Pressing the secondary fire will fire a nail magnet that is affected by gravity and will stick to both enemies and surfaces. A maximum of 3 nail magnets can be deployed at once, with their ammo count recharging upon their destruction. Nail magnets will attract nails, pulling them off course toward themselves and causing nails to orbit when very close. This allows for the creation of "nail traps" on surfaces, which will damage enemies that walk over them and creates an explosion of damaging shrapnel upon the destruction of the magnet. If multiple nail magnets are placed at once, nails will attempt to congeal into a ball exactly in the middle of all of the nail magnets.

The magnet stays on the surfaces or enemies for 12 seconds before self-destructing. The speed of the magnet beeping will indicate how much time it has left. Each magnet can attract up to 75 nails simultaneously before being destroyed. The color of the blinker changes from green to red and the pitch of the beeping goes upwards indicating how close to the nail limit it is. With the help of multiple magnets, the lifespan of a nail can be extended to about 30 seconds before disappearing.

Pressing alternate fire while the overheat meter has charge will fire a less accurate, superheated barrage of nails, the duration of which is proportionate to how full the overheat meter currently is. With the overheat meter fully filled, the barrage will last for exactly 1 second. This will use up a heatsink, which takes 8 seconds to recharge. Be wary of using up all of your heatsinks, as this will drastically decrease the primary fire's rate of fire and will make it impossible to charge the overheat meter until a heatsink regenerates.

The OVERHEAT Nailgun is best used in conjunction with the Attractor Nailgun, as the Attractor Nailgun is able to instantly charge the overheat meter and its nail magnets allow for more of the Overheat Nailgun's nails to hit their target. In general, the overheat barrage is a very useful way to dish out high amounts of damage at once and get rid of large groups of weak enemies such as Filth and Strays, or to eliminate most of the health of a single large target at point blank range such as the Hideous Mass or Malicious Face.