Assemble! - Custom Shooter Squad - The Urban Commando

 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 URBAN COMMANDO

A more modern archetype, the Urban Commando is a character whose battleground is a contemporary urban setting. They are often a gangster associated with an organized criminal entity, the most frequent ones being the Italian mafia, the Japanese yakuza, or African American street gangs. They can be portrayed as an unapologetic career criminal, trying to make their money and rule their turf at any cost or someone sympathetic who has grown tired of the thug life and just wants to make a better life for themselves and their family, despite their violent background. For a more positive take, this trope can also describe law enforcement, like a police officer or SWAT team member trying to fight against such criminal elements.

Our pick for the Urban Commando is…

Carl “C.J.” Johnson from Grand Theft Auto.

Like John Marston’s life is emblematic of his setting, the Wild West, Carl Johnson/C.J.’s life is emblematic of the late 1980s and early 90s in southern California. The story of GTA: San Andreas starts with him returning to the Los Angeles-inspired city of Los Santos, having left to put his gang life behind him. After returning to the city however, he’s thrown back into the gang life. Over the course of the game, he finds himself not only helping his own gang, the Grove Street Families, return to power, but also fights for or against other African American street gangs, Hispanic gangs, foreign drug cartels, the Italian Mafia, and the Chinese Triads. He also helps a rapper take his career to new heights and gives a few crooked cops the justice they really deserve. And unlike a lot of other protagonists in these kinds of stories, C.J. comes out of the whole ordeal alive and on top of everything.

For managing to survive and thrive despite everything the thug life has had to throw at him, he now add C.J. to our roster.

ADDED!

=

 

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!