“Loadout” is a third person shooter based game focused around building a weapon. Using parts that you purchase within the game you can build many different kinds of weapons that do all kinds of absurd and hilarious things.

Do you want a rocket launcher that bursts into a bunch of smaller rockets that stick to a wall to be detonated when an unsuspecting foe walks past? Done. How about a branching laser that follows people after you shoot them for a little bit? You got it.

The game itself is very fun and I liked the trial and error method of building guns. While anything is possible, sometimes it is not as effective as you originally thought it would be. The solution is either to go back to the drawing board or practice until you get better with the gun you designed.

There are several different game modes including a point-capturing spree, what is essentially a team deathmatch, and some games that I could never find any active servers running that I could join.

The game is very abusable in its mechanics. This could be bugs or intentional, but I have had a lot of fun using uneven cliffs to climb walls that should not have been possible.

It is a very smooth movement system that allows this. Though I wish the impact of the guns could be used for mobility similar to, perhaps, the rocket launcher from Team Fortress 2 that could be used to jump higher than you should be able to. The game looks nice and the art style is humorous but somewhat gruesome.

Sometimes when you die you will be blown up until only a leg, an arm and a stretch of torso remains. Others, your character (of which there are currently only three to choose from) gives the finger to the jerk who gunned you down.

Now, if “Loadout” was a game that you had to pay money for and just gave you the parts to mess around with, I could just wrap up my review and maybe look a bit further into the gameplay.

All that really matters for a free to play game is that it is either competitive or fun, and “Loadout” is certainly fun, but if it is not fair to people who want to take full advantage of the free game than it would just be a money sink that is not worth anybodies time.

The game uses a levelling system to unlock more weapon slots so that you can have more than the two different weapons you can craft at once. Unfortunately as a free player you can only have a maximum of four slots which is incredibly restrictive for people who want to explore the premise of gun building this game claims to offer.

During the game people with insane looking weapons will kill you and it’s easy to write the game off then and there but it is actually reasonable. Other people — who have probably played longer and gotten more comfortable with their guns — should feel like they’re better at the game.

“Loadout” boils down to a learning experience. Unfortunately because of its free to play model it suffers from what a full game could have been, with the unlimited amount of different guns that could be built. While unlocking new guns, slots and incorporating new pieces to the design is fun, I believe the game suffers for this model. At the end of the day, it is fun, free and worth looking at.

3/5