Scrappy Weapon / First-Person Shooter

Scrappy Weapons in First-Person Shooters.

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• ARMA 3: Fans who enjoyed the NATO faction were generally disappointed when the new "High Tech" group in the Apex expansion, CTRG-15, was saddled with an HK416 that fired 5.56x45mm NATO rounds, a puny comparison to the 6.5mm rounds that the main force employed, especially since the main game already demonstrated that even the weakest armor in the base game was still almost too much for 5.56mm weapons to penetrate. This is exacerbated by the fact that the opposition, CSAT, also gained a special forces unit by the name of Viper that served as rivals the CTRG-15, but gained all of CTRG-15's benefits with none of the downsides of a terrible weapon - their primary new gun dealt the same damage as their basic one from the main game, and their specialist one was a far more versatile gun that not only dealt good damage in its main function, but could also fire .50-caliber rounds with less range but even greater damage, as well as better armor (which made the 416 even more useless) and a VTOL who's only downside to the NATO variant is a smaller carrying capacity (which doesn't even matter outside of the vehicle transport variant, since most players will never see the infantry transport variant of either at max capacity in most servers. Granted, clever NATO players with the vehicle transport variant do benefit from the ability to transport twice as many light vehicles, and the ability to transport some heavy vehicles).
• Deus Ex:
  • The stealth pistol is usually considered a worthless downgrade to the standard 10mm pistol; though it holds more rounds by default and comes with a free silencer, its damage is noticeably weaker, almost half that of the normal pistol. This counterintuitively makes it worse at staying quiet: at long distances the regular pistol is inaudible to enemies anyway, and will still kill low-tier mooks with one headshot, whereas a stealth pistol, unless you spend the time and effort getting your pistol skill to Master, will inevitably only wound the target even with a headshot, aggroing them and everyone near them in such a way that they will instantly know where you are.
  • Due to a bug with the Game of the Year Edition patch, plasma weapons had their base damage massively reduced - they were supposed to be made weaker specifically for the multiplayer, but these reduced values were accidentally applied to the campaign as well. The plasma rifle itself can still be applied effectively, but it's still overwhelmingly the least-popular heavy weapon; even heavy weapon-specialist players usually pass on it, as the limited inventory space means most such players usually carry only one heavy weapon, and it's hard to pass up the GEP gun when you can get one right at the start of the game. The PS20 plasma pistol, however, is just completely useless, with the same damage as the aforementioned stealth pistol, making it unable to even one-shot a mook with a close-range headshot - an issue compounded by the fact that it only holds a single shot and you're arbitrarily restricted to carrying a single one.
  • If the assault rifle didn't have its grenade launcher, it'd be completely worthless. Each shot does anemic damage, requiring a five-round burst to the head to take out enemies. The recoil makes it completely worthless at range unless you're at least Advanced skill with Rifles. And the formula for enemy ammo drops means killing enemies with it will never get you any more 7.62x51mm ammo.
  • The Light Antitank Weapon also combined the "can't have more than one" problem of the plasma pistol with greater space requirements, but it did at least offer more raw power to balance that out.
• Deus Ex: Human Revolution:
  • The shotgun is nigh-useless. It's ineffective at anything beyond close range, can't be silenced, is useless against armor, and its inability to reliably get headshots lessens the amount of experience you get. Not helping is that unarmored enemies are much less common after just 20% of the way through the game. A PEPS is probably a safer bet, being more effective all around.
  • The machine pistol. It's sufficient in the early game for taking out gangbangers, and it has a great rate of fire even when unmodded, but similar to the shotgun, it's nigh on useless against armored enemies.
• Several weapons in your arsenal in Daikatana; part of the reason for its terrible reputation is for the simple fact that it front-loads the vast majority of the terrible weapons into the first episode. The ion blaster's shots bounce off walls and can — and usually will — hit you. The C4 vizatergo launches proximity mines with a blast radius roughly equal to the range at which you can reliably place them near what you're trying to kill; if you don't end up getting caught in the explosion, your AI "helpers" probably will. The Sidewinder eliminates the C4 thrower's range problem, but doubles down on accidentally pasting yourself with every other shot by wasting two rockets per shot out of your max of 50, combined with terrible collision detection meaning those rockets will still inexplicably blow up two inches from your face. The Shockwave launches an erratically bouncing ball that creates shockwaves whenever it hits a surface… which can easily kill you. It's rather telling that the best weapon of the episode is the shotgun that slowly wastes six shots with every trigger pull, throwing you all over the room if you ever leave the ground, simply because it's the only one of the set that can't actively hurt you as much as it hurts your intended target. Later episodes add proper weapons which prioritize damaging the target over the user, but still have their fair share of terrible ones for the same reasons as the terrible weapons from the first episode: The Eye of Zeus from the Greece episode hits every enemy in sight with lightning when the staff's eye opened, but if no enemies are on-screen, it kills you. Nharre's Nightmare in the Norway episode summons a demon that, like the Eye of Zeus, will turn on you and kill you if there aren't any targets. Finally, shots from the San Francisco episode's kineticore rebound off walls and (all together, now) can hit you. Sensing a pattern?
• GoldenEye (1997):
  • The Klobb, a weak, slow-firing, inaccurate SMG that was outclassed by literally every weapon in the game. A pistol would serve you better. The Klobb does half the damage of average normal gun damage - it takes two shots for a headshot kill! In fact, there was a Max Stats (007 Mode, all enemy stats cranked up to full) run for the Archive level where a shot from any weapon was instant death - except the Klobb. On that note, the Klobb was pretty cool in License to Kill mode. And its reloading sound is pretty sweet, too. As well as the design, which is based on the CZ Skorpion.
  • Unarmed slappers. This does the least amount of damage in the game. Unlike most shooters at this time, you start every level with a set amount of weapons and can't carry over weapons per level. The idea of saving ammo may sound tempting, but enemies (not bosses) in general have the same health and are subdued quickly. Plus, every enemy in the game leaves weapons and ammo when dead. Slappers may sound useful for stealth missions, but you already have the silenced weapons for that. Levels where you have only slappers only have better alternatives such as the Throwing Knife or a weapon right in front of you. Later levels where silenced weapons are no longer available contains enemies expecting your arrival and/or respawn at various points.
• In Perfect Dark, most of the weapons are pretty good, but there were a few that were nearly worthless.
  • The Magnum is a very slow gun in a game where great automatic weapons are a dime-a-dozen, and its power is very underwhelming. Human enemies will often survive a chest shot on Perfect Agent difficulty, yet go down almost instantly to a burst from any submachine gun - plus, a headshot is a one-hit-kill with nearly all weapons, which means that automatics even reward skill more than the Magnum does due to getting headshots at a much faster rate. Even the Falcon II, your starting pistol, can have a higher DPS due to it being semi-auto; the Magnum only does twice the damage of a Falcon II bullet, which the latter can easily outshine with decent button mashing speed. As if that wasn't enough, the Magnum also has an annoying pre-fire delay that makes aiming a lot tougher, and on one of the few guns you can't afford to miss with. It's all too common for an enemy's arm to block their more vital areas, causing the damage you deal to be absolutely pitiful. This despite the fact that it penetrates through enemies - only the first area hit counts, even if the bullet continued on a path through their head.
  • The Shotgun has the same problems of slow speed and not enough power to make up for it, but also adds a pathetic attack range, with a pellet spread so unreliable it can completely miss from five steps away. It also has a sluggish reload animation that can be strangely difficult to cancel out of, leaving you stuck putting in shells when you're desperately trying to do something else.
  • The Hand Grenade is your typical unwieldy, time-based bomb in a game where you rarely need that much firepower to take out enemies, and it's always absent in the few missions where you actually do. Adding to the scrappiness is its alt-fire, 'Proximity Pinball', where it bounces off walls at high speed and detonates when it gets near anyone - hilarious, but usually just as dangerous to you as it is to others. There's no shortage of alternatives that make the weapon worthless, such as the two Grenade Launchers, the Mines and the N-Bomb, which have several advantages like an explosion that's much easier to control, a faster attack rate, far more ammo available, etc. The last kicker is that enemies in the campaign cheat when they use these grenades, as theirs explode the moment they hit the ground instead of after 4 seconds, resulting in a shockingly effective instant-kill attack that you get very little warning for.
  • While the Laptop Gun itself is a good weapon, its secondary fire that turns it into an automatic turret is just a huge waste of ammo. You'd think it would shoot everything in sight, but instead it just picks one target and dumps a hundred rounds into their long-dead body, all while ignoring the rest of the enemies who don't even have a scratch. In fact, quirks with the AI mean its attack can't hurt anything except its current target, so enjoy watching those enemies casually stroll through the storm of bullets to shoot you in the face.
  • Despite killing everything in one hit, the Crossbow is so awkward to use that you're quite likely to miss every shot and be stuck waiting through its incredibly slow reload; and killing enemies quickly isn't exactly a premium ability, anyway. Even worse, it suffers from a glitch where aiming at the sky messes up the trajectory of its bolts; the level design in the air base mission practically screams for you to notice this flaw, so it's a wonder how the developers didn't. It could've had more niche uses, but it's only available in 2 out of 21 missions, and one of those is from a cryptic secret^note In G5 Building, knock out all the cloaking device guards with melee attacks. Its sole advantage is for non-lethally taking out neutral guards, who would fail the mission if killed, but even then, you get a remote controlled drone with a tranquilizer that does the same exact thing but safer. The only other time it's semi-useful is in the combat simulator, where you can use it as a Hail Mary against the twitchy, durable enemies and hope for lucky kills.
  • The Reaper is an alien (Skedar) gatling gun with very bad accuracy (you have to crouch to have any chance of hitting somebody beyond 5 feet), and even firing it in the first place requires you to bring the motor up to speed first. Its fire rate exceeds that of almost all other weapons in the game (only the Cyclone in its mag-dump secondary mode fires faster), but each shot does very little damage. Its secondary fire, which basically turned it into an enormous blender, was a mostly pointless melee weapon, with its only saving grace being that it can be used to spool up the gun and immediately begin firing.
• Tripmines from Duke Nukem 3D and Half-Life, due to their being defensive weapons in games where you're usually, if not always, on the offensive. If you plan on using them, your options are either setting up a trap and luring enemies into it (at which point it's usually just easier to shoot them) or putting them in select points to stop ambushes (which by nature only makes them useful if you already know the ambush is coming, which requires either having already beaten it once, thus already knowing which weapons you like and are good with, or an obvious Hold the Line segment, which has its own problems). It's just an extra pack of explosives that never misses, but usually is less tactically valuable than a command-detonated pipebomb or satchel since it requires the correct placement so that they actually go off and actually hit more than one enemy. Compounding the issue is that game designers seem to intentionally prevent them from ever being useful: for instance, both Duke Nukem and Half-Life's tripmines can be shot and detonated without the laser being triggered, so it'd make sense for players to be able to toss them at the feet of a bunch of enemies and then expend a single firearm round to blow them up, but the games insist on only letting you use them as intended by deliberately placing them on a wall or floor. If you can toss them from a distance, then there will invariably be an arbitrary arming delay of several seconds, more than long enough for your opponents to get past it unless you either stick so close you end up taking Splash Damage, or see the enemy from so far away that the only reasonable excuse for why you're using that instead of just shooting them is that you're completely out of ammo. About the only kind of game where they're really any good in the player's hands are Stealth-Based Games, and even then only for messing around with a patrolling guard (and probably forcing yourself into a confrontation, since the AI usually cheats and automatically knows where you are once you alert any of them).
  • Their one practical use in Duke is actually a bug; placing one completely stops your momentum for a moment, which can potentially save you from a fatal fall. Not too many places where it comes in handy, but it is a fun speedrunning trick.
• The grenade launcher from Kingpin: Life of Crime. Most grenade launchers in video games either fire grenades that explode on contact with enemies, hold more than three rounds in a magazine, let you carry more than 18 rounds total (especially if the game's bazooka has a clip of five shots and an ammo cap of one hundred rockets), take less than four seconds to explode, exist in games where enemies aren't smart enough to run like hell before the 'nade goes off, or some combination of the above. Kingpin's grenade launcher is not any of these things. It's so bad that not even the AI can figure out how to kill you with it.
• Blood II: The Chosen has a few examples, mostly due to lacking or glitched coding.
  • The Insect-A-Cutioner bug spray. While superficially another version of the aerosol can from the first game, it's generally useless due to the short range, low primary fire damage, long secondary fire prep time and the fact that its ammo is also shared with the assault rifle's underslung grenade launcher, a more damaging and altogether more useful weapon.
  • The Singularity Generator, the ultimate word in Awesome, but Impractical. Its primary fire shoots a vortex that sucks in everything around it, but its eye deals absolutely no damage. The secondary fire (at least in older versions) creates the vortex with you as its eye - essentially a damaging tractor shield, as it moves with you. Both use up 50 energy cells, with which you can do more damage by using the Death Ray or the Tesla Cannon, both weapons you get way before the SG. Add to that the fact that the enemies you constantly face by the time you get it both frequently survive long enough to reach the eye of the vortex and deal big time damage at close range, and that you can crush the opposition it's effective against with your older weapons, and the gun's only usefulness is the 100 batteries it comes with.
  • Berettas and Submachine Guns are both worse in damage and/or accuracy than the Assault Rifle they share ammo with. After picking up the rifle, there's no reason to ever pull them out again; the only purpose they serve after that point is to pick up bullets from dead enemies' guns, since they're a fair bit more common but you don't actually get ammo from them if you don't have one on you, and even that's not imperative for long before far more efficient ammo boxes (which give you 100 bullets at a time, compared to 12 per pistol and 20 per SMG) start dropping everywhere.
  • The Howitzer. It eliminates the need to lead a target like with the other explosive weapons, but this was apparently seen as such an overly-advantageous gimmick that every other aspect was pounded into the dirt to make it useless: ammo is hard to come by, it fires slowly, using it in close quarters still hurts you with splash damage, and its damage is ridiculously low. The only upside is that it makes Shikari flinch with each shot, but even that doesn't save it from being discarded as soon as another weapon comes along, mostly because Shikari do their best to get within close range where you will hurt yourself with splash damage.
  • Much like the Howitzer, the Flare Gun also has elements of this. Its fire rate is very slow, the flares cause damage with a second-long tic (enough for most enemies to recover from their pain animations and retaliate) and don't hurt enough. Its secondary fire takes a long wind-up time, has a minimal range, its damage is laughable, and due to a bug it doesn't set enemies on fire. The very plentiful ammo, the engine's lighting mechanics, and its great niche usefulness against Zealots (who teleport, and thus get knocked out of attacking you in return, with each hit) and Death Shrouds (which can become intangible) do guarantee it a permanent slot, but even then, the gun isn't nearly as fun or practical to use as most of the others.
• The Prankster Bit from TRON 2.0 is the game's BFG and looks pretty cool, but the energy usage is obscene, the damage is overkill against everything you fight, and you get it so late in the game that you're literally unable to fully upgrade it. It's not even worth using against the final boss due to how the game handles damage dealt to it. And if you use it in too close of quarters (read: most of that final level), it stands just as good of a chance of killing you as it does of killing your target. Seriously. Stick to Sequencer and just go Rinzler on your enemies.
• The Halo series of games have several:
  • Halo: Combat Evolved has two: the Assault Rifle and the Needler. The former has a high fire rate and magazine capacity, offset by puny damage (particularly against shields) and obnoxiously-wide bullet spread. The latter suffers from being over-specialized. It does happen to be one of the best weapons for taking on the Sentinels that show up in a handful of levels, but against anything else its shortcomings become obvious: projectiles which, while homing in on whoever's in or nearest to the crosshairs on firing, are painfully slow and deal anemic damage unless you dump half the mag into one guy. Doing that causes them all to create a rather large explosion that's an instant kill on most enemies, but for the amount of ammo needed to put down a single enemy in that manner, it's far more efficient to take a plasma pistol or rifle^note That said, the Needler has since been Rescued from the Scrappy Heap; from Halo 2 onward, the needles fire and travel to the target faster, track their targets better, and explode upon hitting an enemy sooner (it was the go-to weapon for charging Brutes in 2). While it lost its dual-wield-ability from Halo 3 onward, its power has continued to be boosted.
  • In Halo 2, the Assault Rifle was replaced by the SMG. It's a downgrade, having all of the prior Assault Rifle's faults on top of now having high kickback forcing your aim off-target. Part of the issue is that it's designed to be dual-wielded — it's not half-bad in close combat when combined with a plasma rifle (blast away with plasma to take out a shield, then spray the SMG at the meaty bits) or a pistol (shred the shields away with a wall of lead, then hit the target directly with pistol bullets to the face), but it's completely useless when used on its own, terribly outclassed by the Battle Rifle in every other way. The Brute Shot suffers from the same sort of issue the Needler did in the first game, being great in melee due to its attached blade, but bouncing its ammo off walls when not making direct hits, making it difficult to use at any further range. The Magnum pistol, which was very useful in the first game, got substantially nerfed, losing its scope feature and just becoming much weaker in most respects. All it gets in return is a faster rate of fire.
  • In Halo 3, the SMG's power is downgraded even further as part of a general nerfing of dual-wielding. The flamethrower is very difficult to use effectively, although it's hellaceous when used properly. Perhaps the scrappiest Halo 3 weapon is the Mauler, a single-handed dual-wieldable shotgun that, when dual-wielded, has less power and ammo than the regular shotgun at the expense of disabling use of grenades and melee... yeah. Its sole saving grace is a Game-Breaking Bug that allows you to shoot and melee at the same time, generally considered cheating and annoying as hell.
  • Halo 3: ODST's scoped and silenced SMG was still not as powerful as the assault rifle. Its main purpose was to deplete enemy shields before switching to the scoped pistol for a fatal headshot — and for swatting drones out of the air. It's also not actually silenced. A single perfect shot to the brain of an unaware enemy produces the exact same reaction as a grenade going off to the hyper-alert Covenant forces.
  • In some circles, the shotguns from Halo 2 onward are considered scrappies due to their wet-cough range, unpredictable damage, and continually decreasing magazine capacity, plus the presence of instant-kill melee weapons. That said, the developers seem to have realized this, having buffed their range and power considerably from Halo: Reach onward.
  • The Suppressor in Halo 4. Meant as the Forerunner equivalent of the Assault Rifle, its spread is so high that it has virtually no range save for point-blank. It's so feeble even enemies using it on Legendary difficulty are unlikely to harm the player.
    • The Pulse Grenade, the Forerunner grenade variant. Very difficult to hit someone with it, and its lack of immediate damage made it easy to escape from if it did connect. At most it was just an annoyance that kept players from advancing through an area for a few seconds. In Halo 5 it was reworked into a more effective form with an EMP effect and post-impact submunitions, making it good for taking out multiple enemies and disabling vehicles.
  • Halo 5: Guardians introduced many new weapons for the Warzone mode, all of which are meant to be upgrades, but some of which are really downgrades.
    • The Twin Jewels of Maethrillian, a beam rifle that fires two sniper beams instead of one and has bonus anti-vehicle damage. Problem is, not only is Level 7 REQ cost extremely steep compared to most anti-vehicle weapons, the two parallel beams were at launch too far apart to deal significant damage together. It was not uncommon to completely miss opposing players with both beams despite aiming directly at them. A later patch in the Memories of Reach update moved its beams closer.
    • The Oathsworn, a Mythic shotgun with a built-in Speed Boost. While not a bad weapon, as it's got increased fire rate and range compared to the standard shotgun, it's completely outclassed in power, range, accuracy, and reload speed by the Blaze of Glory, and the Speed Boost doesn't reduce the gap much. Additionally, the Blaze of Glory is a Rare weapon, while the Oathsworn is a Mythic, making the latter more expensive for less advantage.
    • ONI vehicles are supposed to be the strongest vehicle types, but the ONI Gungoose is considered a downgrade from the standard Gungoose. While most Gungoose grenades detonate on impact, the ONI Gungoose's bounce, making it extremely difficult to hit targets.
    • The Pool of Radiance, a Fuel Rod Cannon variant. While its projectiles creating post-explosions after the initial impact can be useful for locking down a choke point or damaging a big vehicle, the slow firing speed makes it not worth it. It's also too common for opponents to survive a direct hit.
    • The Echidna, a Hydra Launcher whose missiles fire vehicle-disabling EMPs. Due to its niche utility, as it's too expensive an EMP weapon compared to the Plasma Pistol and too weak compared to rocket launchers, the Echidna doesn't see much use except in Warzone Turbo where REQ levels don't matter and vehicles are extremely common.
    • The Talon of the Lost, an anti-vehicle Needler variant. Compared to most other anti-vehicle weapons, it has very short range, low power, and takes too long to deal significant damage. The Talon's only real proficient area is as a fairly cheap anti-boss weapon.
    • The River of Light, an Incineration Cannon variant that trades its charged shot from a single super projectile to a rapid fire mode. The trade harms its utility, since the super projectile was typically used on vehicles but the rapid fire tends to miss them or not deal as much damage. It's also less effective against multiple enemies due to the reduced area of effect from small rapid fire shots.
    • The Hunter cannons. Both variants reduce your walk speed and have low firing rates. The Wicked Grasp only fires small homing projectiles in bursts, making it basically a Boltshot with a movement penalty. The Berserker's Claw fires a powerful fuel rod, but the shot has to be charged first then has a cooldown, meaning there's no reason to use it in favor of an average Fuel Rod Cannon without any charge or cooldown.
• Wolfenstein 3-D plays the Sorting Algorithm of Weapon Effectiveness straight as an arrow. There are three guns in the game, not counting the knife: the pistol, the machine gun, and the chaingun. All three weapons use the same ammunition, have the same accuracy, and are indistinguishable barring their firing rate and damage. Once you have all three, the only reason to use the machine gun over the chaingun is that the chaingun's rapid firing speed and corresponding ammo consumption makes it overkill on common enemies, and the only reason to use the pistol is that you like the game's death screen and you want to see it more regularly.
• Doom: The pistol, in all its incarnations, tends to fall prey to the Sorting Algorithm of Weapon Effectiveness and see very little use unless it's the only ranged weapon you have, or to shoot distant switches. The standard shotgun fires seven pellets that each do the same damage as a pistol shot in a fairly tight spread, so once you have that—which can be as early as the first room on higher difficulties—you have no reason to use the pistol other than to save on shells. Then, once the chaingun shows up, the pistol becomes flat-out obsolete: it uses the same ammo and deals the same damage per shot but fires two shots per round, has a far faster firing rate and can stunlock enemies, and tapping the fire button gives it a perfectly accurate two-round burst that can be repeated at a speed that the pistol cannot match. And these weapons are considered the reasonable Boring, but Practical options — next to the heavy-duty hardware like the rocket launcher or the plasma rifle, or the super shotgun in II, the pistol may as well be a popgun. The fact that the pistol, out of all the guns, is the only weapon the player has when respawning after death is a major part of why trying to start a level without weapon carryover ("pistol-starting") is considered a Self-Imposed Challenge, with many maps, fanmade and official, starting off the player right next to a shotgun just so they don't have to use the pistol for long. Other games have tried their best to give you some reason to use the pistol (saving the chaingun for later, decoupling its ammo pool from the chaingun, giving the pistol infinite ammunition and a Charged Attack), generally with little success, as its core problems of low damage and sluggish firing rate remain intact. By Doom Eternal, the series seemingly gave up on the pistol altogether in favor of simply letting you start with the shotgun.
• Quake has a similar problem of some guns becoming obsolete once you find better ones. There's basically no reason to use the nailgun once you find the super nailgun, as it both shoots faster and does more damage while using the same ammo. The double-barreled shotgun has a similar problem, although the regular shotgun is at least more accurate. Also, the grenade and rocket launchers use the same ammo, meaning few people bother with the grenade launcher once they have the much more useful rocket launcher: the only real exception is when you're overlooking a ledge with enemies lurking below, as you can toss grenades down without having to look over the ledge and risk getting shot at.
• Turok had a few:
  • Turok 1 had plenty of weapons. The starting Pistol only becomes useful for the first minute of the game until you get the hidden Auto-Shotgun very early and the hidden Assault Rifle, both at Level 1. The shotgun is useless if you manage to find the Auto-Shotgun first. The Alien Weapon and the Shockwave is nowhere near as useful as the Pulse Rifle as the former 2 drains the more rare cell ammo like melted butter.
  • Turok 2 had the tranquilizer gun in Seeds of Evil. Not only are more than half the enemies in the game immune to it, even when it works it does no damage and just knocks them out briefly (any damage will wake them up, meaning you'll have to kill them in one hit to be worth it). The Charge Dart Rifle, a futuristic taser that you get slightly later, fares much better in comparison; fewer enemies are immune to it, stunned enemies actually stay stunned, and hurting them while stunned won't end their electrical temporary paralysis.
• The Phoenix from Clive Barker's Undying is the last weapon found in the game, at about 30 minutes before the final boss. Not only is it quite weak compared to your arsenal (which by now include the Celtic Scythe, the Tibetan War Cannon and the Spear Thrower), but each shot must be guided in first person. Except that it's too fast to be properly controlled.
• First Encounter Assault Recon
  • Similar to the aforementioned Klobb, the Xbox 360 version of F.E.A.R. has the nearly-useless SM-15 machine pistol, which replaces half the spawns of the RPL submachine gun for a weaker, slower and less accurate weapon whose only benefits are A) it's the only other non-pistol weapon in the game that can be used Guns Akimbo (which is negligible since dual pistols are still superior in nearly every way), and B) it holds the most reserve ammo of any weapon in the game at 600 rounds.
  • F.E.A.R. 2: Project Origin has the Napalm Cannon, one of only two flame-based weapons in the game (the other is a new grenade type), which is prohibitively useless. Only two or three enemies across the entire game carry it, so you only get one reload for it when it's introduced and then have to play through half of the game to get another chance to use it. While anyone you can hit with it will burn to death, it also takes forever for even the weakest of enemies to die. Really, its only use is as a sort of slot-warmer for your fourth weapon slot until you can find the much more useful and common assault rifle to take up your fourth slot a level after it shows up - it doesn't even make an appearance in the Reborn DLC, which otherwise went out of its way to give more screen-time to guns that only showed up in one or two levels of the base game.
• Star Wars games:
  • Dark Forces had the mortar launcher, a large, cumbersome weapon with a slow fire rate that lobbed shells in awkward arcs and looked like a butt. It was found only rarely, and usually thermal detonators were plentiful and much more useful, having greater power, splash radius, and effective range. Its main use was setting off enemy mines, with occasional breaks to take pot shots at whittling down the game's Demonic Spiders, because unlike the other powerful weapons, it had knockback.
  • Jedi Knight: Dark Forces II had the bowcaster, which on the surface sounded great. Chewbacca's iconic weapon, with a Charged Attack that fired spreads of plasma bolts, or fired a ricocheting plasma bolt to hit enemies around corners? Sounded useful... until you realized that the rate of fire was painful, the charged attack took a long while to get off and spread the shots out with huge gaps between small projectiles, and that the ricocheting shot could bounce back and hit you in the face. In the end the Imperial repeater ended up being a better use of energy cells.
  • The game's Expansion Pack, Mysteries Of The Sith has probably the most useless weapon in the entire series, the Carbonite Gun. When used upon an enemy, it encases them in carbonite, which can be smashed with its Pistol-Whipping secondary attack. The problem with this is that it takes ages for the carbonite to set, uses a lot of ammo to do so, and requires the player to practically be in melee range to actually work. Hardly ideal when you're surrounded by goons shooting you up. To top it off, the effect is only temporary unless you smash them up and the melee attack is slower and clunkier than the game's two dedicated melee weapons.
  • In Jedi Knight II: Jedi Outcast, most people don't recall the stun baton with any fondness. In previous games, Kyle used his fists and was not above punching out Power Armor-clad Mecha-Mooks. The stun baton was clumsy, did very little damage to anything more dangerous than a stormtrooper, and didn't actually knock anyone out so much as slowly shock them to death, only very briefly stunning them before they continued blasting you in the chest, and with no recourse to deal with the three or so other guys that are invariably also still blasting at you. Fortunately, the lightsaber, which kills people in one hit and deflects blaster bolts from all his friends, replaced the stun baton permanently, and the bothersome little shock-prod never resurfaced in the game or its sequel, Jedi Knight: Jedi Academy.
    • It did have one niche use, though — in portions of certain early levels where you would find yourself crawling through ventilation ducts, you would often get swarmed by hordes of tiny, bug-like enemies that, while incredibly weak, were near impossible to hit with most of your weapons in such tight quarters. A few prods from the stun baton, however, would deal with them all in seconds.
  • Star Wars: Battlefront II gets the Beam Rifle. Nearly every weapon in the game has some sort of upgraded version that can be unlocked for doing something with it a certain amount of times in one life and which trades one attribute to increase another — an upgraded blaster rifle that trades fire rate (fires in three round bursts) for extra power and accuracy, a precision pistol that trades the infinite ammo for higher power and hitscan beams, etc. The beam rifle is received for nailing a certain number of headshots with the standard sniper rifle, and gives increased power at the cost of literally everything else. It's a one-shot kill with bodyshots now, which is the sole upside — that increased power comes with an inability to deal headshots, shorter range, and wonky detection that generally makes you need two or more shots to kill one person anyway - at that point, you're seriously going to get more consistent results with the precision pistol.
• PAYDAY: The Heist:
  • The B9-S silenced pistol is usually never used again as soon as the player unlocks better handguns. The pistol in question has low power and requires several headshots to kill someone quickly on higher difficulty levels. The weapon also has a low ammo count and its weak power will barely help you should you go into bleedout mode. The only time the silenced pistol is needed is for Diamond Heist and No Mercy, where stealth is required, since it's the only silenced handgun. Even then, the Mac-11 is a silenced submachine gun and is a suitable replacement for the pistol.
  • The B9-S's primary advantages are low recoil and high ammo per magazine. It's useful for hitting things a long way away if your other weapons are shorter range (if you're using a shotgun, basically) or for taking out cameras and the like. Headshot damage will usually make up for the lack of base damage, but only within a set range of difficulty levels.
  • Trip mines are also rarely used due to being a very situational item. Once placed, the trip mines can't be removed and you can only carry a limited amount of trip mines based on how many upgrades you have for them. While you can't trigger your own mines by mistake, a single cop can trigger them and will be killed instantly, even the Bulldozer. However, even despite the cops' tendency to bunch together, the power of the mines tends to be wasted on single targets unless you have a good guess on where the cops will go during assaults and have a healthy dose of luck on top of it. The explosion can also kill civilians, which adds a delay to your release should you be captured and imposes a penalty to your reward in the end. In short, the usefulness of the mines are limited and most people that are using them usually are doing it for the achievements. They were mildly improved in the sequel by allowing players to switch them between "blow up anyone who breaks the beam" mode and a less-situational "tag any enemy that breaks the beam" mode (thus giving them a purpose in stealth and letting them combo with a skill that lets the team deal increased damage to tagged enemies), and also pairing them up with shaped charges to quickly blow out locked safes and doors instead of having to slowly drill or pick them.
  • The Locomotive is a short ranged secondary shotgun that falls short of its stronger cousin, the Reinbeck. The Locomotive has weaker power and a smaller magazine compared to the Reinbeck, can't hit targets from as far away, and requires more ammo pick ups to refill its reserves compared to other weapons. The phrase "Buff the Loco!" became quite common on the official forums and it wasn't until PAYDAY 2 that the Locomotive got buffed to the point that it became an excellent secondary weapon to use.
  • Sentry guns are far too situational to use. While they can provide good suppression when they are placed correctly, the sentries can't be moved once you place them down, they require you to give up your own ammo to replenish theirs, and they're not powerful enough to take out heavier SWAT and special units. Sentries tend to not last very long when several cops focus fire on the sentry to destroy them. They aren't much better in the sequel, even with the eventual addition of silenced versions that attract less attention and thus don't get shot quite as often.
• PAYDAY 2:
  • Thanks to a weapon rebalance pushed out during the 2015 Crimefest event, some assault rifles and submachine guns are absolutely awful in accuracy, even with the right skills and gun mods, whereas other similar weapons still retain a good balance between accuracy, stability, and power. This was even worse when another change during that event buffed pistols to the point that they outclassed almost all of the assault rifles and submachine guns, with only the absolutely most powerful of them like the M308 and Cavity 9mm being worth using over even middle-ground pistols like the Crosskill, much less the stronger Deagle and Bronco .44.
  • The two starting weapons are almost entirely outclassed by anything that comes later. The Chimano 88 is the player's first sidearm when they begin the game for the first time and, save for a high capacity and concealment, is near-completely outclassed by every other sidearm available; the Chimano simply doesn't have enough damage output to keep up, especially on higher difficulties where more power is needed to drop tougher enemies. The AMCAR, meanwhile, only really beats later guns with its rather high reserve-ammo count of 220; its damage is among the lowest in the game, the recoil is absurd for something with such a low rate of fire, and its accuracy is even worse than the Chimano's. Both weapons can be mildly improved with attachments, but by the time you have access to a decent supply of those, you're also going to have access to far better weapons that can put those attachments to better use — even ones not restricted by reputation level for if you go Infamous.
  • Melee weapons with high charge times generally have a lot of power behind them, but are generally not worth it when you've got weapons that are only slightly weaker yet can pump out damage that rivals stronger ones in half the time.
• TimeSplitters:
  • In the second game, the Sci-Fi Handgun is often a bigger threat than the basic mook in Robot Factory. The lasers fired from the pistol always bounce off surfaces if they don't hit a target, and were fired in three-shot bursts, often resulting in your own lasers hitting you. Future Perfect allowed the reflection mode to be turned off (and it is by default), making this weapon far safer to use.
  • The Lasergun fired a slow laser that had to be charged up to do any real damage, quickly eating up its ammo. The shield used by the secondary fire didn't last long and only served to burn ammo faster. It also had an irritating glitch where the Lasergun's "charge up" noise would become really loud and play endlessly at the spot you were standing when you were unlucky enough to trigger it. Its replacement in Future Perfect, the Sci-Fi Sniper, fixes all of these issues.
• The Unreal series has the GES^note Green Exploding Shit Bio Rifle, an Awesome, but Impractical sort of grenade launcher that shoots small blobs of sticky explosive sludge, which deal quite a bit more damage than other fast-firing weapons and agile enemies can't dodge like they do straight-firing projectiles, but do require the player to take into account the parabolic trajectory and slow travel speed of the shots. The secondary fire charges up the shot, making it able to One-Hit Kill anything that isn't a boss, but at the consequence of firing a Painfully Slow Projectile that won't ever hit a moving target unless by sheer luck and with such short range that the resulting Splash Damage more often than not damages the player as well.
  • In the first Unreal the alternate fire is awkward to use due to the inability to store a charged glob in the weapon, adding timing issues to the aforementioned aiming problems and leading to self-damage and even suicides. In addition the primary fire isn't as damaging as in following games, relegating the weapon to little more than a way to save ammo for other guns when facing slow enemies like Brutes in the campaign. Most multiplayer matches never even see it equipped.
  • In the Unreal Tournament series the weapon becomes mildly more useful because multiplayer gameplay does occasionally require defensive weaponry, and filling a hallway with green goo is a decent way to make sure anyone passing through in the next few seconds is reduced to red salsa. Unfortunately it also makes such a hallway impossible for you to head back into: trap a passage to a room, discover the room itself is an environment you really don't want to be in due to a rocket fight currently going on and you having 20 health, find yourself unable to head in either direction without turning into gibs. The globs do disappear in a few seconds so that situation eventually unlocks itself, but that makes the gun even less useful at its intended purpose.
  • The 200X games and Unreal Championship sped up the rate of fire and the speed of the projectiles to give them better range than "hugging distance", but 2004 also introduced the Spider Mine launcher in Onslaught mode, which does the Bio Rifle's job for defensive play far better, and is still decent for actual offensive play against other players since the spider mines automatically track other players when they're close enough; the weapon only appears in the vehicle-based gamemodes, though.
  • The weapon was combined with the Grenade Launcher (in what was called the "Canister Gun") for Unreal Championship 2: The Liandri Conflict. The alternate glob gained a tracking feature, though it often takes a backseat to other energy weapons such as the Shock Rifle and the Sniper Rifle anyway.
  • It took until Unreal Tournament III to finally and truly rescue the weapon from the Scrappy heap, due to changes to the weapon's alternate fire, namely that it now can stick to a player, damaging them until the receiver dies or the globs disappear, whichever comes first, helping prevent self-damage in the process, requiring the player to be at either close or mid range to his opponent in exchange for an almost guaranteed frag.
• PlanetSide 1
  • The Beamer, the standard issue sidearm for the Vanu Sovereignty. It's very accurate, small, uses the same ammo as their assault rifles, and even comes with an armor piercing mode. It also does piss for damage, uses up a valuable hip holster slot (better suited for a medapp, engineer tool, or REK), and the armor piercing mode makes it highly effective at being purple. The weapon was often likened to a flashlight, as it did a better job at making enemies glow than killing them. The Terran Republic's Cycler assault rifle is likewise regarded as nearly useless, as it has a huge magazine and good accuracy, but is so weak that players are better off using the Suppressor submachine gun. The Scorpion weapon system is a siege weapon, a shoulder-mounted rocket launcher which flies into the air, then detonates and sends shrapnel onto whatever is below it. It requires trigonometry to use, as the detonation range must manually be set by right-clicking while looking at terrain — too soon or too late or too high or too low will cause it to deal negligible damage.
  • In Planetside 2s the Fractures, Anti-Armor weapon for Terran Republic MAX Powered Armor, was a bit overpowered against infantry… so the developers nerfed its Anti-Armor capacity, giving it terrible velocity, spread, and dumping its damage, making it the worse anti-vehicle weapon by a significant margin. At release, the TR Pounders were completely useless because of one major flaw: convergence. The weapons were set to converge at 20 meters, making them go around vehicles or infantry that wasn't at exactly 20 meters. When the convergence was fixed, some considered the weapons to be a Game-Breaker owing to their monstrous damage-per-second especially when the MAX is locked down.
• Call of Duty:
  • A franchise-wide example would be the SVD Dragunov sniper rifle in the Modern Warfare and Call of Duty: Black Ops sub-franchise games. While the Dragunov was acceptable in Call of Duty 4 for its good damage multipliers, the versions seen in Black Ops, Modern Warfare 3, and Call of Duty: Modern Warfare (2019) (the reboot of Modern Warfare) are generally hated for having high recoil, no one-hit-kill potential outside of headshots, and poor handling. The Dragunov is seen as a Master of None, having neither the quick aiming and recoil control of the assault rifles nor the one-hit-kill potential of other sniper rifles.
  • Call of Duty: Black Ops II:
    • In the multiplayer, the SMR is one of the most powerful weapons available, and is very accurate. In the Zombies mode, it make the starting M1911 look amazing. It's a semi-auto in a mode where full-auto or burst-fire is overall better, it has low reserve ammo capacity (it only barely beats the M14, which in turn beats it when Pack-A-Punched; the only upside to the SMR is it isn't recycling four-year-old code to give it a paltry 8-round mag capacity on top of that), it's surprisingly weak even for this type of weapon, it's slow to reload, and worst of all, due to a glitch, it has noticeable bullet spread while you are aiming down its sights!
    • In the multiplayer mode itself, the Executioner pistol. This pistol is unique in that it's a revolver which utilizes shotgun shells, allowing for a quick and easy shotgun as a secondary weapon, but the trade off is the damage from each shot is so weak that it takes extremely close-range shooting just to be able to bring down a target without using the entire five-round cylinder. To add onto the weapon's woes, it has horrible reload speed and ammo capacity. There are attachments and the Secondary Gunfighter wildcard you can use to improve this pistol, but it's still such a small gain that you're probably better off actually using a regular shotgun or even a knife over this pistol and use the spare Pick-10 points for shotgun attachments, any gun that's not the Executioner, perks, and any other wildcards you want.
  • Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare:
    • The NA-45 sniper rifle, a two-shot weapon (as in, it fires two shots before reloading and both must hit a target one after the other to do any appreciable damage, necessitating double-tapping) that is widely regarded as one of the worst weapons in the entire franchise because of how complicated it is to use, its low magazine and terrible damage if both shots don't connect.
    • The crossbow is considered the worst primary weapon. It only holds one bolt compared to the Black Ops II crossbow that holds 3, is difficult to use effectively on account of the increased mobility, and isn't silent despite being a crossbow. As a result, it is one of the least used weapons in the game.
• Rocket launchers in Borderlands are a joke: unless you're playing as Brick and/or have the Maliwan Rhino, they deal very underwhelming damage for what you'd expect a weapon of this class to have, made worse by their small ammo pool and inherent sluggishness of operation, especially when they're single-shot^note shoot once very slowly, then reload even more slowly to shoot slowly again. You can do far more damage per second or even per shot with a decent revolver or sniper rifle, none of which are harder to come by than a launcher of any quality. Borderlands 2 rescued them from being Better Off Sold by drastically upping their damage output and making them the BFGs that they're supposed to be.
• Tribes 2's Blaster became a scrappy weapon despite its many bonuses. It has infinite ammo (drawing from your Jump Jet Pack energy), extreme range, perfect accuracy, penetrates shields, and deals silly amounts of damage-per-second at close range. However, in the world's fastest shooter where players are skipping across the map at 200kph, the Blaster was godawful courtesy of its Painfully Slow Projectile and its infinite ammo gimmick becomes a drain because players need the jet pack energy to keep their speed up. Indoors, it is also a Pinball Projectile that stands a good chance of nailing the user. However, the Blaster has a something of a cult following among the "bastards", who stand on top of mountains plinking at enemy flag defenders til they give chase.
• Doom³:
  • The flashlight makes for an awful weapon. It swings terribly slowly and with range no greater than that of the fists (in the case of the PC version, even less range than them), to say nothing of the horrendously off-centered beam. And thanks to the graphical design of the game, you have to keep switching your gun out for it, leaving you unprepared when you inevitably get ambushed. Once you have a flashlight Game Mod like the famous "Duct Tape" or Sikkmod's headlamp and Night-Vision Goggles, it has no practical use, and it wasn't really missed in the BFG edition⁺it replaced the handheld flashlight with an armor-mounted lamp that is equally as off-centered and only works for a little while before having to shut down and recharge, but at least lets you keep a gun ready either.
  • The shotgun gets a lot of this. DOOM as a franchise tends to make the shotgun the Jack of All Stats, but 3 plays Short-Range Shotgun painfully straight. The spread on it is so ridiculous that you won't hit half the pellets unless you shove it right up a monster's nose, and the damage is slightly randomized on top of that. You can fire it at an imp standing ten feet away three times and still not kill it. And to add insult to injury, the version used by the shotgunner enemy has an actually reasonable spread.
• Left 4 Dead 2:
  • The game has a variety of melee weapons, with each of them having different reach and swing speed to differentiate them (since they all one-hit kill regular zombies). Not all of them are created equal, however.
    • The nightstick is the worst melee weapon in the whole game; it has awful hit registration, which makes it possible to hit a zombie and not kill it. Similar weapons like the frying pan, the fire axe and the ninja sword hit zombies far more consistently.
    • The pitchfork that was added in The Last Stand update is slow, takes up screen real estate, and while every melee weapon consistently swings either from side to side or in a diagonal motion, which clears out crowds of zombies in front of you with very few swings, the third pitchfork swing makes a jabbing/thrusting upward motion, which will ignore any zombies off to the sides of the crosshair.
    • The knife from Counter-Strike: Source was nerfed^note it used to be the best melee in the game back when it was exclusive to the German version, due to swinging insanely quickly, predictable (it has only one motion, unlike other weapons that swing in different directions) and with a reasonably generous arc comparable to the crowbar and frying pan into a scrappy melee weapon thanks to The Last Stand update giving it a bizarre swing arc that angled downwards and didn't cover the right side of the screen at all. Three years later in an August 2023 patch, it was Rescued from the Scrappy Heap by restoring the normal, consistent and useful horizontal swing trajectory it had before the update.
  • The Hunting Rifle was already not well-liked in the first game, being slower, arbitrarily limited on reserve ammo, and overall harder to use than the auto shotgun and assault rifle. Then the sequel introduced a second weapon in its category, the Sniper Rifle, to which the Hunting Rifle is inferior in in every way except moving accuracy — which doesn't matter much for scoped weapons you're not going to be moving and shooting with — and reloading speed, which the Sniper Rifle makes up for with twice the magazine capacity and an extra 30 rounds in reserve. In addition, using the scope removes all movement recoil anyway. Even worse, the SIG rifle introduced in The Last Stand has a zoom function and does everything the Hunting Rifle does but better, especially being a fast-shooting automatic when not zoomed.
  • The Counter-Strike: Source weapons were implemented in the German version of the game to make up for the censorship the game had to go through. They were eventually made available to everyone with The Last Stand update, and that's when the Steyr Scout and Accuracy International AWSM sniper rifles showed their faults. They have high penetration, power and accuracy on par with the Sniper Rifle, but they're bolt action, so their rate of fire is so laughably low that most players don't bother using them unless there's nothing else to use. In a game where zombies swarm you and you have Tanks gunning for you, it's preferable to use any other weapon since they have a better rate of fire; in fact, the single pistol you start all campaigns with has far better DPS than either rifle.
• Half-Life:
  • Snarks let you toss tiny, fast-moving enemies into combat, which seek out and attack your foes. Sounds useful — but their damage is pitiful and their health is low, so they don't do much more than annoy the opponent for a few seconds unless you toss in three or so. But you can only carry fifteen at a time and they're very scarce, so good luck with that. On top of that, snarks seek out the closest target, which includes you, so tossing them at the opponent to distract them and then moving in to finish them off often results in the snarks chasing and harassing you instead. Oh, and for a nail in the coffin, due to their AI coding, they don't attack alien enemies at all. Hell if they aren't fun to watch, though. And they're great for Sequence Breaking by tossing one underneath yourself and abusing physics to let it slowly push you up walls you aren't supposed to be able to scale.
  • There's also the Hivehand, aka the Hornet Gun. The only good thing about it is that it can regenerate ammo, and that the hornet ammo can home in on targets around walls and such without the enemies ever being alerted to the player. Other than those, it's the most ineffective and useless weapon in the series, to the point where you'll hardly be using it at all. Its Black Mesa incarnation buffed its damage substantially, while also reducing the ammo counts for a bunch of other weapons, making it a reliable fallback option… though this also makes it a fair bit scarier in the hands of aliens.
• In Half-Life: Opposing Force, the MP5 really gets the shaft. The expansion introduces a wide variety of souped-up enemies, and the MP5 hasn't received any sort of power boost to make up for that. Despite this, 99% of Black Ops grunts using it instead of the occasional shotgun, and the amount of ammo given out for it is in the hundreds thanks to the weapon pickups themselves providing more ammo, which just means that 9mm ammo is by far the most expendable thing in the game — to little avail.
• Killing Floor has the Light Anti-tank Weapon. When it comes to anti-armor launchers "light" is a relative term: it's the heaviest weapon in the game, taking up 13 blocks of inventory space (leaving you only enough room for your starting handgun and a machete as secondary weapons), and before the introduction of the Demolitionist perk it was surprisingly weak for its heavy size and ridiculous price tag, as even Scrakes and Fleshpounds would be able to shrug off a single rocket. It was improved mildly with Demolitionist, which increases the damage to something worthy of its high price tag and weight, while also reducing the cost down to much more reasonable levels as the perk is leveled.
• Vermintide II:
  • You will hardly ever see a player using a greatsword, Kruber and Saltzpyre's two-handed swords especially, as while they may cut down ranks of fodder enemies with each cleave, they are woeful against armoured enemies like Stormvermin and particularly Chaos Warriors. Kerillian also uses two-handed swords that do have a long-range, armour-piercing thrust, but she has much better options for dealing with armoured foes (like the spear and the fan-favourite dual daggers and sword & dagger).
  • Speaking of our resident elf, weapon tiers will practically always put her one-handed axe at the absolute rock-bottom of the list. Its reach is abysmal and its horde-clearing ability is limited, which is supposed to be a Necessary Drawback for the axe being great at chopping through shields and armour. But nearly all of Kerillian's weapons are at least decent against armour, and her elven glaive is even better at armour-cleaving while also being a much more capable horde-clearer. There's almost no reason to take a one-handed axe. Saltzpyre's one-handed axe also faces similar problems and is outshone by superior competitors, but a Ranger Veteran Bardin might be tempted by the one-handed axe's mobility and armour-cleaving (besides, what on earth are you trying to achieve if you are front-lining as a Ranger Veteran anyway?)
  • Kruber's blunderbusses are the epitome of Short-Range Shotgun. Their dismal performance against anything other than unarmoured enemies at very close range relegates them to horde-clearing duty, and Kruber has a ton of good melee options for that role (like his greatsword, his mace and shield, or his Bretonnian longsword if you have the DLC).

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