pistol jammed again. One of the other cops tells him "Get a revolver, Jake. You'll live longer."
• In The Sandbaggers, agent Willy Caine doesn't like guns. But, when he has to draw arms, he prefers using a revolver. Also, when agent Mike Wallace has to request a sidearm, he specifically asks for a revolver.
• Stargate Atlantis gives us the Particle Magnum, and its distinctive look.
• A major arc in the second season of Supernatural involved the brothers hunting down The Colt, a magic demon-slaying revolver made by Samuel Colt himself, one of the most powerful weapons in the series. Notably, the boys prefer automatics, although they never get into a discussion about it and Bobby used a Colt Single-Action Army.
• At one point, assassins in Taken use revolvers with sniping scopes attached.
• In Tin Man, Cain uses a completely normal-looking old-fashioned revolver. How he can fire off much more than ten rounds in one fight scene without ever having to reload at any moment in the show is truly amazing.
• Deputy Sheriff Rick Grimes from The Walking Dead (2010) carries a large stainless-steel revolver, despite the fact that most other modern American law enforcement officers have switched to semi-autos like the Glock. But then again, he is Rick Grimes, a serious badass. As the 6" stainless Colt Python is an out-of-production collector's item worth more than a half-dozen new Glocks, Rick is apparently also pretty loaded.
• Whoniverse:
  • Even though the Brig carries a Browning Hi-Power as his sidearm for most of his time as commander of UNIT in Doctor Who, when he comes out of retirement to go to the Doctor's aid in "Battlefield", he takes a Webly MK IV out of its case and employs it to great effect against Morgaine's forces: finally shooting the Eldritch Abomination while proclaiming "Get off my world!", causing it to explode.
  • In the Doctor Who episode "The Impossible Astronaut", River Song uses a six-shooter to shoot the Stetson off The Eleventh Doctor's head, blowing off the barrel as she re-holsters it. "Hello, sweetie!"
  • Jack Harkness of Doctor Who and Torchwood prefers an antique Webley revolver, despite everyone else's penchant for modern handguns. Somewhat justified in that he probably got it when they were the best personal guns around, although that doesn't explain why he hasn't updated since. Though being immortal, the usual hazard of possibly dying if you run out of bullets isn't much of an impediment, and this is the man who's spent the best part of two millennia running around in a Group Captain's RAF greatcoat and uniform. Like each regeneration of the Doctor, he found an aesthetic he liked and he's stuck with it.
• Defied in The Wire: Cutty is an experienced and feared gangland hitman, but he's been in prison for 15 years. When they send him on a hit and give him an automatic pistol, he complains that revolvers are more practical because they never jam, while spraying bullets at the target will hit bystanders and cause more problems. Slim Charles promptly tells him that automatic weapons are now standard because the game "got more fierce" while Cutty was away.

Music Videos

• "Holding Out for a Hero" by Bonnie Tyler: In the music video, the hero cowboy's revolver is definitely better than the outlaws' neon whips, and it is enough to shoot these riders off their Hellish Horses one by one.
• Magnum Bullets by Night Runner (feat. Dan Avidan) features, appropriately enough, a revolver as the primary protagonist's weapon. It blasts straight through the antagonist's otherwise perfect defenses.

Pinball

• In Police Force, almost all of the police are shown using revolvers, even as the criminals are armed with machine guns.

Tabletop Games

• The standard pistol in BattleTech RPG spinoff Mechwarrior is described as a .357 Magnum equivalent, possesses six shots, and does more damage than almost any other slugthrower pistol (the one that does do more damage than it has exactly three shots, but not double the damage). It's also more powerful than some of the sniper rifles and SMGs. Particularly notable for doing more damage than some of the laser pistols and laser rifles available in the setting, at a fraction of the cost. There is also no action penalty for reloading (speedloaders are in play, presumably). It is inexpensive, widely available, reliable (as in it doesn't jam on a fumble result like automatics will, nor does it have any accuracy penalties), relatively unrestricted, and has a low skill requirement, meaning that any character who doesn't want to specialize in handguns but still wants a sidearm can buy a revolver and protect themselves in a pinch.
• Clue: Colonel Mustard in the Conservatory with the Revolver!
  • Causing great confusion because while the cards (and the game rules) clearly said 'revolver', in most sets the actual playing piece was very clearly a semiautomatic pistol. Some had what looked more like a pepper-box, aka a pepper-box revolver, in which the whole multi-barrel assembly rotates.
• Exalted In the Age of Sorrows, revolvers are the most advanced gun-type weapon available. (And they can shoot firebolts or holy bullets!)
• Subverted in Feng Shui. Revolvers only have a limited amount of ammo, and reloading takes five shots compared to the one shot that you spend to reload a semiautomatic pistol unless you buy up the Lightning Reload gun schtick, meaning that you're going to be a while reloading and are probably going to be best off behind cover while doing so unless you opt for the New York Reload. Still, magnum revolvers do more damage on average than your regular semiautomatics, but when you've got weapons like the AMT Automag V and the Desert Eagle, which outdamage just about any other pistol out there and have the faster reload time, the only reason to even use a revolver is cool factor.
  • Then again, Feng Shui is built upon the Rule of Cool, so that could very well be reason enough.
• Games Workshop games:
  • In the 3rd Edition of Necromunda, House Goliath's stub cannon is an oversized revolver Hand Cannon that requires two hands to use and has the stopping power equivalent to larger heavy weapons. The rules represent this by giving the weapon the highest strength of any solid-shot Basic type weapon that can blow a target off their feet.
  • Warhammer 40,000:
    • The most common pattern of Astra Militarum grenade launchers have large revolver magazines. These weapons can be highly devastating and are very versatile due to their ability, in the lore and some editions of the game, to load various types of specialist ammunition.
    • The Skitarii warriors of the Adeptus Mechanicus wield a number of weapons, such as the galvanic rifle, radium carbine, and arc weaponry, are revolver weapons that fire a variety of Abnormal Ammo that make them far more effective than the equivalent weapons of most other armies.
    • Subverted with stub guns a.k.a stubbers and grot blasta, these guns were often revolvers and are the antithesis of pop culture's idea of a revolver. Largely ineffective, the stub gun/stub revolver disappeared from the mainline Warhammer 40,000 (though weapons like the Heavy Stubber, Macrostubber, and Stubcarbine persist) and shows up only in the gaiden games. Meanwhile, the grot blasta is a weak, crude gun that has difficulty piercing human skin.
• The most powerful handgun in GURPS: High-Tech is the Ruger Super Redhawk, a revolver.
  • Revolvers also do possess a few benefits over "autoloaders". For one, if you suffer a Misfire, you can simply pull the trigger again instead of having to immediately service the weapon. Secondly, they stand less of a chance of malfunctioning when fired underwater. Finally, they, along with manual repeaters, do not suffer a reduction in reliability when shot in outer space.
• Hong Kong Action Theatre is better about revolvers than Feng Shui is, thanks to all pistols being considered either Small Caliber, Mid-Caliber, Large Caliber, or Hand Cannons. Your standard .38 snub is a Mid-Caliber pistol (making it equivalent to a 9mm); a .44 Special is a Large Caliber pistol (making it about equal to a .45) and a .357 or .44 Magnum is a Hand Cannon (which is Exactly What It Says on the Tin). Under the reloading rules, you only run out of bullets on a gun if you roll a 1, 2, or 3 on D20, meaning as long as your dice luck holds out, you can blast off as many times as you want, though once you do run out of bullets, reloading takes a full turn.
• Pathfinder's rules for advanced guns make the revolver a nasty weapon indeed. Sure, it only does 1d8 damage, but it chews through armor of all kinds when fired within 100 feet, and can be fired six times before it needs reloading, leaving the wielder's other hand free — a hand which will probably be holding another revolver.
• Of the conventional handguns available in Rocket Age, the hand cannons are the most powerful and always described as large revolvers. They still pale in comparison to even the smallest Ray weapons, however.
• Present in Scion through the signature character of Eric Donner. This child of Thor wields a gigantic revolver with a firing pin made from a piece of Mjölnir.
• The Chrono Ranger of Sentinels of the Multiverse, being a sheriff from the wild west who slipped through time to the distant future, carries his trusty six-gun. Though he also uses a variety of futuristic weapons given to him by a futuristic AI, his revolver is his most reliable weapon, as nearly every card he has lets him do damage with it as a bonus to whatever other action it does.
• Shadowrun has all sorts of very powerful handguns, even the smallest of which can kill when backed by the kind of skill that most 'Runners possess. The standard issue revolver (Ruger Super Warhawk) does very slightly more damage than the standard issue Hand Cannon (Ares Predator). In theory, this is balanced by the smaller ammo capacity.
  • In fact, it ends up doing more damage per shot than most assault rifles due to its stats (Both do the same amount of damage, but the Warhawk is better at penetrating armour (which everyone is wearing in Shadowrun.)
  • With later editions, the Ruger could be even more nasty, rules for gun modifications included altering or adding new firing modes, including turning the Ruger's single action to a double action. Thus lifting the gun's restriction of one shot per turn, doubling the potential damage output!
• In Unhallowed Metropolis, with the undead highly resistant to damage, those that fight them favor using powerful guns over weaker ones with a higher rate of fire. So revolvers are the typical handgun used, with the best of them being a custom heavy revolver which is even more expensive and potent than the famed Westgate Executioner 12mm semi-automatic pistol. Also of note is the Magwitch Terminus which is a double-barrelled revolver, its main barrel uses 12mm bullets while the 2nd will fire a wooden stake to deal with vampires.
• Subverted in Unknown Armies, where the limited ammo and average damage combine to make most other handguns more useful (not that guns are that great in the game without proper skill). Still commonly used by Entropomancers, adepts who draw power from risk, because what good is a gun that can't play Russian Roulette?
• In the War Machine game, revolver technology scales up to the huge-caliber rifles used by Cygnar longgunners, and the huger-calbier cannons used by warjack robots like the Khador Decimator.

Toys

• The Nerf Maverick... What? Hey, it's their bestseller! Cheap, has a rail to slap on NERF accessories... problem is, like all nerf guns, it jams if you look at it weird and the cocking mechanism reduces your rate of fire.
  • A good rate of fire is pointless when it fails after two months of sporadic use.
  • It is particularly popular in the Steampunk community because of how spectacular it looks painted in brass, tin, and woodgrain.
  • Is it any wonder Megatron decided to use it for his altform in the Classics toyline?
  • That other new NERF revolver, the Spectre REV-5, is a 5-shooter with a slimmer body and an improved cylinder-advancing mechanism that greatly improves reliability, accuracy, and power. On top of that, its Tactical Rail is in a better place than on top of the priming action, AND it can take both barrel extensions and detachable stocks for specific situations.
  • There's also an upcoming automatic revolver, the Barricade REV-10, which holds more ammo than the other revolvers, and is more accurate than the standard flywheel-driven automatic dart blaster revolvers by virtue of having vertical-mounted flywheels rather than horizontal ones. Too bad it's far too noisy for stealth attacks.
  • The Furyfire is a pump-action revolver in Nerf's Dart Tag line, which by definition is awesome. Internally, it is an updated Maverick with a larger cylinder and great ammo capacity, greater range, and much less tendency to break the loading mechanism or misfeed darts.
  • The Maverick has a bigger, stronger brother, the Strongarm, which features the same six-round capacity, but includes a 'slam fire' function that can launch darts far faster than the Maverick, as well as greater range.
  • The Strongarm also has another brother, the Disruptor, which has a fixed cylinder instead of a drop cylinder, but allows you to reload mid-fight without taking out the cylinder, making it more compact and stable.
  • Nerf's Zombie Strike Hammershot is a five-round revolver with an external hammer that has to be cocked before each shot instead of pulling back a slide like the Maverick, just like a proper revolver. The Nerf Rebelle Sweet Revenge is a pink-and-white, decal-covered version of the Hammershot, only with smoother external molding but functionally identical internal parts, marketed to girls.
  • The Zombie Strike FlipFury is a twelve-round revolver with two vertically-aligned cylinders and a second trigger that flips the cylinders around so you can quickly switch to the second after emptying the first. It even has the slam-fire ability of the Strongarm.
  • In what is possibly this trope taken to its extremes in terms of design, the Zombie Strike Doominator is a revolver-SMG with a cylinder comprised of revolver cylinders, making it look something like a revolver grenade launcher as a result. It features four revolver cylinders carrying six darts each for a total supply of 24 darts. Most notably, its construction gives it access to the slamfire function, giving it a rate of fire of up to four darts a second.

Video Games

• A matter of taste in 762 High Calibre: there are a few revolvers in the game. They are always more powerful than comparable handguns (one of the most powerful revolvers is the Garza, which fires 12.7mm rounds, making it almost an order of magnitude more powerful than most handguns), and due to somewhat high manufacturing standards, they tend to be more accurate. However, they suffer from poor balance, low magazine size, lengthy reloading times (no speedloaders) and, most importantly, they shoot very slowly compared to handguns. You can fire three 9mm bullets for every .357 shot from the Colt Python. The Blue Sun mod (which is so popular that it's practically mandatory for players) adds a large number of revolvers, including .38s and even single-action revolvers. Both calibers are fairly common early-game pistols (especially cheap .38 Special revolvers like the Ruger Security Six), but their only advantage in many cases over semi-autos is that they don't require the player to buy magazines. They still shoot slower and have a lower capacity than any semi-automatic, and decent automatics are available for free early on. Taking one is really just a matter of style.
• Revolvers are the only handguns in Alan Wake. Considering there isn't a gunsmith in Bright Falls, however, it makes sense to own a gun that's relatively easy to maintain. Zigzagged in Alan Wake's American Nightmare; the base revolver is one of the less powerful weapons available. The Magnum, on the other hand, is a revolver more powerful than a good portion of the two-handed weapons available, can shoot through enemies, and even has a larger magazine than the standard revolver. However, its spare ammo pool is quite small.
• In Alliance of Valiant Arms, the Python 357 revolver is the most powerful pistol in the game; even moreso than the Desert Eagle.
• Alone in the Dark:
  • In the original game, the revolver can be found inside a shoe box that was buried under a pile of coal. Some players prefer this revolver over the rifle, since it has less of a recoil, and its cartridges are waterproof.
  • Averted in the fourth game, The New Nightmare — the revolver is the starting weapon of both Edward Carnby and Aline Cedrac, and it's barely adequate for the zombies and monster dog starting enemies. Aline's revolver is pretty due to its silver finish but is otherwise fairly weak. Carnby's custom revolver has two barrels and two cylinders, and thus has a total of 12 bullets as it fires two of them at once — he'll be killing enemies faster than Aline until they both get their hands on the shotgun.
• The Wingman is considered one of the most effective guns in Apex Legends due to its high damage and good accuracy, although its 4-shot magazine definitely means there's a learning curve.
• Instant Armor created by Arc Angle's Bounty Hunters also forms a large revolver, which is as dangerous as it is cool-looking.
• For the Gunslinger/ Gunsmith in Arcanum: Of Steamworks & Magick Obscura, the Fine Revolver is the best all-around weapon until mid-game. Best rate of fire, best damage per shot, best damage per action point. After that you'll need to rely on the Handcannon (sawed-off shotgun), then the Elephant Gun (heavy rifle) before you reach your endgame uberweapon: Droch's Warbringer, a fast-firing and extremely heavy revolver.
• Arizona Sunshine: You can wield revolvers against the undead, but it's debatable if they do more damage than a Glock.
• In Ashes 2063, one of Scavenger's most reliable weapons is an S&W 625, referred to in-game as the .45 Revolver. It is always pinpoint accurate, deals considerable damage –- on the Survival modes where all attacks are more powerful, it can sometimes kill bandits or even a Pit Fiend in one single shot – and can be fired relatively fast if needed. Heavy bullets for it are not quite as plentiful as light bullets for the 9mm Autoloader and Machine Pistol outside of bandit drops, but the Revolver offsets this with its ammo efficiency. It is often featured as Scav's weapon of choice, as it's the gun he starts with in 2063 and he's holding one in almost all in-game art, whether on foot or on his motorcycle.
• In spite of their name, the Dueling Pistols in Bastion are very clearly a pair of revolvers, as evidenced by both their design, and the fact their ammo capacity upgrades explicitly refer to cylinders. They fire as fast as you can pull the trigger, and can be upgraded to either cause knockback or entirely ignore armor. Their active skill is either a rain of lead titled Slinger Storm, or an aptly titled Duel Decider (a devastating Critical Hit).
• Battlefield:
  • In Battlefield 2142, the strongest handgun is the revolver, balanced out by the fact it has less ammunition and truly awesome muzzle climb. Not to mention it has easily the best reload animation in the game, along with a loud boom that was just as terrifying to hear if you were on the PAC as hearing the Shuko Light Machinegun was to an EU player. The EU revolver also looks to have ammo of a pretty impressive calibre when compared to the PAC pistol, and this revolver has eight shots compared to the typical six.
  • Bad Company 2, Battlefield 3, and Battlefield 4 have the MP-412 revolver that kills in 3 bullets, 4 at maximum range, compared to the other pistols that kill in 4 at the closest range at best. It has quite the kick and a small magazine of 6, however. BF3 and 4 add several more with similarly high power, 3 including a Taurus Model 44 and 4, with all DLC, also adding the Mateba Model 6 and Chiappa Rhino 40DS.
• From Bayonetta 2, there's Secret Character Rosa, Bayonetta's mother, and her revolvers called Unforgiven, which she wields on both her hands and feet. They are basically a quartet of hand cannons and do three times as much damage as any other weapon in the game, balanced out by the fact their wielder has very low defense and is a Glass Cannon.
• BioShock:
  • The first gun found in BioShock is a six-shot revolver that is loaded by replacing the entire cylinder like a magazine. It's the most basic gun in the game and deals relatively low damage. Until you upgrade it that is. When fully upgraded, it gains a damage-increasing "ammunition accelerator" and has its clip size quadrupled by the addition of an extra ammunition attachment. This effectively turns the revolver into a belt-fed, Gauss-revolver. Not that you would need all that dakka, since once you get enough Research points one clean headshot with an Antipersonnel bullet is enough to kill all but bosses in mook clothing, and piercing rounds will put a huge dent in Big Daddies.
  • Subject Delta, Player Character of BioShock 2 uses a rivet gun instead of a pistol. But even he doesn't entirely miss out; upgrading the shotgun's ammo capacity converts it from a regular double barrel into what is effectively a double-cylinder revolver.
  • BioShock Infinite introduces the Hand Cannon, which has the 2nd best accuracy and damage of all bullet-fed weapons (the sniper rifle being the only thing above it).
• The Magnum is one of the most powerful guns in Black. It is almost as accurate as a sniper rifle and deals about as much damage as one, making it a guaranteed One-Hit Kill on Normal difficulty for all but the strongest enemies (who'll still go down in two shots or one headshot). Having one equipped is almost essential to winning the incredibly hard final fight.
• The Blackpine Outbreak: A revolver is the only weapon you can get in the game. One shot to the head can take a zombie down.
• The Revolver in Bleed has a good stopping power, but is truly unique in having its shots ricochet off surfaces.
• Bombshell and its sequel Ion Fury has the military cyborg Shelly who owns a massive tri-barrel revolver called Loverboy which packs quite a punch.
• Gearbox, the people who made Borderlands, certainly seem to think so, which is very true to its Space Western roots.
  • When on your first playthrough as Mordecai, the guy who uses lots of pistols, the first guns you get are low-powered automatics. Later, you will find that the revolvers in this game are like combinations of pistols and sniper rifles. On top of that, every revolver pistol, especially Mashers, is a Hand Cannon. And that's just the tip of the iceberg, with revolver shotguns, revolver sniper rifles, revolver rocket launchers, which are all in seven-shot, six-shot, three-shot, two-shot, side-gate, cylinder swapping, break-open with speed loaders... almost every gun with under 8 rounds per reload uses revolver technology. Revolvers are also more prone to come equipped with a blade for melee attacks than any other gun.
  • With the Masher, a revolver that shoots shotgun shells, it's a case of Revolvers that shoot shotgun shells are just better.
  • Toned down in Borderlands 2, though. Revolver shotguns have been replaced with break action, drum magazine, and box magazine-fed shotguns, revolver rocket launchers are gone, but Torgue, Maliwan, and Jakobs continue the trend. Torgue's line of explosives-only weaponry extends to revolvers, and it is even possible to get a 14-round explosive Torgue revolver that shoots two bullets at once; all of Maliwan's pistols, which are elemental, are also revolver-like, and Jakobs still continues their Western line of revolving rifles and heavy revolvers, as their weapons retain their reliability and high damage from the first game with the new attribute of firing as fast as you can click.
• In Broforce, the revolver of Indiana Brones insta-gibs all the basic enemies and tears through several of them at once.
• Call of Duty:
  • In Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2, General Shepherd's weapon of choice is a .44 Magnum Colt Anaconda revolver. He uses it to kill Roach and Ghost, and nearly kills Soap with it before Price tackles Shepherd at the last split-second before/as he fires.
  • The last pistol to be unlocked in the online mode of Call of Duty: World at War is a revolver.
  • Its sequel, Call of Duty: Black Ops, has the Python... which is the only pistol that can have a scope. Or you can dual-wield it. In the story, Mason takes it as his weapon of choice after the first couple of missions, starting with one or pulling one out of nowhere for scripted sequences on several occasions.
• The revolver of Chrome (2003) is a Hand Cannon that fires 12mm bullets; each one does 3 times as much damage as an assault rifle bullet and can kill enemies with one shot at close range. On the downside, it takes up more space than the regular pistol and only holds 6 shots.
• Clive Barker's Undying had a revolver whose hammer could be "fanned" for rapid fire, silver bullets optional.
• The Anaconda Black in Combat Arms. While it has a low rate of fire and low ammo capacity, it can take down any enemy in one to two shots, making some players label it as a Game-Breaker.
• You get to see one of these in the multiplayer side of Conker's Bad Fur Day. One shot, one kill. And laser-sighted, too.
• Downplayed in Control, where revolver-style Grip is the base form of the Service Weapon. It's "better" in the sense that it's Boring, but Practical, while most of the cooler forms are Awesome, but Impractical. If you do an extremely obtuse and unlabeled sidequest, you are awarded a unique mod for it that makes it so that any shot that hits an enemy doesn't consume ammo, which actually does make it quite a bit better than most other forms since you could theoretically keep shooting it forever and never have to reload as long as you never miss.
• Being a Steampunk-flavored game, Damnation has a lot of increasingly cool (and ridiculous) revolver varieties, including one that has four cylinders.
• The revolver in darkSector loads and fires sniper rifle rounds. Predictably, is by far the most powerful handgun available.
• Dark Watch has the Redeemer, a heavily modified revolver with a curved blade fitted to the grip and a 24 round, helical magazine that slots in underneath the barrel and cylinder, and reloads extremely quickly. The same goes for the Warmongers, smaller revolvers that are always wielded as a pair.
• DayZ:
  • The mod has an unusual example in that while the revolver (A Taurus Tracker 455) is not especially powerful, being chambered in .45 ACP, it is one of the most practical weapons in the game, being loud enough not to attract a large number of zombies.
  • The Magnum in the Standalone is liked by many over the semiautomatic pistols for many reasons. Style, power, and the fact that you don't need to find magazines (Which primarily spawn in Airfields which are known as Death Traps due to hostile players heading straight for them to find powerful weapons) are popular reasons.
• In Dead End St, a revolver is the highest tier of weapon available and has the best damage, even compared to automatic weapons and shotguns.
• The Dolt 45 and Snubnose revolvers in Death Road to Canada are more powerful than the average pistol, at the expense of firing slower and holding less ammo. They're better as early-game weapons where saving ammo is more crucial and where the Shooting stat is a bit underdeveloped. In the endgame, it's better to switch to pistols with higher reserves, assuming one's shooting stat has improved.
• Averted in Decision 2 and 3, where the revolver is the starting weapon, and also the weakest one available.
• The "Bulldog" Heavy Revolver wielded by Deep Rock Galactic's Gunner boasts the highest damage per shot of any bullet-based weapon, at the cost of only having 4 shots in its cylinder. It can even be upgraded to fire explosive rounds. And it's decently accurate too, for those nasty glyphids that aren't in range of your Minigun; especially if you have a bead on their unarmored spots.
• Destiny has a class of weapons called "Hand Cannons" which are high-caliber, revolver-style pistols about the size of a sawn-off shotgun.
• In Deus Ex: Human Revolution, the revolver's a heavy hitter from the start, and can be upgraded to fire explosive rounds.
• Nero from Devil May Cry 4 uses a revolver for his gunslinging, as opposed to Dante's Guns Akimbo style. Said weapon, Blue Rose, features a truly insane two-barrel over/under configuration, the logistics of which are best ignored. It's the same kind of revolver as the Hand Cannon from Resident Evil 4 with a second barrel. However, said revolver is not implied to be any better than Dante's guns. The only real application of this trope is that Nero's fully charged bullet is extremely powerful, although it takes forever to charge. Compare to Dante's guns, which are faster, and (uncharged) deal roughly the same damage during combat. However, during cutscenes, Dante's guns have enough power to take out Physical Gods. Plus, the over/under configuration of Nero's gun, while awesome, would mean the shooter would only be able to get three blasts off before needing to reload (which Nero is of course shown doing only once in the entire game).
• Thoroughly averted in Door Kickers. The revolvers available offer no real advantages over the .45 pistols but have multiple weaknesses such as a lower fire rate and a smaller ammo capacity. The weakest enemy in the game also uses a .38 revolver that is ineffective in harming your officers.
• Last Wish revolver is considered the most powerful of all gold-tier weapons in Dying Light, as its special attack is the only thing that kills Giant Mook enemies with a single headshot.
• In Empire Earth, the hero characters of WW1, WW2, and Modern eras wield revolvers, while the basic units of the time use rifles.
• Two of the starting characters in Enter the Gungeon (the Convict and the Hunter), possess revolvers as their default, infinite-ammo firearms. A lot of other handguns are also revolvers, and many are really cool. Examples include the Frost Giant (a large, powerful revolver, which fires as fast as the player pulls the trigger, and every shot from which also discharges a cone of ice from the barrel that freezes enemies up close), and the Devolver, which often converts the enemies it doesn't kill outright into the weak Arrowkin.
  • Smiley's Revolver and Shades' Revolver are the weapons wielded by a pair of potential Floor 1 bosses (though you can find either of them on that very floor before fighting them, somehow, or way after that fight). They are decent enough for early-to-midgame, but are always useful to keep around thanks to their passive bonuses: Smiley's Revolver reduces the shop prices, while Shades' Revolver substantially decreases active items' recharge time, which can be extremely important when those items are something like Stuffed Star (temporary invulnerability) or Big Boy (calls down a straight-up nuclear missile.)
  • One of the most powerful guns in the entire game, The Finished Gun, is a revolver that quickly fires high-damage bullets, and the final shot of each magazine is a larger bullet that deals more damage and reflects enemy bullets.
  • Even the floors are called "chambers" in a direct reference to the chambers in the revolver's cylinder, and the floor teleport tiles look exactly like a revolver's cylinder.
• Averted in Eternal Darkness, where revolvers are among the weakest weapons you can use, even if you enchant them first, but they can be handy for avoiding going toe-to-toe with a Horror, at least.
• E.Y.E: Divine Cybermancy has 4 different pistols to choose from, the first two (and the weakest) are semi-automatics, the latter two are revolvers and to say they are significantly more powerful is an understatement. The strongest of the bunch, the .444 Bear Killer, can bring down anything from random thugs to Power Armor-wearing cybernetic super soldiers to military grade attack helicopters in less than 4 shots. However, the semi-automatics are generally more practical as a backup weapon due to larger magazines and overkill only being necessary against Heavy Jians, Interceptors, and Deus Exs. That being said, the .444 Bear Killer is perfectly capable of being a player's primary weapon.
• Fallout:
  • Fallout 2 has a .44 Magnum Revolver that is available at The Den. This revolver can fire faster than the pistols you can find at the beginning of the game, and has more damage than the Desert Eagle as well. You can use it until up to New Reno, where there's the .233 Pistol, which has more damage. However, with the Fast Shot trait, you can shoot faster for one AP less. This means that you can fire the revolver three times with 9 AP. You can also upgrade the revolver to use a Speed Loader, which makes it reload for 1 AP. Cue The Chosen One shooting a revolver three times, then reloading it. All in one turn, if you maxed Agility to gain 10 AP. Now, if you get the perk Bonus Rate of Fire, you can fire it for 2 AP, which means that you can UNLOAD your chamber into an enemy (if you maxed Agility and took two levels of Action Boy/Girl to get 12 AP), then reload it and shoot it five times in the next turn. This makes the gun so powerful you can use it until you find a Gauss Pistol near the end of the game, which has the same rate of fire as the Magnum while doing massive damage and carrying twelve rounds for two turns of uninterrupted death. Revolvers really are Just Better. It should be noted that the ".223 Pistol" is based on Deckard's gun. Confusingly, its look and design come from a .223 Steyr-Mannlicher's exposed bolt action, but the real-world prop was a revolver. Hence why the video game refers to That Gun as a rifle round-firing Hand Cannon.
  • Fallout 3 goes to town with this trope. In the stock game, the only semiauto pistols are the completely useless Chinese pistol and the 10mm automatic, which is useful early on but soon discarded for something — almost anything — else. The .32 revolver is so weak it's not even worth talking about, but the scoped .44 Magnum is a far more powerful weapon, and the Blackhawk (special scoped magnum) is one of the most powerful small guns you can use and the best handgun in the entire game. It also makes a very cool noise. It's incredibly visceral getting headshots on Enclave soldiers in power armor. Then there's the official expansion, which adds a revolver that's even better than the Blackhawk, and another that somehow uses .44 ammo but fires pellets like a shotgun. Then there are countless weapon mods, which add Vash the Stampede's gun, the original .223 pistol from Fallout 2, many real-world revolvers, and even rarities like the Mateba Model 6. Plus, there's the Mysterious Stranger's .44 Magnum, capable of one-shotting any (killable) character in the game. The only way you can get it yourself is by console commands.
  • Fallout: New Vegas plays with this trope. Of the starter pistols, the .357 Magnum has better damage and accuracy than the 9mm and 10mm automatics but fires slower, while the .45 Auto outperforms it but requires completion of the Honest Hearts DLC to obtain. Endgame pistols generally come in two categories: First, the smaller, quicker gun that relies on critical hits, of which there are two revolvers (That Gun, Lucky) and two automatics (A Light Shining in Darkness, Li'l Devil). The automatics fire faster with higher base damage, while the revolvers are more accurate (especially with Hand Loader ammo) with a higher critical hit rate. The second category is the larger, slower Hand Cannon — all of these (the .44 Magnum and Mysterious Magnum, the Hunting Revolver and Ranger Sequoia) are revolvers.
  • Fallout 4 has a few nice (and not-so-nice) revolvers. The .44 Magnum hits like a truck, and legendary effects can make it absurdly powerful. Conrad Kellog, the Disc-One Final Boss, even uses one of these to kill your spouse in the prologue, and to fight you. The Western Revolver from Nuka-World is a fancier-looking (and even more powerful) .44 magnum, and can even have a scope attached for long-range shots, as the Western Revolver shoots with almost no projectile deviation. For more mundane weaponry, the Pipe Revolver Gun uses .45 rounds, and can be modded into either a pistol or rifle and acts as a powerful early-game weapon, before .45 rounds become widely available.
• Averted in The Fall: Last Days of Gaia, where 38. Special revolvers are the worst-ranged weapons.
• The Far Cry series has started taking advantage of this trope starting with Far Cry 3, where the top-level pistol of the first half of the game is a .44 Magnum revolver, which can be fitted with a longer barrel, illuminated iron sights, or a scope of some variety; it's powerful enough that one shot is a guaranteed kill on almost any non-animal enemy you meet in that half of the game. Far Cry 4 dials it back, however, as the starting Webley revolver has low power, a slow rate of fire, and a slow reload, and the returning .44 Magnum doesn't get its long-barrel option... as well as not showing up until the point where you can simply skip it and go straight for the even better Desert Eagle.
• Final Fantasy:
  • Final Fantasy VII: Dirge of Cerberus: Vincent Valentine's main weapon, appearing first in the Advent Children movie and later in said game, is the Cerberus, a massive three-barreled, three-cylinder double-action revolver (the barrels are arranged in a triangular setup with two side by side with one sitting on top) that fires all three barrels simultaneously when the trigger is pulled; the kind of nightmarish internal mechanisms and ridiculous trigger pull this would require is studiously ignored. In addition, it is powerful enough to take down helicopters. Though it takes a little longer to do so if you're actually playing the game. Word of God has also retconned the original game to state that the Cerberus should be considered his default weapon.
  • Squall Leonhart of Final Fantasy VIII uses a gunblade with a revolver handle. While he does get more powerful weapons throughout the game, this is his iconic weapon and is used in every cutscene in which he needs to do something badass.
  • Evidently Noctis and Prompto are of this opinion in Final Fantasy XV as most of the weapons under the Firearm category tend to be revolvers. They're not particularly powerful compared to most other weapon categories, but they can be used while in cover and you can aim for weak spots with them.
• The Revolver is considered a Legendary weapon in Foes.io. It does a whole 600 damage (next to Pistol's 300 and Silenced Pistol's 400), and thus is guaranteed to kill any rival player in 2 shots. It is also very accurate and can fire twice a second, but obviously only has 6 bullets in it, when a Pistol comes with 20 and Silenced Pistol with 15.
• In Foxhole, the revolver is a pure upgrade over the starting pistol, giving up two rounds of ammo for better range and damage.
• You can wield a revolver in Frostbite: Deadly Climate.
• The Boltok pistol from Gears of War is great for decapitating enemies in one to three shots, which makes up for many of its shortcomings.
• .44 Magnus is the most powerful handgun-type weapon in Generation Zero.
• Zig-zagged in Girls' Frontline. Revolvers are part of the Handgun class, and like them are mostly valued by their ability to buff other units in the echelon. Guns like Nagant M1895 and Astra Revolver are good for early game but are easily replaceable later on (the former does get a very useful MOD 3 upgrade down the road). Colt Single Action Army is a staple buffer but competes with other handguns for a slot in most formations (though, like Nagant, her MOD 3 upgrade pushes her to the top-of-tier lists). Colt Python, on the other hand, has one of the best damage output for her class, making her invaluable for cost-efficient 5 HG compositions.
• Subverted in The Godfather: The Game. Aldo's first gun is a .38 snubnose that is appropriately weak; even after getting the level 3 upgrade with its gold plating and ivory grips, though it still has enough accuracy to make headshots a breeze. The pistol is stronger than the .38 and faster-firing than the Magnum. Meanwhile, the Magnum series may be the strongest handgun, able to match the shotgun for power and initially have better cylinder capacity, but once you get the level 3 upgrades for both you find that the level 3 shotgun, with its 10 rounds per "clip" and 100 round total capacity compared to the 8-80 of the level 3 Magnum, is preferable in a sustained engagement. In the sequel, the .38 is no longer present. The pistol is faster-firing and has a bigger magazine than the Magnum, but the Magnum deals more raw damage. Furthermore, the shotgun has been greatly nerfed from the first game, with both smaller clip (yes) and total ammo capacity, meaning the Magnum is now the best.
• GoldenEye (1997) on the Nintendo 64 gives you the Cougar Magnum, the most powerful handgun in the game, which will kill almost anything in one shot, and shoots through walls. Of course, it has an awful rate of fire, and limited bullets, but just about anything it hits is going down. It even sounds like a cannon when fired!
• In Golden Krone Hotel, a revolver is Sorina Arobase's firearm of choice when she's still in her human form. Whenever she turns into a vampire, her hands morph into strong, yet deformed claws that make holding anything besides potions impossible.
• In several of the Grand Theft Auto games (Vice City, the Stories duology, and Chinatown Wars), a .357 Colt Python is the most powerful handgun, though it also comes with a slower rate of fire and reload.
• Guilty Gear -STRIVE- brings us Happy Chaos, the "Gunslinging Broken Messiah". He totes a borderline-legendary revolver that only appears five times across the entire multiverse, but is sometimes seen Dual Wielding on account of also possessing a replica. Gameplay-wise, his revolvers and unique Stance System mean he can pressure you from anywhere on stage. He does have two gimmick bars, however (one for ammo, and one for focus), and if either one is empty, he can't use his stances, forcing him into Difficult, but Awesome.
• Guncaster has the Longhorn, a revolver that fires massive bullets and can be zoomed in to snipe enemies at long range. Upgrading it allows you to fire electric bullets that can spread lightning to multiple enemies.
• Half-Life:
  • Gordon Freeman gets two handguns in both Half-Life and Half-Life 2. His starter gun is a 9mm handgun (respectively a Glock 17 or an H&K USP Match), and later he will find a .357 Colt Python. On a whole, it's downplayed for balance purposes. The revolver is incredibly powerful and accurate, essentially a Sniper Pistol; humanoid enemies will always go down in one shot until very late in the game. On the downside, it has ridiculously low ammo (36 and 24 bullets total in the first and second games, compared to 168 for the 9mm guns), very scarce supplies of ammo for it, and a very low fire rate thanks to high recoil. Finally, the reload speed is sluggish. Thus, the revolver excels at picking off targets at medium range, but in close quarters with multiple foes, it's a better idea to use the lighter handgun to snap off several quick headshots. The fact that ammo is so restricted that you'll have an overbearing urge to save it for emergencies make this gun Too Awesome to Use. And it can make Breen do a backflip (at about 1:30).
  • Subverted in Half-Life: Opposing Force, which replaces the Magnum revolver from the original game with a semiautomatic Desert Eagle for the expansion pack, which holds more ammo per magazine, reloads faster, and can fire faster too if you turn off the Laser Sight (though in return, it's less accurate than the original's revolver until you turn the laser back on).
  • In the Valve-approved Fan Remake of the original Half Life, Black Mesa, the Colt Python has a slightly longer reload speed, and a halved reserve ammo capacity, but this is more than offset by its ammo becoming far more frequent.
• Hunt: Showdown absolutely revels in this trope. Being set in 1899, there are multiple different period-appropriate revolvers using all five of the game's ammo types. They include cylinders with varying capacity (including the Lamat's, which puts a shotgun shell at the center), and options to duel wield or fan the hammer. There are early automatic pistols in the game, but they suffer from cumbersome, wasteful magazines. The most powerful handgun in the game is the Caldwell Uppercut, so named because of the kickback that results from it being modified to use long rifle ammo.
• In Hotline Miami, the revolvers are most notable for their ability to pierce multiple enemies.
• The Rusty Revolver in Immortal Redneck does considerably more damage than the basic pistol, but it is also far less accurate.
• The revolvers of Immortal: Unchained deal more damage per shot than the pistols, at the expense of having a lower fire rate.
• Shelly's starting gun in Ion Fury is the "Loverboy", a ridiculously oversized, three-barreled revolver. Its alternate fire will lock on to multiple targets with hold-and-release.
• In Jagged Alliance 2, this is generally averted; the weakest pistol in the game is a snub-nosed .38 that can't even reliably kill with a headshot, The .357 is at least on a par with the 9mm semi-automatics, but is slow to fire, has a much smaller magazine and can't take a suppressor. In addition, the expansion pack adds in Tex, a Japanese Western fanatic who uses blinged-out movie prop revolvers. He's good with them, but again, the AP costs. In 1.13, this is played straight; the best handgun you can get is the .357 Satan, which has a low AP cost and takes the heavily damaging AET round. You can also purchase a Raging Bull or a Freedom Arms revolver, both of which fire the .454 Casull round, or the slightly less powerful UDAR that fires what are effectively .410 shotgun shells loaded with slugs. This is all somewhat academic, however, as pistols are quickly demoted to Emergency Weapon status once the Mooks start showing up with assault rifles and better body armour.
• In Jupiter Hell, .44 revolver deals the same damage as a .44 hunter rifle, which is 1.5 times the damage of a 9mm pistol, even doing slightly more raw damage per shot than a CRI plasma pistol. Unlike the two of them, it has a 20% critical bonus that stacks with all your other critical modifiers. However, its chambers fit 6 bullets instead of 8, its range is inferior to a plasma pistol, and it is reloaded bullet-by-bullet. Guard-type enemies will always carry a .44 revolver in addition to either a basic 9mm pistol or a plasma pistol if they used to be CRI. Weirdly, the normal, unpossessed, yet still-hostile CRI Guards that are encountered on Io only carry a plasma pistol, which makes one wonder how their possessed versions found theirs. There is also a rare JS .44 revolver, which is slightly more damaging than the normal version and also has a better accuracy and a 30% critical chance. However, its chamber is limited to three bullets.
• In Just Cause 2, the revolver is one of the various one-handed guns available in the game and is all-round the most powerful (the Sawn-Off Shotgun can deliver a bigger punch, but this requires that all its pellets hit the target, only achievable at point-blank range). It's capable of one-shotting just about any non-Elite Mook and can be upgraded to pack 12 rounds in its six-shot cylinder somehow. A fully upgraded revolver allows Rico to casually wipe out entire Panauan military patrols with one magazine. Its biggest limitations are a low fire rate and a relatively small ammo pool, but seeing as how enemies regularly carry and therefore drop their own revolvers for ammo this is hardly as pressing an issue as, say, a shortage of Sniper Rifle ammunition.
• Dan Smith in Killer7 has a revolver as a weapon, and it's the best in the game even before he replaces it with the even awesomer demon gun (which is also a revolver, natch). Coyote also uses a revolver.
• In Killzone 2, the Helghast are given the semi-automatic StA18 pistol, a fairly powerful gun with a magazine that slots in under the barrel forward of the trigger assembly. What do the ISA give the good guys as their sidearm in response? The M4 Revolver. A good solid magnum revolver based on the Mateba, with excellent accuracy (to the point that you get a PS3 trophy for scoring three headshots in a row with it) and stopping power. However, the best handgun is a triple-shot shotgun pistol that looks like a handheld grenade launcher.
• The revolver in Krunker.io is the sole weapon of the Detective class, and so has to be correspondingly good. As such, it does the 2nd largest per-shot damage after Hunter's Sniper Rifle, and so it kills that Glass Cannon class in one hit, while two-shotting everyone else but the Mighty Glacier Spray N' Pray.
• Played with in Land of the Dead: Road to Fiddler's Green: Only the revolver is able to dismember limbs and score outright instant kills with headshots, but the hit detection is a bit janky. The competing Glock pistol can't blow off arms or heads, but it does fire much faster and, thanks to the rather simple gameplay mechanics, three shots anywhere on an ordinary zombie's body is a guaranteed kill.
• The Last of Us: The .357 revolver that Joel acquires does more damage than the 9mm pistol (the latter requiring three body shots to kill unarmored humans and runners, while the latter only requires two shots. On Grounded difficulty, the revolver becomes a One-Hit Kill on humans.) but has a slower rate of fire and less ammo capacity. Then there's El Diablo, a high-caliber revolver with a scope that Joel finds near the end of the game, which will kill all non-armored enemies in one shot by default and can be upgraded to pierce armor as well.
• Left to Survive from Upwake.Me has the revolver special weapon class. These have only a few shots but do incredible damage and penetrates the target to continue hitting. Of interesting note is the weapon, Jolly Roger. It's classified as an auto-pistol special weapon but it's actually a very intriguing revolver design. This ornate weapon loosely based on the HDH Støckel revolver, dates back to the Golden Age of Piracy. It's an over-and-under double-barrelled revolver. What makes this gun even better is that its main cylinder has a secondary cylinder placed within it to feed the lower barrel. This secondary cylinder carries a good 8 rounds but the main cylinder holds a whopping 20 rounds! It's this massive ammo capacity and Clock Punk firing mechanism that makes this revolver a fully automatic auto-pistol.
• Zig-zagged in Mafia: The City of Lost Heaven. The earliest revolvers you are likely to find are Colt Detective Special and Smith & Wesson Model 10, which fire low-power .38 special rounds and are inferior in damage, stability, and fire and reload speed to the semi-auto Colt M1911, with a slightly more common ammo being their only advantage. However, Smith & Wesson M 27 .357 magnum is rare but packs the big punch you'd expect.
• Mass Effect:
  • While not a traditional revolver by any means (since revolvers have long been obsolete), the Cerberus-made M-358 Talon from Mass Effect 3 is a shotgun-pistol hybrid, and to ensure it fires properly, the gun has multiple heat sinks that rotates with each fire, akin to a 20th-century revolver. The "better" part of the trope comes with it being one of the most useful and heavy-hitting handguns you can get in the game, making it a favorite choice of a sidearm for players in both single-player and multi-player.
  • Mass Effect: Andromeda introduces the Sidewinder, which fits this trope far more traditionally than the M-358 Talon. A fantastic gun having a fast rate of fire and good damage output, its only limitation is its low, six-shot capacity.
• Averted in MDK2. Max the Dog can have a Magnum, an Uzi, a Shotgun, a Gatling Gun, and a Ray Gun in his arsenal. Of these weapons, the Magnum has the worst power and rate of fire for Max.
• Metal Gear:
  • Revolver Ocelot. It's right there in his Code Name. In the prequel Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater, he starts off with a semiautomatic and is pretty good with it, killing one man with a ricochet shot. However, Snake notes his technique is more suited to using a revolver, and he soon switches to the Single Action Army. Interestingly, when he first switches to the revolver, it's shown he has to do some adjusting; for example, he doesn't realize that the gun only has six shots the first time he takes on Snake with it.^note Compare the quote on top of this page, showing off his growth over the years. In any case, he rather enjoys reloading.
    "This way of reloading is a revolution!"
    "There's nothing like the feeling of slamming a long silver bullet into a well-greased chamber."
    "I've never felt a tension like this before!"
  • To go with the katana thing, when Ocelot blasts the Russian mook in the Tanker chapter of Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty, the camera angles and Ocelot's pose as he holsters his revolver are extremely similar to the 'sheathe your katana after a Clean Cut' shots used after a Single-Stroke Battle. Right down to holstering it across-hip instead of same-hip.
  • If you contact Master Miller during the duel against him in the first game, you'll get an explanation of why the revolver is so powerful, at least for inflicting very nasty wounds. In gameplay terms for the games that let you use them, however, they're Awesome, but Impractical; they provide more stopping power than semi-automatic pistols (even the game's beloved .45 ACP handguns), but cannot be suppressed, which makes them unsuited to a Stealth-Based Game.
  • Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain has three different types of revolver, all of which fit in the secondary slot:
    • The WU S333 (which also has short and long-barreled variants), sporting good damage per shot and good accuracy,
    • The Uragan-5, a revolver shotgun that has slug and non-lethal variants,
    • And the Tornado-6, Ocelot's weapon of choice in the game. It sports greater damage-per-shot than the WU S333 and can even take advantage of ricochets to hit enemies beind obstacles, but cannot be modified in any way. If the player chooses to play as Ocelot in FOBs, Ocelot will dual wield them.
• The starting magnums in Metal Wolf Chaos are cool, but they soon get outclassed by the more advanced semiautomatic handguns. The late-game magnums, however, are some of the most powerful weapons available.
• Metro:
  • The only sidearm available to Artyom is, curiously enough, a revolver chambered in .44 Magnum (rather out of place in Moscow, as the .44 Magnum cartridge is only really popular in America). Next to the Bastard SMG, it's one of the most ubiquitous guns around. It is more accurate and does more damage per shot than most weapons firing the 5.45 round — justified since those cartridges are survivor-made 'dirty' rounds and are inferior to proper 5.45 rounds. In Metro 2033, it can be upgraded to a ridiculous degree, with accessories including an extended barrel or silencer, a scope, and a freaking stock, turning it from a handgun to a downsized revolver hunting rifle. It loses some of this versatility in Metro: Last Light, but a silenced version is the first weapon you're given once the game starts in earnest and can carry you through most of the game due to the ammo availability and the fact that it hits like a brick.
  • The semi-automatic shotgun is also a revolver. The DLC for Last Light adds a revolving shotgun made from bicycle parts, and it even retains its bicycle bell.
• Averted in Mexican Motor Mafia, where he only revolver is a .38 with a serious lack of power.
• Erron Black in Mortal Kombat X wields dual revolvers across all of his variations.
• The Monster Hunter series has a hammer which is basically the cylinder and hammer attached to a long handle so that it can be swung at dragons and giant enemy crabs.
• The first Nexus War game had Walker Colts made from the faded iron of the land of the dead. Colts were deadly powerful Hand Cannons that were superior to every other gun in the game...until you had to find some more ammunition for them.
• Noblemen: 1896 by Foursaken Media is an aversion. You'd think a Steampunk game set in a post-Civil War America would have amazing revolvers, but it avoids that with the Colt and its successor, the Lemat. Instead, rifles are king (the only advantage for handgun users is being quicker in readying for melee). Revolvers only hit harder than the Milita's smoothbore musket, but after that, any two-handed firearm outclasses the revolvers. Additionally, revolvers are actually the weakest of the handguns — some Officers have an automatic pistol that looks like a Mauser and others carry a sawed-off shotgun. Both these guns are superior to the revolver in damage output and other stats.
• No More Heroes: Dr. Peace, the 9th-ranked assassin in the world, uses a pair of golden revolvers during his fights.
• No More Heroes 2: Desperate Struggle: Skelter Helter, the first boss, has a revolver that revolves revolvers. 36 bullets, right? Nope, he never runs out.
• Nosferatu: The Wrath of Malachi: The Revolver reloads faster than the Flintlock or Musket and can shoot 5 times before reloading. However, each shot only does a third of the damage, so this is kind of subverted. Not that it makes it any less useful.
• Averted in Nuclear Throne, where the revolver is the starting weapon of most classes. While it's functional, it is still the one weapon they'll want to ditch as quickly as possible, since it has no advantages whatsoever over even the machine gun or a pop gun weapons that can be found almost immediately, let alone the more specialized weapons.
• A .357 Magnum Smith & Wesson is the only revolver in Operation Flashpoint, but it is also the most powerful handgun available, though it has a correspondingly high recoil.
• The revolver happens to deal the most damage out of any pistol in ORION: Prelude.
• In Outlaws, a revolver is James Anderson's main weapon. It can be fanned for the sake of rapid fire as well.
• In Overkill's The Walking Dead, revolvers deal more damage than semi-automatic pistols, but they generally hold less ammo and take longer to reload. Worst of all, they can't be silenced, which matters a lot given the focus on trying not to alert every single zombie in the vicinity.
• Cassidy/McCree of Overwatch carries a revolver dubbed the Peacekeeper as his main weapon. Its high power coupled with accuracy makes it one of the most powerful weapons in the game. According to a dev interview, it was inspired by Half-Life 2's revolver.
• Averted in Pathologic, where the revolver is the least accurate and second-weakest gun available. Its only real advantage is a relatively large magazine size, but it is more than offset by its ammo being the most expensive one as well.
• The Judge in PAYDAY 2, a revolver that fires shotgun shells, somehow deals more damage than full-sized shotguns despite using smaller shells. The Bronco also does more base damage than most of the other pistols. The Matever and Peacemaker revolvers are also pocket snipers in a pinch, though both suffer from strong recoil and long reload times, respectively.
• Perfect Dark comes with the DY357, a revolver similar to the Cougar Magnum. There's also the DY357-LX, a hideously blinged-out gold-plated version with a tigerskin grip that acts as a replacement for the previous game's Golden Gun.
• The most powerful gun in The Persistence is a revolver named Stormfury balanced by its limited ammunition. It starts out only holding six bullets and can be upgraded to hold nine, less than the minimum for every other gun. Still, it can one-shot giant, bulky enemies like Berserkers with ease.
• Persona:
  • In Persona 3, you know you're screwed if the friggin' Grim Reaper himself is dual wielding Colt Buntlines, each of which has a barrel as long as you are tall! The sound of chains ringing through the hallways are always a good cue for you to run, no matter what level you are. The Reaper will also show up to kick your ass in Persona 4 and Persona 5.
  • 3 also has Takaya, leader of Strega, who's stated by Word of God to be carrying a Smith & Wesson Model 500, the most powerful production revolver in the world. He kills Shinjiro with it, and Junpei only survives a round through the chest when Chidori burns her life out to save him with her Healing Hands.
  • In Persona 4, Naoto Shirogane and Tohru Adachi use revolvers as their weapon of choice. In both this game and Persona Q: Shadow of the Labyrinth, Naoto can get a freaking .44 Colt Anaconda. And that's only a mid-game weapon — the late-game revolvers are truly terrifying.
  • Persona 5 has Makoto Nijima, a straight-laced honor student who shoots her revolver from the hip like she's in a Western. She's also the daughter of a cop and loves Yakuza movies, so this probably influences her choice of gun.
• In Phantom Doctrine, revolvers possess greater stopping power than the pistols, but it is offset by an inferior ammo capacity. You also can install fewer weapon mods on them.
• PlanetSide 2's best pistols are the NS Underboss and Commissioner revolvers, the latter of which can one-hit-kill infiltrators with a headshot and both can kill anyone else with three body shots. Both pistols are very popular among players, especially the Commissioner, due to their accuracy, stopping power, and ammo efficiency. They also sound and look cool with their strange split-cylinder reloading mechanism. The only pistol which can even hope to compete with the revolvers in power is the Terran Republic's standard issue TX1 Repeater, a burst-fire pistol.
• Project Brutality has the Revolver. It's a powerful Hand Cannon that can shred weaker enemies and deliver a nasty punch to stronger ones but it has only six shots, meaning you have to reload it more often than the normal pistol, can't be silenced unlike the .45 pistol, and it only starts showing up at later levels. Due to how the gameplay works, it's easier to use the rifle and pistol to kill weaker foes with headshots and use rapid-fire weapons for stronger ones to force them to flinch and prevent them from attacking. The weapon upgrade replaces it with a Desert Eagle, which has the same damage output with the advantage of a larger magazine and faster firing rate.
• Your starting weapon in Rage (2011) is The Settler, a hefty revolver that holds a whopping twelve rounds. At first, it's not very impressive, but it becomes a lot more useful when you unlock the alternate ammo types-the the heftier Fat Boys (which are limited to six-round cylinders), the all-in-one Killbursts, and Fat Mammas (which act like Fat Boys with the added benefit of penetration). In comparison, everyone else in the game who carries a pistol is limited to a Colt .45.
• .44 Magnum appears in both iterations of the Rainbow Six: Vegas series.
• Averted in Red Dead Redemption: While the game takes place in the Old West, it still takes place in 1911, and pistols are slowly taking over. Most gunslingers you meet would probably prefer a revolver, but the game repeatedly points out that the Old West—and, by extension, gunslinging—is slowly dying out. Statwise, while revolvers are powerful, pistols usually aren't that far behind in terms of damage and have the advantage of being (semi-)automatic and often have larger magazines.
• Played lovingly straight in Red Dead Revolver as an homage to Westerns. The ultimate revolver in the game, "The Scorpion", is noted that only two of them were ever made and that it possesses superior damage and accuracy to any other gun in the game including the rifles and shotguns.
• Several Resident Evil games, mostly by virtue of the fact that they are nearly always the coveted Magnum, shooting a much more powerful caliber than the default pistol (it varies from game to game, but the default pistol is often a 9mm Beretta). The Colt Python magnum is more or less Barry Burton's signature weapon.
  • Resident Evil offers you a .357 Colt Python, the most powerful gun in the game. In the 2002 remake, it's now a custom-tailored Python that uses the name "Silver Serpent".
  • Resident Evil 2 has the Colt Single Action Army, which isn't any more powerful than the normal handgun, and only holds six rounds. But it can fire those six rounds faster than anything short of the submachine gun, meaning it can take down individual zombies very quickly but is useless for anything bigger. In the Remake, Claire's starting handgun is a simple 9mm revolver — when upgraded with the optional parts and using the high-power rounds, it becomes comparable to Leon's magnum.
  • Resident Evil 3: Nemesis gives Jill the .44 629 S&W, a more modern version of Dirty Harry's killing gun.
  • Resident Evil 4:
    • The game gives you a choice of a few Magnums, but the potentially most powerful one you can get during the game is, of course, the revolver. Coolness is balanced out by the shortage of ammo for it, however; when you get the first one — either by buying it or getting it for free at a certain point of the game — the ammo is amazingly hard to come by, making it not very usable.
    • The Handcannon, which you can get Infinite Ammo for. You get it for free (if you can get five stars, with every character, on all four Mercenaries levels), but upgrades are hugely expensive...and if you try to sell it, its monetary value drops to 0.
  • Resident Evil 5 has two revolvers, both with barrel lengths approaching the size of the revolver in the picture for Hand Cannon. Both do more damage than any other weapons per hit in the game.
  • Barry "My gun is my partner and my bullets are my backup" Burton wields a Colt Anaconda. The longest model of that gun is 13 inches(!) which judging by the fact that it is bigger than his head in most cutscenes is probably the model he owns.
• The HE .44 Magnum from the Resistance series. Not only do the bullets pack a punch, but you can explode them remotely after hitting your target. This allows the player to kill several enemies with one shot.
• Inverted in the CYOA-style A Road Less Traveled from Jeffrey Dean and Greek Winter Media, in the first game Westward Dystopia — your character uses his revolvers as his weapon of choice and he can upgrade them with a laser sight and hollow point ammo. He likes them so much that he doesn't even pick up the superior assault rifles he finds. However, in the prequel Spire Ablaze, the hero gets a choice of starting weapon — a shotgun, an Uzi, or a Colt Single-Action Army revolver. Of these, the weakest weapon is the revolver (to make up for this, the Technocrat Guild gives you some extra medkits). The hero only gets his favourite set of revolvers (they were part of his graduation test to successfully refurbish them) when his instructor gave them to him.
• Russian Overkill has revolvers as the starting weapon for all three player classes.
  • Alosha's revolver, the Screamin' Bernie, fires reasonably powerful bullets. Alt-fire consists of throwing the gun, which then explodes while a new gun materializes in your hand.
  • Yuri's revolver, the Matchstick, fires flares. Alt-fire launches a sticky flare that continuously damages an enemy until they die.
  • Marty's revolver, the Silver Hornet, fires explosive bullets. Alt-fire has you swinging out the cylinder and launching six shots at once.
• S4 League has the Revolver weapon, which is unrealistically big and, contrary to its name, is more like a concentrated Burst Shotgun with less spread.
• Saints Row series has a powerful revolver named .44 Shepherd.
• In Sakura Wars, the heroines who favor guns all wield revolvers; Maria Tachibana carries an Enfield No.2 Mk 1, while Rosita Aries favors a pair of Remington Model 1858s (one painted gold and the other silver). Gemini Sunrise carries a Colt Single Action Army, but she never uses it, favoring her katana instead. Additionally, Rosita's Star uses a pair of revolvers as its main weapons, while Gemini's has a revolver attached to its sword.
• In Sam & Max: Freelance Police, Sam's weapon of choice is a very large revolver, while Max prefers a Luger.
• In SAS3, with a high enough rank your soldier can earn as a sidearm, the Nitro Express .600 — a revolver based on the Pfeifer Zeliska .600. With this in hand, even the toughest zombies can't withstand more than a few shots and it penetrates multiple targets, finally it has a Ranged Emergency Weapon's default Bottomless Magazines benefit. It's only drawback of poor rate of fire can be improved with upgrading, until it gets a moderately decent speed.
• The first two Serious Sam games had him using revolvers with .45 Schofield ammo. Infinite .45 ammo, in fact; the guns were also accurate out to ridiculous ranges, and extremely useful for plinking at distant enemies who weren't aware of Sam or weak ones who were. (The manual really hammers this trope home; human R&D had just started to crack the enemies' infinite ammo technology, had time to use it to send Sam in with one Emergency Weapon that wouldn't rely on enemy resources for reloads, and picked .45 Schofield ammo as the best thing they could give him.)
• SCP: Secret Laboratory has the .44 Revolver, a pinpoint-accurate Hand Cannon exclusively found in the hands of Chaos Insurgency Marauders. Against human players, what armour they have doesn't matter — a single headshot will kill them on the spot unless they're under the effects of Adrenaline. It leaves a lot to be desired against SCPs, however, owing to its slow rate of fire and low mag capacity.
• In StarCraft II, James Raynor carries a revolver. He has it loaded with one bullet, the loaded chamber rotated away from the barrel, presumably as a safety precaution. It is not intended to be used for combat though, instead Raynor intends to use it on his arch-enemy, Dominion Emperor Arcturus Mengsk. However, he ends up using it on his old friend Tychus.
• In Star Wars: Galaxies, the DE-10 blaster pistol looked like a silver-plated revolver. Rule of Cool is in effect here, since blasters really wouldn't functionally need a rotating chamber.
• The Suffering has revolvers as the second and third (if you count getting a second gun for dual wielding them) weapons. They are not that powerful though, compared to your .45 Thompson.
• Zigzagged in Sunset Riders. Steve and Billy use revolvers while Bob and Cormano use shotguns. While the latter are better for getting through the stages (thanks to their wide shooting range), the former fire faster and deal more damage to the bosses.
• Super Robot Wars: Original Generation:
  • The Giant Revolver does more damage than the M95 Machine Gun for the same amount of upgrades. This is balanced by the fact that it only has 6 ammo, nearly half that of the machine gun. There is also the Revolver Stake weapon on the Alt Eisen. While not a typical revolver by a long shot, it definitely uses the imagery of one for coolness value
  • Also, in the Gaiden Game OG Saga, one of Haken's weapons is the Longtomb Special, a revolver with an incredibly long barrel, with one extra feature.
• Survival Crisis Z has the revolver as the starting weapon of the Doctor class, and a purchasable weapon for everyone else. Interestingly, the main benefits of this weapon aren't its power (which is only slightly above average), but rather its plentiful ammo and its decent firing rate (which can be boosted to machinegun levels with a certain skill).
• Surviv.io:
  • Averted with the OT-38 revolver, which is usually considered the second-worst pistol-type weapon in the game, and one of the worst weapons in the entire game. While it is very accurate and deals pretty good damage per shot, its fire rate is so low that actually killing anyone not already grievously wounded will take far too long next to anything else — unarmed players straight-up punching OT-38 wielders to death indoors is the rule, rather than the exception. You can dual-wield it to fire a bit faster and get double the ammo, but then you lose its accuracy advantage and get double the reload time.
  • However, the trope is played straight with the Peacemaker revolver, which has one of the highest DPS in the game. However, it is only available in the Desert mode/Potato mode and is restricted to the rare .45 ammunition, which it burns through all too quickly. Thus, a Model 84 rifle can often be a safer bet as far as .45 weapons go, simply because of its range and more consistent damage.
• The Spy in Team Fortress 2 has a Revolver as his primary weapon, replacing the tranquilizer pistol from the original games. It's the third most accurate weapon in the game (after the Sniper's rifle and the Soldier's rocket launcher) and is rather powerful. Unusually for a revolver, it also has one of the fastest reload speeds in the game (loads a whole new magazine at once with a loader in just over one second). The lack of health on the part of the Spy class makes it less useful in pitched firefights than you'd think, though.
  • On the other hand, a Spy can reliably utilize his revolver against other Spies, Snipers, and Scouts and even use his revolver to pick off bigger, bruiser-type targets with low health (due to the Spy having the ability to see the remaining health of any enemy he looks at). Its accuracy especially makes it very useful in situations where the Spy can get the drop on his enemy but isn't in a position to backstab.
  • The Spy has several more revolvers as unlockable weapons. The Ambassador trades lower base damage for the ability to deal headshots, L'Etranger trades lower base damage for the ability to restore Invisibility Cloak power with each hit, the Enforcer trades higher damage for a lower fire rate^note it originally traded higher base damage for a minor Invisibility Cloak nerf, which was so inconsequential a downside that it was deemed a Game-Breaker, and the Diamondback (a promotional weapon from Deus Ex: Human Revolution) trades lower base damage for guaranteed critical hits every time he successfully sabotages an Engineer building or backstabs an enemy.
• In 10tons's Tesla vs. Lovecraft, the revolver is a huge improvement over Tesla's starting semi-automatic and it's better than the rather lacklustre Tommy Gun. The revolver has a pretty good rate of fire and high damage, but its greatest advantage is that it will penetrate enemies — a trait only the gauss weapons have. With at least one "Extra Barrel" perk, the Revolver can start rivalling the Weird Science weapons that appear later.
• In Tomb Raider: The Last Revelation, one of the weapons Lara can pick up during the game is a large revolver. It's slow and has very limited ammo, but it's also more powerful than any other gun in the game except the shotgun, and it's the only firearm you can use the laser sight with.
• The expensive but powerful magnum revolver is easily one of the best handguns available in Torn City.
• Trailblazer has three revolvers as part of the player's arsenal.
  • Cradle & Grave, a pair of Guns Akimbo revolvers. They have infinite ammo, but still have to reload unless you upgrade them, in which case they never have to be reloaded.
  • The Bitchmaker, a revolver that shoots explosive bullets. When upgraded, you can fire an extremely powerful Magnum Ball shot by holding down the reload button.
• In the Uncharted series, one shot from the revolver kills, no matter if you hit a head or an ankle. Crushing difficulty does downgrade the revolver: one shot to the chest or head still kills, but any other body part will require two shots. The Desert-5, however, remains the most powerful gun. In all difficulties, the revolver also has highly limited ammo compared to other handguns.
• Unreal Tournament:
  • The Rocket Launcher works along these lines: the front of the weapon is a giant, open-sided, rotating cylinder with six chambers for rockets to be slotted into before firing. It has a tertiary fire mode that abuses this: hold down the fire key to slot in more rockets and fire off up to six of them all at once.
  • A steampunk mod features a revolver with a cylinder consisting of four ordinary revolver cylinders.
• The Colt Anaconda from Vampire: The Masquerade - Bloodlines is the coolest as well as one of the best firearms in the entire game. Not only does this piece pack the punch of a shotgun at much longer ranges, but it's also deadly accurate like a sniper rifle and fast. The only drawback is its six-shot cylinder. Oh, and its firing sound is just plain badass. You can also switch to alternate fire and "fan" a room pretty easily, as long as you don't mind stopping to reload every two seconds.
• Verdun has three types of revolvers. M1883 Reichsrevolver fires and reloads extremely slowly compared to other pistol-type weapons, but is highly accurate and can One-Hit Kill. Webley Revolver fires and reloads substantially faster, but is only somewhat more powerful and accurate than the semiautomatic pistols. M1892 is somewhere between the two in terms of damage and reload rate.
• In War Brokers, the revolver is superior to pistols mainly due to its superior accuracy and damage, which enables skilled players to take out their opponents with headshots at a decent range, while pistols are only effective up close.
• Warframe has a variety of revolver secondaries such as the Vasto and Magnus, though they are generally seen as average weapons at best—often used more for looks than effect. However, you can buy the Perla pistol reskin to turn other Hand Cannons into revolvers, and Mesa has her Exalted Regulators, revolvers that are attached to her forearms and flick up and into her hands when she activates her Peacemaker mode. Peacemaker mode involves her infinite-ammo revolvers firing up to fifty bullets per second, turning her into one of the most ridiculous sources of damage-per-second in the game.
• The revolvers of WASTED pack a more significant punch than most starting weapons. In fact, the El Seis or Ocelot revolvers deal more than twice as much damage per shot as a semi-automatic rifle. This is offset by the scarcity of their ammo, though.
• In WET, Rubi's default weapons are a pair of black custom eight-cylinder revolvers.
• Wild ARMs:
  • Subverted in Wild ARMs 3, in which Virginia's revolvers are... quite weak in comparison to everyone else's guns. To mock gunplay tropes further, try guessing what's weaker than Virginia's revolvers? Why, it's Gallows' Sawed-Off Shotgun, of course! To be fair, Virginia is an item-oriented fighter with speed as her forte, and Gallows is a full-on nuking black mage.
  • One boss in Wild ARMs 4 wields a pair of revolvers that may as well be rocket launchers for the amount of damage they can do, as well as the stunts the character wielding them pulls off in his final cutscene.
  • Boy howdy, Wild ARMs 5. Not only does Rebecca use a fairly normal revolver ARM based on a cap-and-ball Colt, but... Dean's ARMs, despite shooting like a semi-auto complete with flying brass, are shaped so as to overlap this trope with Gatling Good, and Avril's sword ARM has a revolver-esque wheel of power cartridges.
• X-Blades has protagonist Ayumi using a pair of... things. Each one is a double-barreled, double-drummed revolver with each emerging on the side of a long blade. Essentially, a pistol grip with a sword in the middle and two guns melded on the side. And she has two of them, one for each hand. And just for extra cool factor, her "gun-blades" can be imbued with fire, lightning, or even light, causing them to both hit and shoot significantly harder. Skills are available to make her shoot significantly faster or cause her bullets to ricochet off enemies, and her light and dark modes can further double her rate of fire and her speed of melee attacks. The English variant X-Blades also adds gun-blade upgrades into wider blades and bigger guns. Who cares about realism or practicality?
• In XIII, it was possible to fan the revolver for rapid fire. However, this was rarely used due to the rarity of its ammo, and because the player wasn't lacking for rapid-fire options anyway, while revolver's main use was to score headshots from a long ways off.
• Zombieville USA has a revolver as the final handgun upgrade. Although it isn't very powerful in the later levels, it is very useful if you manage to get it early, and is absolutely necessary if you expect your handgun to do anything late game.
• Averted in Zombs Royale.io, where the revolvers once were practically the worst pistol variant in the game, as they dealt less damage per shot than Deagles, yet their fire rate was nearly as slow, and far lower than that of other pistols, making it difficult to win a proper shootout with it. Later updates addressed that somewhat.

Visual Novels

• In Case 3 of Apollo Justice: Ace Attorney, the victim bleeds to death after being shot through the shoulder with a 45-calibre revolver. This is actually a plot point, as it's pointed out that the defendant, a 14-year-old, wouldn't have been able to use the murder weapon without dislocating his shoulder.
• The Danganronpa franchise utilizes (Truth) Bullets during Class Trials which are loaded into a metaphorical revolver. Certain trial minigames require the protagonist to fire bullets to shoot down contradicting arguments. Truth Bullets usually contain facts and evidence you have gathered during the Investigation Phase, but during trials, you can also absorb yellow arguments into your Truth Bullets to temporarily replace the original content.
• Ein from Phantom of Inferno wields a revolver.

Webcomics

• Code Name: Hunter has revolvers as common sidearms for agents who prefer guns such as Ruby. Probably because magic wreaks havoc with technology. However, in an early comic, magic manages to make a revolver jam, despite its owner's insistence that they never do.
• In El Goonish Shive, the aberration Scarf uses an oversized revolver that uses .50 caliber bullets to try and take down Raven.
• Harry Eastwood of Exterminatus Now uses a .44 revolver, but had it modified to hold seven bullets rather than the usual six.
• While most weapons in Girl Genius are death rays or other creations of mad science one of the circus members prefers a revolver, even though she herself is a Spark.
• Doc Scratch keeps what seems to be a Schofield revolver as his sidearm in Homestuck. He later gives it to Spades Slick.
• In Suicide for Hire Hunter carries a semiautomatic, but he also has a .44 "Idiot Magnum" for liquifying the heads of particularly moronic clients.
• In Wapsi Square, Monica's grandpa used to carry a revolver back in the day. Notably, it is the same model that Indiana Jones carried in Raiders of the Lost Ark. Considering that Monica's grandpa was an Adventure Archaeologist who did a bit of Nazi killing in WWII, this was probably a deliberate Shout-Out.

Web Originals

• Chapter 3 of Dead Ends gives the hero Eddie DOC HOLLIDAY'S revolvers!
• RWBY:
  • General Ironwood uses two revolvers, one being named Due Process — both are gigantic, and they shoot Dust as well as real bullets. He faces off against Watts, who also wields a twelve-shot, ultra-fancy revolver himself.
  • Emerald's weapons, Thief's Respite, are two green revolvers capable of becoming sickles and chain scythes.
• Like Katanas Are Just Better, Survival of the Fittest subverts this. While some characters are given revolvers and do use them, there are far more automatics than revolvers, and the revolvers aren't shown to be that much better than the automatics except for the ones that really do have more stopping power. Even then, though, the smaller magazine capacity is a disadvantage in gunfights. David Jackson trades his highly powerful Smith and Wesson .357 revolver for a slightly weaker Walther P99 for precisely that reason.
• In Vaguely Recalling JoJo, Jonathan infuses a revolver with the Ripple to kill zombies and vampires more effectively.

Western Animation

• Vigilante in Justice League dual-wields revolvers. The one time we see him reload, the chambers are filled with red, and he doesn't put anything in them, suggesting that he has Laser Revolvers.

Real Life

• Somewhat Truth in Television, because among gun enthusiasts revolvers are known for better reliability, greater accuracy, easier maintenance, and greater stopping power compared to automatics. Particularly with single-action revolvers. Because of basic mechanical designs, the maximum firing speed for a single-action revolver is on par with a conventional semiautomatic, although few people can pull back the gun's hammer fast enough to even match normal semiautomatic firing rates. Of course, these benefits are offset by the small number of rounds, greater recoil, difficulty reloading, and difficulty with faster rates of fire (particularly single action).
  • Revolvers have some advantages in home defense use. For people who keep it for years in the cupboard with little to no maintenance until it's needed in an emergency, revolvers can have an advantage in reliability. Poorly maintained or cheaply made guns can easily jam. If a revolver fails to fire, you can just try shooting again, as the cylinder rotates to a new chamber. For a semi-automatic, you can be in deep trouble if it jams, and will need to perform a clearance drill (typically "tap-rack-bang") to make it ready to use again. Especially true for gas pistols, which have an increased tendency to jam because there is less force available to cycle the action.
  • Revolvers are also capable of being loaded and left loaded for prolonged periods of time without damage to the firearm, whereas semi-automatic firearms have springs in their magazines that can wear out over time, or if left constantly loaded without releasing the tension. Revolvers also don't need a magazine to function, as the rounds are loaded into an integral cylinder that is either fixed to an axle in the frame (single action only) or screwed onto the swing-out crane (modern double action/single action revolvers).
  • Downplayed in the case of subcompact handguns (like those often used for concealed carry), in that semiautomatics scale down better while still retaining stopping power. Revolver calibers were designed around longer barrels that allow powder to burn for longer, and lose as much as half of their energy when fired out of short snubnose barrels (semiautomatics lose energy much less sharply, and it's proven easier to design semiauto-caliber ammunition to work consistently across barrel lengths than revolver calibers). Most people don't realize that a 9mm +P round has as much or more energy than an equivalent weight .357 Magnum round until you get over a 3-inch barrel.^note Compare here how sharply .357 Magnum loads drop off in energy in short barrels versus 9mm.
  • An example of why revolvers are just better for criminals: Unlike most semiautomatic weapons, spent shells remain in revolvers after firing, lowering the chances of leaving incriminating evidence.
    • Unless you load it with more than one brand of ammunition, kill someone then toss it in a river with the empties still in the cylinder. A murder where a person was shot with different brands of .22 bullets was solved years later when a person wading stepped on a revolver. When the gun was examined by police it was found to be loaded with several brands of .22 rimfire, with fired shells matching the bullets removed from the victim. The gun was traced back to its owner — and a report of it being stolen. The thief had been caught with other stolen items, but not the pistol. Had he the presence of mind to empty the cylinder and toss the rounds elsewhere, he'd have gotten away with murder.
• Samuel Colt's five-shot Paterson revolver, first patented on February 25, 1836, and manufactured in Paterson, New Jersey, was the first commercial repeating firearm employing a revolving cylinder with multiple chambers aligned with a single, stationary barrel. Revolver-type firearms had been made since the Renaissance, but they had been expensively made one-off items and lacked convenient features of the Colt such as a cylinder that automatically rotated the next chamber into place with each cock of the hammer. Although the Paterson revolvers sold poorly because people saw them as unreliable novelties, John Hays acquired a pair of them for each of his Texas Rangers, who used them to fight off a band of Commanche Indians in the Battle of Bandera Pass.
  • Afterwards, Samual Walker of the Texas Rangers reached out to Colt and asked him to design a more rugged and powerful version that could be fired from the saddle, and that would be powerful enough to take out horses as well as men. Colt delivered with the Walker Colt, a Hand Cannon weighing four and a half pounds, which was the first Colt to be a six-shooter. Firing these two-hundred-year-old guns today still provides a fairly decent spread on a target from up to 60 feet away, and incredibly for a black powder gun, the Walker remained the most powerful revolver in the world until the .357 magnum cartridge was introduced in 1934. It did have some problems, however, the most notable being bursting cylinders: In addition to the primitive metallurgy of the day, they featured overlength chambers for the front-loaded black powder charge, leading users to over-charge them—especially because they were unused to the Walker's conical bullets and sometimes put them in backwards, creating more space for extra powder than there was supposed to be. In addition, the loading lever catch didn't work well and often allowed it to drop during recoil, temporarily jamming the gun. Walker owners would often secure the lever with a piece of rawhide. Only 1,100 Walkers were made, and Colt commissioned New York engraver Waterman Ormsby to etch the cylinders with a scene of the battle of Bandera Pass, which made them beautiful and also increased the difficulty of counterfeiting the Walker. On top of there having been few to begin with, Walkers in good condition are rare because the people who owned them really got a lot of use out of them. They were used in the Mexican-American War, The American Civil War (mostly by Confederates), and in conflicts with American Indians.
  • The Colt Dragoon later solved the issues with the Walker.
• In 1854, while prospecting for gold near Sacramento California, Mexican war veteran Jonathan R. Davis killed 11 armed outlaws who had killed two companions and tried to murder him as well. He killed 7 of the 11 bandits with a pair of Colt revolvers (the rest he killed with a Bowie knife)
• Ed McGivern set several records on standard Smith & Wesson revolvers. His most famous is to fire five shots into a playing card-sized group in two-fifths of a second. He also shot marbles midair, fired targets that live helpers hung onto, shot targets from vehicles moving at over thirty miles per hour, fired without having a line of vision, shot from the hip and basically got crowds to see him because of his skill. And, to top it off he set several records dual wielding, commonly considered to be one of the least effective tactics in a gunfight. He basically chose the revolver out of preference (the Smith & Wesson Model 10 was his favorite gun), but it shows what they can do.
• The French GIGN are one of the only premier counter-terrorist units that continue to use revolvers, most notably the Manurhin MR-73 in .357 Magnum: an absolute tank of a revolver. Their reasoning is that imported revolvers from Smith & Wesson couldn't withstand firing 150 rounds of full power 357 Magnum everyday, owing to the rigorous training of GIGN operatives.
  • During the Air France Flight 8969 terrorist incident, a GIGN operator armed with his MR-73 barged inside the plane and shot dead three Algerian hijackers armed with AK-47s and Uzi submachine guns.
• The revolver in this◊ picture is chambered for .600 Nitro Express. Elephant gun bullets.
  • The reason for the above quoted great stopping power and accuracy of the revolvers lies in their ability to fire long rifle-like cartridges, down to The Wild West era .45-70 or the modern-age .454 Casull. The usual pistol ammo has poor aerodynamics due to short and fat shape of the bullet (to fit the width of a pistol magazine) and low velocity (to diminish recoil) and can't be accurate at rifle or carbine ranges, while long rifle bullets may still have some accuracy even from the 6-inch barrel of a revolver.
• For much of the 20th century, police departments all over the world issued revolvers to patrol officers, most commonly in .38 Special with 4-inch barrels. The Smith & Wesson Model 10 and the Colt Police Positives were some of the most successful revolver designs due to this. Detectives and undercover officers tended to make use of short-barreled (less than 3" long), or "snubnose," revolvers such as the Colt Detective Special and S&W Model 36. However, starting around the late 1980s, departments began to switch en-masse to semi-automatic pistols. Some examples:
  • U.S. law enforcement began the switch after some highly publicized deaths of officers killed while they were reloading. One of these was the infamous Newhall Massacre in 1970, California, where 4 rookie police officers died in a shootout against two suspects; one of the cops, James Pence, was shot in the head because his revolver took one second too long to reload and the criminal managed to run up to him and pull the trigger. Another well-known example was Scott Gadell of the NYPD who died while reloading his revolver.
  • The aftermath and analysis of the 1986 FBI Miami shootout showed the inadequacies of both .38 Special revolvers and 9mm semi-automatic pistols , leading to the FBI switching from revolvers to 10mm semi-auto pistols, which they later downloaded to .40 S&W. Most state and local police soon followed their example.
    • Some smaller departments scattered throughout the U.S. still have holdouts that continue to carry service revolvers, though. One of the last major notable examples to complete the switch was the New York Police Department. In November 2017, the department formally gave notice to all its officers that revolvers would be completely phased out as of August 31, 2018, at which point any remaining revolver users would have to transition to either a Generation 4 Glock 17 / Glock 19 or a SIG Sauer P226 DAO.
    • The Dallas Police Department still had active officers among its personnel using .38 caliber revolvers until they were required to make the switch in December 2019. The article also notes about 40 bailiffs with the Dallas County Sheriff's Department still use revolvers, along with one confirmed officer in the city of Plano.
  • The Victoria Police Force of Victoria, Australia, used to issue Smith and Wesson Model 10 revolvers, in .38 Special. As of April 2010, it began being phased out by the Smith and Wesson M&P auto-loader in .40 S&W. The Model 10 was known as the Military and Police revolver from 1899 to 1957 (at which point S&W changed their entire catalog from unique names to using model numbers only), so it's almost appropriate that it be replaced by the Military and Police semi-automatic.
  • Several Asian police departments held out even longer before making the switch. It wasn't until 2016 that law enforcement in Macau switched to the Glock 17 as their standard sidearm. In 2017, the Singapore Police Force started evaluations for a replacement for their Taurus 85 .38 Special snubnose revolver. While they first tested the 9mm CZ P-07, in April 2019 they eventually settled on the Generation 5 Glock 19, ordering 6,000 pistols.
  • Hong Kong and Japan are some of the few places remaining where uniformed officers still use .38 Special revolvers as their main sidearms, Hong Kong still soldiering on with the S&W Model 10, and Japan with the S&W Model 360J. Officers who operate in other divisions (such as surveillance or in special response units) use semi-automatics. In Hong Kong & Japanese TV shows/movies that involve the police, revolvers are the most likely gun to be used by officers. Although if the protagonists are inspectors in Hong Kong media, they'll be using Glocks (or other copies) instead, and if they're Japanese detectives, they'll have the Minebea P9 (a licensed copy of the 9mm SIG Sauer P220).
  • South Korean beat cops carry either the Smith & Wesson Model 10 or Model 60 because revolvers allow them to use a mix of blank and live rounds.
  • China is a major exception: ever since the founding of the People's Republic in 1949, beat cops have not carried firearms with only very few exceptions. That all came to a shocking end in March 2014 when a group of 8 Islamic terrorists armed with knives and hatchets slaughtered 29 civilians at a train station. Except for a few train station guards who futilely used tear gas launchers to slow them down, the terrorists ran rampant for ten minutes completely unopposed until a SWAT Team arrived on scene and gunned down half the group while arresting the other half. Following this incident, the Chinese government moved to begin arming police officers with revolvers. But in a subversion of this trope, the police issue revolvers are woefully underpowered and ballistics are more similar to a .38 S&W cartridge, which is inferior to the .38 Special.
  • Chile may well be the last South American country where beat cops are still using revolvers, with the Taurus Model 82 in .38 Special (a copy of the Smith & Wesson Model 10) being standard-issue for the Carabineros.
• From Mother Russia comes the MTs-255 — a revolver shotgun.
  • Sort of the case with the Sou'African Striker, where its magazine revolves.
  • From Taurus, we have The Judge, a revolver shotgun in Hand Cannon form. Sadly, it's Awesome, but Impractical, as the .410 shotshell it uses is horrible at even medium range (though an increasing number of specialized self-defense .410 shells are being introduced to fix that flaw), and it's also very inaccurate with .45 Colt rounds. Not to mention it's freakin' expensive.
    • The Circuit Judge, a carbine (long barrel, stock installed) version with baffles to deflect the hot gasses from the cylinder away from the shooter's off hand and face (the usual flaw of revolving long guns).
• There are hunting models available: just add a scope. Given that pistol rounds are less powerful than their rifle cousins, revolver hunting tends to be much more close-ranged and larger-caliber.
• Apparently, George S. Patton believed that Revolvers Are Just Better, for he has been described as carrying a pair of ivory-handled (not pearl, ivory. Patton hated it when people referred to his guns as pearl handled) revolvers. One being a Colt Single Action Army "Peacemaker" (that he used to kill two high-ranking subordinates of Pancho Villa) the other being a Smith & Wesson Model 27 (the original .357 Magnum) that he called his "killing gun". Though he also had a pair of semi-auto pocket pistols as backup guns. Patton was Crazy-Prepared and always armed.
• The Mateba Autorevolver is one of the most sought-after and highly-performing handguns in the industry. It addresses a number of complaints about revolvers like the tougher trigger pulls on double actions and the recoil and spinning action. The Mateba fires from its bottom cylinder, greatly reducing upward pull endemic to handguns, especially revolvers. As an Autorevolver, it uses the gas from the round to turn the cylinder and recock the trigger, acting as somewhat of a halfway point between a revolver and a semiautomatic. However it's still as reliable as a normal revolver and the only downside is that you only get six shots.
• Subverted in long guns. Although the revolver mechanism was fine for handguns, it posed a problem for long guns: without special sealing details, the cylinder produces a gas discharge close to the face (Ouch!) when the weapon is fired from the shoulder, as all long guns are traditionally fired. The off hand is also normally used to stabilize long guns (as their barrel length makes them front-heavy relative to handguns), and this perfectly positions one's forearm to get its own dose of hot gas discharge (Ouch! again) when firing a revolving rifle; a nice pair of long leather gloves is therefore a must.
  • The Colt Model 1855 Revolving Rifle was a weapon that was shelved almost as soon as it was adopted. What made it a disastrous failure of a weapon was that there was a chance that discharging a round would ignite the gunpowder in all six chambers, blowing off the left hand of anyone who held it like a normal rifle. This was generally a fault with all multiple-shot weapons of the era prior to the adoption of the far safer self-contained cartridge but was not as much of a problem with the handguns since the bullets had a clear path ahead of them. Soldiers would get around this problem either by holding the loading lever near the trigger (so that it would be out of the way of any accidental discharge) or by having only one loaded chamber at a time. The latter solution rendered the advantage of having a revolving rifle moot.
  • As mentioned above, there is still one revolver-carbine still in production for novelty purposes, though— the Circuit Judge.
    • It's not the first revolver-carbine to solve these issues either. The Belgian Pieper M1893 Revolving Carbine did so in a more complicated way by using the same gas seal system as the more famous Nagant M1895. Pieper's carbine is obscure today, but at the turn of the century, it was a popular weapon in Mexico. However, a certain World War I Video Game reintroduced it to the current era.
• The M32 Multiple Grenade Launcher.
  • Also, the MM-1 Grenade Launcher (USA) and the RG-6 Grenade Launcher (Russia).
• True in aircraft weapons where the most popular form of gun armament since WW2 has been revolver cannons. First invented as a Nazi wonder weapon these cannon use a cylinder with multiple chambers, like those of a revolver handgun, to speed up the loading-firing-ejection cycle. Although unable to achieve the crazy rates of fire of a Gatling gun, cyclic rates of between 1000 and 2000 rounds per minute are not uncommon. Moreover, because the revolver cylinder has a lower inertial mass than the Gatling gun's revolving barrels, the initial rate of fire is often much higher which can prove an advantage in air-to-air combat. Revolver cannons do have more issues with overheating and barrel wear, though.
• The Webley-Fosbery automatic revolver, a very clever recoil-operated handgun that (with its six-shot capacity, complex mechanism, and high barrel) unfortunately mixed together most of the problems and limitations of each type of gun. What it did do well was to dramatically reduce the recoil the shooter felt. This made it beloved of target shooters who owned it until the fraternity caught on and introduced a handicap rule. For obvious reasons, it was also one of the first revolvers for which a speed-loader was invented. Originally chambered in .455 British. An eight-shot version in .38 calibre was made, which was featured in The Maltese Falcon.
  • Similarly the Mateba Autorevolver
• The Puckle Gun, a large tripod-mounted revolver cannon, that would fire spherical bullets at Christian enemies and cubical ones at Muslim Turks, "which were considered to be more damaging and would, according to its patent, convince the Turks of the "benefits of Christian civilization".
• An old email edition of The Darwin Awards tells the tale of a man who went to prison on charges of involuntary manslaughter. Apparently, he and his brother decided to try playing Russian Roulette, so the man put a semi-automatic to his brother's head and pulled the trigger. Possibly fictitious, given the nature of The Darwin Awards in the early days, but still instructive to certain people.
• For the ultimate in Revolvers, the French AMX-13 and AMX-50 tanks use 5 or 6-shot revolver autoloaders for 75mm to 120mm anti-tank cannons!
• Colonel Jeff Cooper wound up subverting this during World War 2. On the advice of accomplished gunfighter Colonel Charles Askins^note Who also had a controversial career as a trigger-happy Border Patrol agent, he took a Colt Single Action Army into combat in the Pacific. Cooper noted that this advice almost got him killed. (The revolver served incredibly well in combat for the most part, but reloading was agonizingly slow^note Worse than you might think: The Single Action Army is reloaded by punching out cases then loading cartridges one-by-one, which nearly got him killed when he was reloading in the open.) As a result, he developed the Modern Technique of the Pistol around the semi-automatic Colt 1911.
• Because revolvers do not contain their ammunition in the handgrip (as do almost all automatic pistols), they have slightly greater flexibility in changing the grips to suit various sizes and shapes of users' hands, and can also take cartridges whose length or diameter can make the existing design of an automatic pistol difficult or impossible to adapt to that ammunition. On the other hand, they do not handle bottle-necked or rimless cartridges as well, and some sort of adapter clip is often required for the latter. Case in point: in an effort to end the Lensman Revolver Race, the Russians designed the RSh-12,7, which uses 12.7x55mm subsonic sniper rifle rounds almost twice the length of "regular" Magnums and therefore impossible to cram into a pistol grip magazine.
• The American Civil War era LeMat, which had a nine-shot ammo capacity and a single shotgun charge in a secondary barrel.
• In World War 1, the Royal Italian Army attempted to make the Glisenti Model 1910 pistol their main service sidearm, but the complex firing system caused the handgun to be weak and unreliable leading to many Italian soldiers preferring to stick with the older but much more reliable and powerful Bodeo Model 1889 revolver.

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