Slugs or chainsaws?

So I’ve decided to cull back my scope for my Doom Metroidvania and limit my arsenal to 12 weapons.

4 starter weapons, 8 main weapons, and 8 upgrades that give an alt fire.

Starter weapons will eventually be replaced with objectively better versions of the weapon.

The weapons I’ve landed on are:

1) Acombat knife that is replaced with a Halo-esq energy sword. Alt fire is a flying lunge.

2) A shotgun that is replaced by a super shotgun. Alt fire is either a contact grenade (making it an Unreal-esq flak cannon), or slugs making it work like a magnum.

3) A SMG that is replaced by an assault rifle. The alt will either be a chainsaw or a contact grenade launcher.

4) A Halo-esq battle rifle that is replaced with a railgun. The upgrade will be a an XRay zoom allowing you to shoot through wall.

5) A flame thrower. Alt fire lobs a glob of napalm that makes an area set on fire.

6) A Quake 3 esq plasma rifle. alt fire is a like a BFG round with a cooldown that eats up ammo.

7) A rocket launcher. Alt fire allows you to lob the rockets like grenades.

8) A microwave cannon that shoots a constant beam, which “charges” enemies life bars. If the charge surpasses their current HP they explode relative in size and damage to the charge. Alt fire will send a surge that does ample damage in a single burst, but pits the gun into cooldown. (Yes, Prey did this. But I swear I never played it and had this idea years before it came out.)


Anyway, the crux is this:

A) Should I do shotguns with slugs and assault rifle with a grenade launcher?

B) Or a flak cannon with grenades and an assault rifle with a chainsaw?

A is appealing because I really want a magnum, and I do love HL1’s SMG grenade combo. But I also acknowledge that the railgun works just fine for this purpose AND the ammo for the assault rifle’s grenade launcher skews the single ammo per gun formula.

B is appealing because the flak cannon is probably my favorite gun in FPS history and and an FPS without a chainsaw just seems wrong. Also, this gives me a mid and short distance attack for both weapons. But, the chainsaw seems redundant with the energy sword already filling the “no ammo weapon” slot.

Or maybe you have a suggestion for a completely different alt fire for the assault weapon.

Disclaimer, I’ve already thought of having a tracer shot for the assault rifle as the alt that causes the bullets to curve towards it but feel like it makes things too easy. Although I suppose I could tweak it.

Suggestions?

EDIT: and I should mention that if I do a flak cannon, one tweak that I’m going to do to the basic contact grenades is that it will spray out shrapnel forward that bounces everywhere, so it’s better to hit just in front of the target.

EDIT 2: How cool would it be to stun lock an enemy with the chainsaw while simultaneously shooting them??? I think I’m starting to answer my own question…

 

B seems more interesting to me since it adds more variety. There already are a trillion other weapons that shoot a fast linearly moving projectile. Gimme grenades and a chainsaw!

Variety isn't always good of course but with my limited knowledge of your game, I don't see a problem.

 

Yeah I agree. B sounds better.