Video Game / Loadout

Loadout was a free-to-play Third-Person Shooter game developed by Edge of Reality, launched on February 1, 2014. The main draw of the game was the ridiculous amount of customization to your weapons, allowing you to build everything from tesla shotguns, to flame beams, to laser guided missile launchers that split into 6 smaller rockets upon impact.

The game also featured a variety of gamemodes: Jackhammer, Extraction, Blitz, Death Snatch, Domination, and Annihilation.

Sadly, the game's servers shut down on May 24, 2018 after 4 years of development, due to a lack of funds to keep the game compliant under the then-recently-passed General Data Protection Regulation.

View the launch trailer here, courtesy of Rooster Teeth.

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Loadout provides examples of:

• Alien Blood: The Kroad have bright neon blue blood.
• Amusing Injuries: Taking a heavy hit to a part of your body will result in you losing that part for a while with it pouring blood. This can include a part of your arm or your skull! Even then, the characters just don't die until they lose that last hit point, nor does it really affect them in any way.
• Awesome, but Impractical: A lot of the crazier weapons end up either being outright useless, or very situational.
• And Your Reward Is Clothes: The Prize Boxes you open at the end of each round may very well release some fancy threads to put on your character. Since it's a rather rare occasion (you'll usually end up getting Blutes), it's something to be celebrated.
• Badass in a Nice Suit: A possibility thanks to the character customisation.
• Better to Die than Be Killed: Once upon a time, it was possible for a player to avoid having their Blutonium captured in Death Snatch by hurling themselves into a Bottomless Pit, preventing it from spawning and subsequently the enemy scoring. Soon enough, this became subverted, when Blutonium would simply pop up at the side of the pit if the player suicided.
• Black Is Bigger in Bed: Both Axl and T-Bone have items that allow them to show off their (heavily pixellated) genitalia. T-Bone's is noticeably larger than Axl's.
• Bloody Hilarious: Helped by the cartoony art style and exaggerated animations.
• Booby Trap: Faux Health Kits and Faux Equipment kits. They ALMOST look like their real counterparts, only slightly opened and a bit more bloated (Though, for team mates they look like kits stuffed to the brim with Dynamite). They will explode when an enemy gets too close or if shot and deal near-fatal damage. It's always smart to spend another moment checking if the health kit you're running towards is a life saver or your doom.
• Boom, Headshot!: Headshots on offensive payloads deal increased damage. Nonlethal damage might leave you without most of a head, except for brains and eyeballs, and killing someone with a headshot will leave them without a head at all.
• Boring, but Practical: The initial assault rifle they give you is just as effective as a lot of guns you make, despite it firing boring old bullets.
• Bottomless Pits: Most maps have them. A couple of maps are actually floating over a single, huge bottomless pit!
• Brawn Hilda: Helga.
• Bribing Your Way to Victory: Averted as of release. The prices for cosmetic items are steep, but the best gameplay advantages money can buy are extra slots in the gun storage (so you can keep a greater variety of gun builds at the same time) and experience/Blute boosts. The gun parts are unlocked only through playing.
  • Played straight with the PS4 Release, however, as gun parts either require buying bombs to blow up safes, buying lockboxes, buying them outright, or playing campaign missions to obtain either the parts or money to buy the parts. The only way of getting bombs is to buy them.
• Capture the Flag: Jackhammer mode. Simply replace the flag with a towering sledgehammer that can smash people trying to stop you from escorting it back to your base. Five smashes renders it unusable though.
  • In an interesting twist, racking up kills with the Jackhammer increases the amount of points your team gets for a capture, which makes being the carrier a surprisingly strategic balance of scoring wherever possible and keeping yourself alive.
• Chain Lightning: Tesla weapons invoke this trope, but with a twist: Even if the round doesn't hit an enemy, arcing will still occur from the point of impact of the round, dealing extra (reduced) damage. Most pronounced with Tesla beams.
• Combat Medic: It's very rare to see a player using a healing weapon and a buff weapon or two healing weapons, mostly because they don't have any means of self defense other than melee if they do.
• Confusion Fu: A healthy mix of combat rolls and jumps can negate most of the damage you might receive.
• Critical Existence Failure: You can have a gaping hole through your entire torso, or your limbs reduced to bone, or your head reduced to a brain with googly eyes, but you can still run, roll and shoot just as effectively as ever until you lose that last hitpoint.
• Defiant to the End: If you end up on your back from a killing blow, then your corpse may give the enemy one final Bronx salute.
• Deflector Shields: One of the available types of equipment are personal energy shields that can absorb enemy fire.
• Difficult, but Awesome: Snipers. Considering this is an arena shooter, nobody is going to be standing still to let you get a clean headshot on them
  • To a lesser degree, the mortar propulsion for rockets. Aiming it really does matter because it can whiff right above your target's head if you're too close. However, if you get used to the odd angle that it's launched and maintain being above your opponent, you can get one of the best types of single barrel rockets in the game, due to having the travel time even faster than lobbed when you are firing from above, and damage on par with agile rockets.
• Design-It-Yourself Equipment: Basically the point of the game. You make up your gun from a selection of chassis, stocks, barrels, triggers, clips, payloads and depending on what type of weapon you're making, projectiles.
• Destructible Projectiles: Rockets can be shot down with any offensive payload. Doing so will reward you with the "Broken Arrow" bonus. Fast-firing weapons excel at this, with autofiring beam weapons taking the crown. Skilled players will simply swat down any rocket enemies fire at the point they're trying to capture from afar.
• Developer's Foresight: As mentioned under The Many Deaths of You, Edge of Reality has included an absolutely astounding number of death animations for very specific circumstances.
• Emergency Energy Tank: The Portable Health Kits. If you put these into your loadout your character will carry two deployable health kits, which can be placed on the ground with the equipment button. After a short waiting period you can open it, which will refill your health moderately slowly. Dying before the waiting period is up could have the enemy steal it from you, however.
• Every Bullet is a Tracer: With Rifle weapons. Unless it is equipped with a silencer barrel, which removes the effect.
• Expository Theme Tune: One plays during the credits, though it does not tell you much more than what can be guessed.
• Fan Disservice: Every naked character in the game (especially Helga).
• Fictional Currency: Blutes, which are the currency you earn by playing the game, and Spacebux, the premium "pay real money" currency.
• Fire, Ice, Lightning: Fire and lightning both have payload types in the form of "Pyro" and "Tesla", with ice soon to be included as the "Cryo" payload.
• Flipping the Bird: When a character is killed by another, the dead one gives the finger to the responsible of his\her death. Also, The Bird is used as a taunt in the customization system.
• Full-Frontal Assault: Possible thanks to the customization system, but unreasonably expensive.
  • How expensive? For example, in T-Bone's customization screen, plain pants are 999 Spacebux (about $1.50), shorts are 2499 Spacebux (about 5 dollars), Speedos are 4799 Spacebux (about 9-10 dollars), and the Logical Extreme, named "T-Bone's Steak", has T-Bone's (heavily pixel-censored) genitalia out for the world to see. It also costs 34999 Spacebux, or about 55 dollars.
• Gatling Good: The Gatling barrel. Unparalleled firing speed, but terrible accuracy. It's better not to use it in conjunction with slow-firing triggers (semi, charge, burst) or you might embarrass yourself.
• Going Commando: The "Axl's Rod" clothing piece removes Axl's trousers... revealing that he isn't wearing anything underneath.
• Gonk: Helga.
• Gorn
• Goofy Print Underwear: The Blitz game involves your team raising a flag over a control point. The flag is actually a pair of brightly colored boxer shorts.
• Blue Rocks: Appropriately named Blutonium, which is likely related in some way to the currency of Blutes.
• Grenade Launcher: The appropriate selection of Launcher parts can turn your weapon into one of these.
• Healing Shiv: Any gun, laser beam, or even rocket launcher can be converted into a helpful healing tool simply by replacing its dangerous payload with the "Health" type. Deadly projectiles are replaced with green syringes, green rockets and green... slime blobs.
• Hollywood Silencer: The Silencer barrel eliminates almost all the noise a weapon causes, hides the tracers of Rifle chassis weapons and firing with a silenced weapon will not show you on the enemy radar.
• Jiggle Physics: Used for Fan Disservice courtesy of Helga. Some taunts combined with the right outfit take this up to eleven.
• Kill It with Fire: Courtesy of the Pyro payload. It deals less direct damage than other payloads, but sets the target on fire, dealing ongoing Damage Over Time. Time spent burning on fire depends on the amount of damage received, but can be cut short with continuous battle rolls. Fire spreads from character to character, however, and does not discriminate between teams. You might end up setting your team mates on fire with this.
• Kill Streak: You will be notified of a kill streak with a large message on the bottom of the screen, and all other players will be notified of your kill streak in the chat.
• Laser Sight: A sight option for Pulse and Launcher weapons. Projectiles will follow the laser.
• Limited Loadout: While the game itself isn't limited (you can build your weapon using any combination of parts), you can only carry two guns and one piece of equipment at a time. As much as you would want to carry an electro-pulse rifle, a flaming machine-gun AND a heal-beam, you can't carry all three.
• Ludicrous Gibs: Loadout is violent. In the course of playing a round you can have your arms ripped off, your body burnt to a crisp, holes blown through your chest, and your skull destroyed, leaving your brain and eyes bouncing about in the open.
  • Kill someone with a Launcher, and there'll barely be anything left.
• Macross Missile Massacre: One can create a full auto rocket launcher with six rockets, each of which can burst into cluster-rockets.
• The Many Deaths of You: A vast array of death animations are present, from slumping to the ground with your head shot off to skidding face first across the ground, with each one having (occasionally ludicrously) precise conditions for occurring. Some are also character specific.
• Medal of Dishonor: In certain circumstances, getting the "Assist Streak!" bonus can just sting. It means that you either can't finish the job, or keep having your kills stolen as a result of Always Someone Better.
• Microtransactions: You can use the real-money currency, Spacebux, to unlock cosmetic items - clothing and taunts. However, clothing can also Randomly Drop sometimes.
• More Dakka: Slap a high-capacity magazine, gatling barrel and spooling trigger on a weapon and shoot bullets like there is no tomorrow!
• No Celebrities Were Harmed: Axl is clearly inspired by Sylvester Stallone while T-Bone by Mr. T and the late Kimbo Slice.
• No Plot? No Problem!: You are a miner. You are in a mining colony. You have guns and shoot people. Probably. The game doesn't really tell you.
• No Scope: Your weapon, your rules. You want to fire your single shot bolt-action sniper rifle with iron sights? You got it, boss.
• Overheating: Beam weapons use this mechanic instead of regular round-carrying magazines. Fast-firing triggers and powerful barrels will overheat the weapon faster to compensate for the increase in damage. Weapons can be manually cooled by pressing and holding the reload button, allowing them to cool faster or just switched out for your other weapon while the beam weapon cools down.
  • This can be forcibly invoked by users of Pyro weapons. Setting an enemy on fire with incendiary ammunition will increase the heat level of the enemy's beam weapon.
• Player-Guided Missile: With a Remote scope on top of a launcher, you can control the flight path of a rocket yourself, no matter what kind you shoot. Superfast turbo rockets, super slow hard-hitting rockets and even multiple corkscrew rockets will be at your fingertips. However, you will stand stop-still while you guide the rockets and people fed up with rockets hitting them from nowhere might go and look for the one pulling the trigger.
• Play Every Day: Whenever you finish your first match of the day, you'll be allowed to pick from three boxes. Inside are varying amounts of Blutes, with the possible chance of cosmetic items.
• Practical Taunt: The "Fore!" taunt has your character pull out a golf club and whack a beer can across the map. If you have grenades equipped, they'll hit one of those instead. Very much Awesome, but Impractical due to the extreme unpredictability of the grenades's trajectory.
• Quick Melee: A tap of the melee key will have your character give your enemy a good whack with the stock of their gun. This causes considerable damage (40 points out of 100) and is a good finisher against weakened enemies. Your character is left helpless while doing this, though, and it can't be done in the air.
• Ray Gun: Beam weapons. They fire a linear beam instead of single projectiles. They're hitscan guns similar to rifles, but they use an Overheating mechanic instead of regular ammunition.
• Refuge in Audacity: Oy...
• Sentry Gun: The Turret equipment allows you to place a turret with your current weapon on the ground that aims and fires at a 90° angle. It deals less damage than the original weapon and can be destroyed with a single melee attack, but with certain weapons it can put serious pressure on a contested point. Some weapons, though, are next to useless on turrets.
• Slapstick: Helga is gibbed and maimed as often as the boys.
• Shock and Awe: The Tesla payload, which arcs electricity around between people and projectiles, generally making accuracy a bit less important.
• Short-Range Shotgun: To the extreme with Rifles with scatter barrels. Their range is only a little longer than melee.
• Shotguns Are Just Better: Despite their short range. For quite a while, the damage cone on the gun was massive, making it exceptionally easy to hit your opponent once you get close to them.
• Shout-Out: Falling into a Bottomless Pit will cause your character to either let out a Wilhelm Scream or Goofy's legendary "Waa-hoo-hoo-hoo!"
  • Several taunts are pop culture references, such as the "80's Dance," the "Slick Criminal" and the multiple "Gangnam" variants.
• Shows Damage: Whenever you take a heavy hit to any part of your body, it will be blown apart, leaving bones and gooey bits plainly visible. These can be turned off if you so desire.
• Sniper Rifle: Attaching a sniper barrel to a weapon will grant it high damage and a long range, but a very low rate of fire. The headhunter barrel also increases headshot damage while lowering damage to other body parts a bit.
• Starter Equipment: The game starts you off with a run-of-the-mill assault rifle and grenade launcher. They can be really useful though.
• Stock Scream: Wilhelm Scream and Goofy's Scream
• Taunt Button: Four of them, and you get to decide what each button will do with each loadout (at least if you unlock more than the default taunt).
• That One Player: The level brackets for lobbies are, at the moment, really sparse. There is a lobby for newbies up to level 5 and after that everyone gets thrown in the same pot. It is very possible for a lobby of around level 10 players to be thrown together with a player of around level 30 which, depending on game mode, can decide the winner of a round before it even starts.
• The Computer Shall Taunt You: The training dummies in the weapon testing area seem really eager to make you want to shoot and kill them over and over.
  • Dying to a bot might have it stop to perform a random taunt before it moves on if it thinks the area around it is completely safe. However, sometimes their positions for taunting are... less than optimal.
• Top-Heavy Guy: Both male character models, Axl and T-Bone, are beefcakes at the top, with comparatively thin legs at the bottom. Helga alleviates this a little.
• Unusable Enemy Equipment: Averted. Every time a non-AI enemy dies he will drop his currently used weapon, free for you to pick up and use. They can serve as a good source of inspiration for your own weapons.
• Virtual Paper Doll: The outfitter allows you to create unique outfits with all of the clothes you have unlocked. There are a lot of options.

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