As a common trade-off for Bottomless Magazines, Overheating is quite common among First-Person Shooters.
- In the Battlefield series, mounted weapons generally use an overheat system, while weapons carried by the players have anywhere from 30 to 200 rounds, that can be fired off in one long burst before reloading. The anti-air rotary cannons will overheat and have unlimited ammo, while light machine guns mounted on a tank will overheat, one upgrade for tanks is a .50 cal heavy machine gun which does not overheat, but instead fires much more slowly.
- In Battlefield 1 and Battlefield V light machine guns and even some big-mag submachine guns have both limited ammo and overheat. In the former it's represented as the gun malfunctioning and jamming, but in BFV some machine guns require a full barrel swap.
- Bioshock Infinite is another case of weapons overheating and glowing red just because it looks neat, without affecting their performance in-game. It veers into outright silliness when the submachine gun's heat shield starts glowing, while the still-cool barrel underneath it can plainly be seen.
- Borderlands 3: Children of the Vault brand firearms have Bottomless Magazines but are prone to overheating. Some guns have the burnt parts replaced, while others are sprayed with a Dahl Kidz-brand water pistol.
- Brink! has the variant where ordinary guns need reloading, while wall-mounted machine guns overheat.
- In Call of Juarez, there are rusty weapons and normal weapons: the former overheat if you fire them too often and after you fire enough times, the latter only do the last part. Once a weapon overheats, however, it's no longer usable.
- Sometimes it overheats, sometimes it just catastrophically fails, like the barrel rupturing or the cylinder exploding. Also, any normal gun will become rusty and eventually fail the more you fire it.
- The horse-riding Sprint Meter in also inverted to function this way: in one (awesome) chase scene, it can be helpful to switch horses because the one you start with will tire.
- Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare has the variant where mounted M249's, miniguns, and the Mk 19 have infinite ammo but can overheat, while the man-portable version of the former does not overheat but has limited ammo. Other games in the series, like World at War, have a variant where you can actually carry around mounted machine guns like the MG42 and mount them on their bipod yourself, but they still have limited ammo when mounted, and in some games in the series will overheat when fired like that anyway.
- In Choo-Choo Charles, the mounted weapons have Infinite Ammo, but they'll glow red and overheat if you continually fire.
- Machine guns in Crysis can overheat, and the ice-shard firing MOAC gun also works this way.
- Deep Rock Galactic:
- The Gunner's "Lead Storm" Minigun and the Scout's Drak-25 Plasma Carbine both have overheat mechanics in place of a reload system, and also have overclocks that weaponize this trait, for example allowing a glowing-hot minigun to fire superheated bullets that ignite targets, or the plasma carbine to vent its heat in a fiery shockwave that damages enemies.
- The Driller's signature power drills and Wave Cooker sidearm also overheat if they're used for too long at a time, while his Cryo Cannon operates on a similar "pressure gauge" system.
- Deus Ex: Human Revolution: the Heavy rifle (which would be more accurately called a light machine gun) overheats if you fire it for too long. A mod specific to that weapon is an enhanced cooling system that slows this down.
- Doom (2016):
- The Mobile Turret mod for the Chaingun puts out the most dakka of the entire game, but overheats if too many rounds are put through it at once. The Mastery for the mod removes this limitation, allowing you to fire indefinitely, or at least as long as you have ammo for it. The Gatling Rotator also generates a fair bit of heat (it intentionally circumvents the weapons safety systems), but it can channel that heat into the tungsten/depleted uranium bullets the weapon fires to unleash superheated bullets.
- The Plasma Gun has an alt-fire mode that works by charging a heat sink. It can be violently discharged into an enemy's face at any time, with more heat sunk translating into a more powerful heat blast. It can be upgraded to passively siphon heat off the weapon's power core as well.
- The End Times: Vermintide and Vermintide II:
- Sienna uses Playing with Fire for all her ranged attacks, which comes with an overheat meter that causes a fatal explosion at maximum. Several of her class abilities in the sequel manipulate overheat, like an option to vent it by taking damage, Damage Reduction that builds overheat instead, and attack bonuses that scale proportionately to her overheat level.
- Bardin's Fire-Breathing Weapons are the only non-magic weapons in the core game that run on an overheat gauge instead of ammunition. Again, he dies in a Flamethrower Backfire if the overheat hits maximum.
- Far Cry:
- Mounted guns in Far Cry 2 will overheat if fired for too long, eventually reaching the point of, like everything else in the game, catching on fire; however, the portable version of the SAW light machine gun will never overheat, instead requiring reloads and having ridiculous muzzle climb.
- Ditto in Far Cry 3 and Far Cry 4; Mounted guns still have infinite ammo and will overheat if fired continuously and you can carry a man-portable version that won't overheat like last time. This time around, the player character gives the weapon's charging handle a good yank, as if that would cool the weapon down. You can also unlock a skill in 3 that somehow makes the turrets keep cool for a longer period of time.
- In FEAR 2: Project Origin, the player is at one point given control of an automatic mounted grenade launcher, which will overheat if fired for too long. Oddly, though, the gauge only actually increases while the fire button is held down; given the low rate of fire for that launcher, if the player taps the button instead of holding it, the heat gauge will never increase. The machine guns on the Elite Powered Armor also overheat - you can even see them glowing in thermal vision, though the oversight to avoid it doesn't work since they spit out bullets as long as the fire button is held.
- The beam laser in Forsaken breaks if it overheats.
- In Ghost Recon: Advanced Warfighter, vehicle-mounted miniguns and stationary machine guns both overheat if fired constantly for too long.
- Halo:
- The Covenant's plasma weapons don't have to be reloaded (and the player can't reload them), but overheat if fired too much. (Same thing in the fan game Halo Zero.)
- Mounted machine guns function this way from Halo: Reach onward. When mounted, they overheat, but when torn free, they can be fired nonstop until their ammo runs out.
- Impaler has the titular weapon which curiously does overheat... despite firing impaling spikes instead of bullets. You can collect a power-up to reduce the overheating.
- Mounted guns in Killzone 2 overheat, with the meter being the visible top surface of the barrel, which goes from dull silver to bright red.
- In Left 4 Dead, both the Gatling and Browning mounted guns overheat in about seven seconds of continuous use, and take about 20 to cool down enough to be fired again.
- In Medal of Honor: Vanguard, the MG42 can overheat if it is fired for too long without waiting for it to cool down.
- In the Metroid Prime series, if you fire your Power Beam rapidly for an extended period it overheats and steam flows out of your gun. It doesn't affect your ability to fire and is purely cosmetic, however.
- Red Orchestra has overheating machine guns, but handles it realistically with barrel switching, although not all LM Gs have a spare barrel. In Red Orchestra 2 ambient temperature is taken into effect, barrels overheat faster on summer maps. The tank barrels supposedly also heat up, affecting shell velocity.
- The Sten and Venom of Return to Castle Wolfenstein are rare examples of overheating weapons that still have limited ammo. Firing them in short bursts (particularly the Sten, which overheats after about ten shots) is a must. They're also both rare examples of enemies also being subjected to the same rules as the player (at least for the Sten, since waiting for a Venom-armed Nazi to overheat his weapon instead of getting to cover will usually get you killed). Truth in Television for the suppressed Sten; the barrel got hot enough to take the skin off your fingers if you sprayed a whole magazine in one go.
- While overheating is not an actual gameplay mechanic, firing the minigun for long enough in Serious Sam will cause smoke to rise from the open end of the barrels once you let go of the trigger. NETRICSA's description for the laser gun also mentions that avoiding this is why it's made out of titanium+ and has four barrels that fire in succession. Serious Sam 4 Planet Badass retcons the laser gun's overheat, but in a curious inversion: once you fire it long enough for the barrels to glow red hot and the fan-like structure in the center to start whistling like a cooler fan on overdrive, the Slow Laser bolts gain a 33% damage boost. It's an incentive for the player to keep the trigger pressed until there's nothing in the screen to kill.
- Shadow Master grants you a variety of weapons, the trade-off being tendencies to overheat if you kept using the same one - you'll need to swap weapons around while waiting for your current firearm to cool off, lest if it jams while you're surrounded by multiple alien enemies.
- The raygun in System Shock has a fire rate hampered by heat building up with each shot, on top of requiring energy drawn from your battery. You can tweak it to draw more or less energy with each shot, changing both the damage dealt and heat accumulated.
- TimeSplitters and its sequels use this with the chain gun and plasma rifle, among others. The former even allows you to keep the barrel constantly rotating without firing (which keeps the heat gauge on about 1/3) so you can start shooting more quickly at the cost of overheating faster.
- Yoshi's Safari had the, uhm, Super Scope overheat.
