Assault rifle

"The 7.62x51mm assault rifle is designed for close-quarter combat, utilizing a shortened barrel and 'bullpup' design for increased maneuverability. An additional underhand 20mm HE launcher increases the rifle's effectiveness against a variety of targets."

- Inventory description.

The ZHL-U1953 is a weapon in Deus Ex.

Background
The ZHL-U1953 is a modern bullpup automatic rifle using 7.62 NATO rounds. It also has an integrated grenade launcher for clearing out tight areas, such as foxholes. The assault rifle is the standard rifle of many armies and paramilitary forces throughout the world. Even UNATCO, the premier anti-terrorist force, has adopted the assault rifle as its standard rifle.

Characteristics
The Assault Rifle is a surprisingly bad weapon. It firest bursts of 5 bullets, 3 damage each, for a total of 15 damage - barely above single shot from the Pistol(14 damage). Furthermore, because of recoil - and Assault Rifle has quite a bit of recoil - there's much less guarantee that all the bullets hit, and the burst itself takes time which creates even more problems when trying to hit moving enemies, or even non-moving ones because of the hit animations.

The low damage value doesn't scale well with the skill damage bonuses. The damage bonus is a percentage and damage of Assault Rifle is a low number. This normally wouldn't be a problem, hovewer the game uses damage values as integers rounded down. In other words, when you're "Trained" in Rifles you should get a 20% damage bonus. Hovewer 120% of 3 is 3.6, which is rounded down to 3, the base damage value. At "Advanced" level you should have 50% damage bonus, but 150% of 3 is 4.5 which is rounded down to 4. Only at "Master" skill level you will get a "clean" damage bonus - 200% of 3 is, of course, 6.

Finally, searching enemy bodies yields just several bullets worth of ammunition for whatever weapon they were holding, and Assault rifle is no exception. When relying on it as the main weapon you might quickly find yourself short on ammo, since you can't fire less than 5 bullets at a time(not that you would want to with one bullet doing so little damage) and searching an enemy who wielded an assault rifle will usually give you only 1 to 5 bullets.

There is, hovewer, one very good reason to carry an Assault Rifle in your inventory: the 20mm underbarrel grenade launcher. While rare, the grenades do a lot of damage in a rather large radius so they're great against both groups and single tough enemies alike, as well as doors of all kind and even safes(if you're short on lockpicks).

Locations

 * Liberty Island, killing or knocking out the UNATCO troop that appears after you find Leo Gold at the Statue of Liberty.
 * On the body of an MJ-12 soldier in the New York City sewers.
 * Hong Kong, used by the chinese military police.
 * In various place after the capture by Gunther Hermann, used by the UNATCO and Majestic-12 troops.