Assemble! - Custom Shooter Squad - The Flanker

Welcome to Assemble!

Here, we'll look at several different characters across multiple series to see who would form a perfect team for a certain genre. From fighting game rosters to RPG adventuring parties, different types of characters tend to show up frequently. What we'll do here is look at those archetypes to see what character is the best fit for that slot, and in the end, we’ll have the best team for the job. These articles will also be shorter entries, compared to some of the more long-form articles here, focusing on one or two characters at a time.

Despite a perception of a lot of these titles as generic war games, some shooters allow players to dive into an engaging story in a captivating world, taking the role of interesting characters with varied weapons, abilities, personalities, and motivations, especially with the popularity of hero shooters like Team Fortress 2, Overwatch, and Paladins. In this series of Assemble articles, we will be assembling a hero shooter roster using characters from several different shooters, based on different character archetypes.

The picks will be based on the different themes and tones of the characters and the worlds they inhabit as well as the roles they fill on a team or the kinds of weapons they use. Only characters that originated from video games, shooters particularly, will be observed here. Both first and third-person shooters will count and so will first and third-person action games if their main method of combating enemies is gunplay. Finally, I’ll only be discussing games and characters that I am at least somewhat familiar with. While this means I won’t discuss every shooter in existence, there should still be a good amount of variety with the series explored.

THE FLANKER

With several of them found in hero shooters, the Flanker is a specialist in hit-and-run tactics. Quick, agile, and light on their feet, their abilities and arsenal are geared towards getting in, dealing damage, and getting out quickly. They typically don’t carry big guns or wear any armor, carrying only what they absolutely need. They are typically used to distract the enemy by making them scramble around to attack them or sneak into the backline to take out key targets like medics and support characters. The character chosen for this distinction is the one who best embodies all of those traits.

Our pick for the Flanker is…

Tracer from Overwatch.

Out of a roster filled with fast-moving, mobile characters, Tracer is one of the fastest and most mobile. Her signature move is her Blink, which lets her “jump” forward a few seconds in time, letting her zip around a location very quickly. Using this ability with her dual Pulse Pistols and Pulse Bomb Ultimate means that she can deal out a large amount of damage and zoom out of the way before the enemy can retaliate. Even if she does get hurt, her Recall ability lets her rewind her body a few seconds in time, essentially making it so she didn’t get hurt in the first place.

For her ease in quickly moving in to deal damage and moving out to avoid it, we now add Tracer to our roster.

ADDED!

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What did you think about this article? Want to see what other characters get picked for our roster? Do you think someone would fit this role better besides whoever got picked? Make your voice heard in the comments below. 

Thanks for coming!