There’s countless lists out there about “the best” fictional weapons, or the most iconic, but today we’re focusing less on the weapons themselves and more how they make players feel when using.

Below you will find, in random order, the ten best weapons from the pantheon of gaming that will put a smile on your face the moment they’re equipped.

Casey

Game: Enter the Gungeon 

As you can imagine for a game called “Enter the Gungeon”, firearms are a big part of this bullet hell / roguelike / shooter. It’s a real surprise, then, that some of the most fun you can have here is with a melee weapon.

Casey is a baseball bat that skipped the part where the wielder takes steroids and did them itself. This bat can kill most normal enemies – and even a couple of bosses – with a single swing. Even better it can actually fling enemy carcasses around as a projectile and redirect the bullets from enemies.

Sounds broken, right? Casey is balanced out by a high skill floor thanks to its hilarious long wind up time. All that power doesn’t mean anything if you die before using it. As a melee weapon in a game based around projectiles, it’s also a difficult task getting to enemies without being shot up on the way. Oh and if you’re winding an attack up an you take damage, the animation is cancelled and you have to start again.

Casey has become a meme god in the Enter the Gungeon community (see The Church of Casey for proof) and we spoke to the game’s developer Dodge Roll a while back to ask about all things Gungeon, including the legacy of this weapon.

Intervention

Game: Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2

The king of a thousand montage videos on YouTube. The one tap wonder. The 360 no scope beast.

The Intervention sniper rifle, with its ability to usually kill players with a single bullet and the endlessly cool bolt action, has carved a monument in gaming history among the endless guns present in the endless Call of Duty games.

It’s quite telling that in Modern Warfare 2’s multiplayer, a game mode still marvelled for having an entire roster of OP weapons, the Intervention was still feared by most players.

One shot, one kill.

MK1-Paris

Game: Warframe

A bit of a personal story here as, for a good few months a few years ago, I was hopelessly addicted to Warframe.

For those few months I played only it and was pouring around six hours into the game every single day. It was the first time I had ever been bitten by the live service game bug and I had been bitten hard.

How I shook that addiction is a story for another day, but I trace the “first hit is free” moment to the tutorial where the player is given a bow, the MK1-Paris, to use at some point.

The second I saw the bow act more like a nail gun, skewering a conga line of enemies to a wall as they walked out of a monster closet, I knew I was hooked.

Warframe has a long and sordid / illustrious past with bows depending on why you ask. A few thousand hours after the tutorial I found myself grinding out resources using the Attica, an crossbow that could be modded to shoot an endless, instantaneously stream of explosive bolts that turned into a napalm strike on enemies.

Good times. Now let’s go on before I relapse.

Super Shotgun

Game: Doom 2016

At a certain point in Doom 2016 you get an upgrade that allows you to shoot the Super Shotgun twice before needing to reload, effectively doubling the potency of the weapon.

At that instant the game is no longer about killing a demon invasion, instead it’s swapped into a reverse horror game where Doomguy roams the wastes and fills demons with lead until they die.

This upgrade trivialised Doom 2016 so much that its sequel, 2020’s Doom Eternal, removed it. Sure we got the Meat Hook attachment that acted as a sharp grappling hook taped to the Super Shotgun, but it was a massive nerf.

Some people complained that Doom Eternal tried to explain too much of the lore behind the Doom series and, in particular, provide so much backstory to Doomguy that he became an insufferable legend as every NPC can’t help but swoon about how badass he is. We can’t help but wonder how much of that was caused by the Super Shotgun in Doom 2016.

Smart Pistol

Game: Titanfall 2

Without spoiling anything there’s a moment in Titanfall 2 where you finally get to use the Smart Pistol. It’s a future piece of tech that locks onto enemy heads and then empties its clip killing a room of enemies instantaneously.

That section is in the video above, so don’t click on it if you haven’t played the game yet.

The combination of this being an insane concept for a weapon, and its strategic use in the story of the game, makes this gun one of the true greats.

There’s a few key moments in the story of Titanfall 2 that everyone will mention whenever a discussion about it starts, and the Smart Pistol segment is always near the top.

We honestly think an entire game could be made around having the Smart Pistol as your only weapon.

Leviathan Axe

Game: God of War 2018

Santa Monica Studio looked at the magic boomerang powers of Thor’s MCU hammer and thought “what if we strapped a giant axe head to it?” and that sentence should be enough to sell God of War 2018 on its own.

The genius of the Leviathan Axe in this game is that it only gets better as time goes on. The player can unlock new abilities and ways to use the axe, and it’s crucial in many of the puzzles. You’d be amazed at how many complex ways Santa Monica managed to stretch the basic premise of a magical boomerang.

With God of War Ragnarök on the horizon we’re excited to see how the axe is expanded upon. To quote Kratos in this game, “I expect an improvement”, but how can you improve something so great already?

Brimstone

Game: The Binding of Isaac

We could just write in this section “blood laser” and that should be enough to sell brimstone.

In The Binding of Isaac your main method of attack is shooting the weak tears out of the eyes of a child that has recently been accosted with a knife by his religiously fanatical, insane mother. This is a weird game just roll with it.

Brimstone replaces those tears with a blood laser. You hold down the attack button to charge it up and then lay waste to anything in front of you.

While the focus here is on Brimstone we also want to give an honourable mention to another weapon in an entirely different franchise of games. In the Metal Slug series players can be turned into zombies at which point their powerful grenades are turned into a screen-covering blood vomit attack.

Who would have guessed it: two different games released years apart both with really fun weapons based on shooting blood out of your mouth. Speaking of Metal Slug…

Shotgun

Game: Metal Slug

The weapon here with the simplest name, all the pickup weapons in Metal Slug are known for their ability to obliterate enemies, especially the rawket lawnchair, but the shotgun is a league above.

There’s a section in the first Metal Slug, on the second level, where you can pick up a shotgun for the first time. Until you run out of ammo you can decimate entire squads of enemies, tanks and even a miniboss.

The presentation of the Metal Slug shotgun really sells its power, with a huge, short cone of fire spreading out of it, a punchy sound effect on every shot and a screen flash that can be a bit irritating to the eye but it helps convey just how ridiculous this weapon is.

Chainsword

Game: Warhammer 40,000: Space Marine

With a sequel finally on the way after all these years we were reminded just how much fun this game is, even if it is getting on in age.

With all the Warhammer games floating around Space Marine is still king in our eyes for fully realising the fun that could be had with the insane weaponry of 40K, and the famous Chainsword was done true justice in this one.

It’s a sword. It’s a chainsaw. It can cut through orks like butter all while sounding like a dying piece of industrial machinery that turns fuel into blood. Superb.

If you have still not played this game we recommend the great video on it above from Manalore.

Man, Space Marine 2 can not arrive sooner.

Double Fireball Spells

Game: The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim

Instead of writing “Double Fireball Spells” above we could have just had “Kamehameha”.

Leading up to release the dual wielding in Skyrim was heavily advertised as a way to mix and match traditional weaponry with spells, but if you double up on the latter you can combine two of the same spells to increase their power.

Sure this can also be done with other spells and, in the Destruction pool, with electricity and frost, but something about whipping up a giant explosive fireball out of thin air and hurling it at enemies is endlessly gratifying in this game.

Spells aren’t technically “a weapon” but if that’s your biggest problem with shooting fire out of your hands in a videogame well we don’t know what to tell you.

Oh, and a first person Dragon Ball game would be insane, even more so in VR. Akira Toriyama write us a cheque for 10 percent.

Blitz’s G52-Tactical Shield

Game: Tom Clancy’s Rainbow Six Siege

Is a shield technically weapon? We’d say yes when the shield has several giant flashbangs strapped to it.

Blitz was a favourite operator of ours when we were playing a lot of Siege a few years ago and he became even better with an update that greatly increased his speed. The sound of a bulky Blitz, with shield in tow, running around the map put the fear of god into other players.

Honourable mentions here include the Tactical Shield from Counter-Strike 1.6 and the Riot Shield from Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2. The Tactical Shield was the ultimate troll tool in 1.6 and few things were as fun as running around in Modern Warfare 2 with the Tactical Shield either outright killing enemies with bashes from the shield or switching to another weapon, such as the RPG-7, to get kills from afar.

Also a shout out to Assassin’s Creed Valhalla which allows players to not only use a shield as your main offensive weapon, but to also duel wield shields for the ultimate “the best defence is offense” strategy in the world of gaming.