Twas the Monday before Xmas when all round the house, not a creature was stirring, not even a mouse… you know why? Because 2011’s amazing crop of weapons were used to decimate the pesky little rodent. Turn him into red mist, if you must.

Yes, that’s right… it’s Festive Feature time and with the first of 2011’s crop of festive features, we kick things off with an explosive start by looking at the year’s Top 5 weapons. Yes, 2011 was one hell of a year for weapons – so much that we nearly ran a Top 10 instead – and so we put our heads together to pick our favourite 5 from this year. Oh, this is going to be fun!

Coming in at number 5 is Rage’s iconic Wingstick. Considering the weapon is nothing more than a glorified boomerang with blades attached, we’ve never had this much fun with a thrown weapon in video games… possibly ever – not even a sticky grenade or a Tomahawk has provided this much fun or devastation! In fact, boomerangs in games have never come as brutal and effective as Rage’s Wingstick, and lopping heads of Rage’s crop of ugly-ass mutants is one of the most gratifying things ever. Effective over long-distances, brutal when thrown into a crowd, easy to craft and this bugger even comes back to you… how can you not love this bad boy? This video is enough to show you its pure awesomeness – yes, that is a word.

It was fairly obvious that a Gears of War 3 weapon would feature in this year’s Top 5 Weapons feature – after all, the Lancer is the brainchild of Epic and that’s as iconic as it gets – but interestingly, rather than opting for the red-mist inducing One-Shot, we went in a different direction: the Digger Launcher. Why? Simple… If there’s one way to freshen up a cover-shooter and throw a spanner in the works that can not only affect your offensive tactics but your defensive tactics, it’s by creating a weapon that takes the cover out of the equation and makes you as vulnerable as ever, and that’s exactly what Epic did. For those who aren’t aware of Epic’s new weapon, it’s essentially a grenade launcher that buries itself beneath the ground before popping up and exploding. That means, pretty much any cover is now moot when it comes to this weapon, thus mixing things up. Plus, any weapon that can bury into someone’s chest and explode inside of them… well, that’s Epic… geddit?

There might be more interesting weapons in Saints Row: The Third, like the pre-order only Mollusk Launcher or the Fart in a Jar stun grenade, but none are quite as iconic and amusing as Volition’s slap-happy, crazy-ass, huge purple dildo baseball bat: the Penetrator. It’s a baseball bat shaped like a huge pink dildo… it doesn’t get any more simple than that, but beating someone to death with this beast is amusing no matter how many times you do it. It’s a powerful melee weapon too so it’s not just a gimmicky piece of crap that you’ll never use. Thanks to Saints Row: The Third’s impressive character customisation too, you can buy yourself a pimp suit to wear with it, you can even beat the locals completely starkers, hell, you can even create your favourite character or celebrity and then see what they’d look like wielding a huge purple dildo baseball bat… it’d be like watching Paris Hilton’s sex tape scandal all over again.

If we’re being perfectly honest, Deus Ex: Human Revolution’s truly incredible Typhoon Explosion System was close to nabbing the top spot this year, but lost by a nose length. In another year, it’d have taken home the gold, the silver, the bronze and even stole every bit of china in the house, I mean, after all, this son of a bitch is as iconic and as brilliant as they get, but alas, this year it has to settle for second. The Typhoon Explosion System is a mechanical augmentation that protagonist, Adam Jensen, can have installed in his back that when activated will detonate a series of explosive projectiles in every direction around our mechanical friend. With upgrades you can improve the blast radius, the power of the detonations… in short, you can be a frickin’ missile factory and take out a room of bad guys in the space of a minute, what’s not to love?

If there’s one thing that Epic and People Can Fly’s hugely original shooter, Bulletstorm, brought to the market this year, it was a hell of a lot of crazy weapons. Despite that though, it was fairly easy to filter through all those and find one that really stood out from the bunch. Ladies and gents, I present to you our number one weapon of 2011: the Flailgun. The Flailgun essentially attached two grenades together with a large chain and propelled it towards wherever you’d aimed it, but wait… it gets better! Not only does that mean you can shoot the projectiles around obstacles and use them as traps, but you can also tie them around enemies and use them as human traps. Wait… it gets even better, the secondary fire on this badboy heats up the chain to a temperature than can even cut through foes, so splitting in them in two is very much a reality too… it’s like the weapon that keeps on giving. If Xmas was a gun, it would be the Flailgun. Would you look at that… it’s a festive choice too! Just look at some of the cool stuff you can do!