The shotgun — while not the first gun to appear in anFPS, it’s become one of the most popular and one of the most famous firearm types in the genre. Reliable, deadly at close range, and when done right, forever a blessing on the ears to listen to as slugs and buckshot rain death and carnage onto the poor souls staring down the barrel.
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There are a lot of shotguns and many FPS games featuring shotguns, but only a select few can pass into the realm of legend and become icons unto themselves. These are some of the best shotguns to feature in FPS games.
10Roadhog’s Scrap Gun (Overwatch)
Relatively new but instantly recognizable, the Scrap Gun, and the Australian outlaw that wields it, were quick to become icons ofBlizzard’shero-shooter IPOverwatchwhen it was first released back in 2016. Crafted and used by Roadhog, a massive outlaw that made a name for himself in the wastelands of post-apocalyptic Australia,the Scrap Gun is a walking Blunderbuss, firing scrap metal and scavenged junk in lieu of shotgun shells or muzzle-loaded pellet wraps.
When his Ultimate is activated, Roadhog throws a makeshift grinder on top of the Scrap Gun, loaded with excess scrap and fed with a crank,turning the shotgun into a firehose of molten leadto send enemy players flying in all directions. Loud, proud, and looking like it’ll explode and take Roadhog with it one of these days, the Scrap Gun is a workhorse weapon for a team that needs enemies out of their way and fast.
A South African-originating pump-action beauty, the Neostead 2000 Combat, NS2000 for short, is a trick-filled beauty that dominates the domain ofBattlefieldBad Company 2’s multiplayer. Reloading faster than its peers andeasily reload-canceled,thanks to a bug that was never patched out, the NS2000 was otherwise identical to the other pump shotguns in the game, but these quirks quickly made it a common sight on the battlefield as word of its reload rapidity spread online and in-person across the world.
When equipped withslug rounds, the NS2000 can also pulldouble duty as a sniper rifle, thanks to Bad Company 2’s forgiving and easily mastered bullet drop system — dropping unsuspecting players with a headshot from a shotgun at distances that will make eyes bulge and jaws drop. Unique to look at and play around with, the legacy of the NS2000 was all but guaranteed, and its in-game silhouette has become as iconic, if not more so, than its real-world equivalent.
8Spas 12 (BLACK)
2006 was the age of action television, federal agent police procedurals, and the war on terror dominating the airwaves of the United States. Enter BLACK, a standard military drama story that iseclipsed by its bombastic, exaggerated, and explosive gameplaythat puts players into an interactive 80’s action film — waves of faceless goons, explosive containers and vehicles aplenty, and weapons that are loud, loaded to the brim, and able to blow away debris, effects, and enemies with a single trigger pull.
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The Spas 12 is the player’s tutorialto this experience as soon as the game starts, leaned up against a solid metal door. Picking it up, a single shotblows the door clean off the hingesand flies backward in a shower of clangs, booms, and sparks. This is how the entire game feels, and the Spas 12 is a multiplier to that feeling in every regard. Large, powerful, and readily available across most of the game, found in armories and up against walls or looted off of dead shotgun enemies,the Spas 12 is the heart and soul of BLACKrolled into a single weapon from minute one to the rolling of the credits.
7The Terrible Shotgun (Fallout 3)
The Capital Wasteland is abundant in old-world firearms, military, police, and civilians alike.The Combat Shotgun was a workhorse weapon for pre-war America’s waning years, and now it litters the wasteland, sought after and employed by militants, raiders, store clerks, and vault dwellers alike. Deep in the bowels of a pre-war factory-turned-raider-stronghold is Smiling Jack and The Terrible Shotgun. While it’s physically identical to a standard Combat Shotgun, The Terrible Shotgun deals far greater damage and is thesecond deadliest weapon in the Small Guns category, dealing up to540 critical damage with the right perks.
While more fragile than standard Combat Shotguns, their availability throughout the game makes iteasy to repair and maintainthe Terrible Shotgun for all the closed-off sewers and tight hallways the ruins of D.C. will subject the player to. Deadly, easy to get, and just as easy to maintain, snatching the Terrible Shotgun off of Smiling Jack and using it to make the wasteland a better (or worse) place is one of the best things a player inFallout 3can do for increasing their chances of surviving and thriving in the dangerous new world.
6USAS 12 w/Frag Rounds (Pre-Patch) (Battlefield 3)
Sadly, this exact weapon no longer exists, but itsbrief time in the limelight is immortalizedin the videos and memories of those who experienced it. The early days ofBattlefield 3’s multiplayer were dominated by this weapon, clearing entire teams out of hallways, metro tunnels, and warehouses across the battlefield.
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The Frag Rounds attachment, paired with the magazine-fed USAS 12, essentially turned the weapon intoa fully automatic grenade launcher, with each shot creating a deadly blast radius that could kill around corners and across the cover, leaving no one to be spared from the nearly35 explosive roundsthe player wielding it had access to. Sadly, patches and content updates would greatly reduce the impact of Frag Rounds in the weeks following the game’s release, rendering this behemoth of a shotgun a figment of the past, gone but not forgotten.
5Spas 12 (Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2, 2009)
This is one that the nerfs never touched. The Spas 12 shotgun in Modern Warfare 2 continues to dominate the game nearly 15 years post-launch. A secondary weapon, the Spas 12 quickly proved to bea stronger backup weapon than the more traditional handguns, boasting solid damage, good range, and a decent reload speed, easily dropping enemy players at ranges that the other shotguns on offer would struggle to one-shot at. Unlocked at level 4 in multiplayer, the Spas 12 was an early-progression weapon that continued to hold its ground as players unlocked even more guns to play with,blowing away competition all the way through Max Prestigerank.
Where its greatest competition,the Model 1887 shotguns, were soon nerfed into the grounddue to their ridiculous damage over range, the Spas 12 wasall but untouchedand quickly supplanted the 1887’s as the go-to shotgun for players up to the present day. The sounds, the presentation, and the reliability helped cement this version of the Spas 12 as one of the greatest in gaming history and continues tostand as a templatethat futureCall of Dutyshotguns are compared to whenever a new entry is on the horizon.
4Super Shotgun (Doom 2)
Not the first shotgun, not even the firstDOOMshotgun. However,this one created a sub-genre all by itself.A double barrel shotgun that fires both barrels in a single trigger pull, the Super Shotgun cemented the idea that double barrel shotguns are absolute death machines in video games,a way to balance against only having, at most, two shotsbefore having to reload. Readily available and still effective against late-game enemies, the Super Shotgun would become the unofficial representative weapon of the DOOM franchise.
The 2016 DOOM revival and its sequel, DOOM Eternal, would give the Doom Slayera specialized double barrel shotgunthat blows both barrels with a single trigger pull, later having itcome with a grappling hookto pull the Slayer towards his enemies to make the blast even deadlier. The Super Shotgun embodies the Rule Of Cool and shows no sign of ceasing its crusade to rip and tear nearly 30 years later.
312 Gauge Shotgun (Half Life 2/Garry’s Mod)
A gun that’s arguably larger than its source material. The 12 Gauge Shotgun inHalf-Life2 isa workhorse weaponfor Mr. Freeman and the player, readily available and regularly used against Freeman by Combine soldiers. The 12 Gauge packs a powerful punch, a satisfying soundboard, a decent reload times, and maintains relevance throughout the entirety of Half-Life 2 as the only spread-fire weapon in the world’s sandbox. When wielded by the equally iconic Gordon Freeman, it’s easy to see why this shotgun has such a beloved reputation. But that’s not the end of this weapon’s influence. With the open-ended nature of Valve’s Source Engine, assets, weapons, and models from most Source Engine games can be dumped into each other with relative ease.
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Enter Garry’s Mod,a fan project turned official releasethat built off the Half-Life 2 version of the Source Engine to create open source tools for content creation, map porting and custom game modes. With beloved games like Trouble In Terrorist Town and Prop Hunt launching their success off of this game, the 12 Gauge Shotgun was there from the get-go, one of the default weapons that countless players and creators played with while experiencing countless maps and modes on Garry’s Mod, further cementing this weapon as on the best there is at what it does:Killing in style.
2VK-12 Combat Shotgun (F.E.A.R.)
A John Woo-styled FPS with a horror setting sounds like an odd combination of ideas. It is. But odd doesn’t mean it won’t result in a masterpiece of a game with a masterpiece of a shotgun. The VK-12 Combat Shotgun is the 4th Spas-12-derived shotgun on the list, a testament to that weapon’s cultural longevity in spite of its real-world shortcomings. The VK-12 does this weapon justice and packs a mighty punch that’s made all the better by F.E.A.R.’s excellent particle effects system, with dust, sparks, paper, and glass shards being sent in all directions with every shot.
Using the VK-12 in combination withthe player’s slow-motion abilityallows these particle effects, muzzle flash, and the spread of the buckshot to shine and soak in every frame as they fly in all directions andsend enemies flyingto the ground with blood splatter and red mist occupying the space where they stood only moments before. The Rule of Cool can only be cranked up to 11 in F.E.A.R. and itsDLC expansions, andthe VK-12 is the player’s microphone.
1Pump-Action Shotgun M45/90 (Halo Series)
How could it be anyone else? Forover twenty yearsacross 8 titles, the Pump-Action Shotguns ofHalohave delivered players 8 Gauge satisfaction against the Flood, the Covenant, Covenant Remnants, and the Prometheans alike. From the fast-loading 12 rounds of death offered in Combat Evolved to the close-quarter powerhouses in Halo Reach, 4 and 5, the Pump-Action Shotguns havenever failed to deliver.The most prominent use of these shotguns, themultiplayer Infection game mode,is where this shotgun became the stuff of legend. With infected players closing in around every corner,players have to pick and choosewhen they fire, when they reload, and when to turn-tail and run.
This deadly game of Cat-and-Mouse with shotguns versus swords has made the game mode a long-lived fan favorite, and these shotguns are the key to that success. They may come in different models, with different sounds, ammo capacities, and stats, butthe core of how this weapon is used has remained stunningly consistent and eternally funto engage with. Its noted absence fromHalo Infinite, alongside the lack of an Infection game mode, is one of the most shocking developments and largest points of fan contention. Of all the debates and conversations about this franchise, a single weapon being excluded from the game managed to raise so many eyebrows, a testament to its legacy.
