Assemble! - Custom Shooter Squad - The Environmental User

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.

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THE ENVIRONMENTAL USER

A more unorthodox kind of shooter, the Environment User, as the title describes, uses the setting around them to their advantage in more way than simply as cover. These characters are more creative with their approach to offense and defense. They tend not to be the kind of protagonist you would normally see in a shooter and they tend not to use normal guns. Their equipment and abilities tend to either warp the laws of physics, take physics to the extreme, or otherwise enable the wielder to do things that might seem impossible to the normal person.

Our pick for the Environment User is…

Agent 3 from Splatoon.

As an Inkling, most of Agent 3’s abilities, while common for her species, are wildly strange for other shooter characters. Their weapons are designed around shooting globs of colored ink instead of bullets or lasers and they can turn into squids to swim through any ink placed on the ground, walls, or other surfaces (if it matches their color). The ink is strong enough to break apart wooden crates or constructs made of metal and the weapons come in different varieties including automatic weapons, the sniper rifle-like chargers, giant rollers and paintbrushes, and bazookas, just to name a few.

Moving on with Agent 3 herself, she has wielded several of these weapons to combat against hordes of the Octarian Army after stealing Inkopolis’s main source of power, the Great Zapfish. She fought against the army’s strongest super weapons, and eventually the leader of the army himself, and came out on top. She would also play a part in rescuing another hero of her world, the Octoling Agent 8, and allowing them to save Inkopolis from a newer threat.

For her use of her special abilities and weapons to achieve victory against a great threat, we now add Agent 3 to our roster.

ADDED!

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Honorable Mention: Chell (Portal)

Using her Aperture Science Portal Gun, Chell can create portals for herself, others, and inanimate objects to go through, from Point A to Point B and back. She was able to use those portals and other physics pushing elements to make it through the different tests that GLaDOS put her through. However, as versatile as she is, Agent 3 is more versatile with what she is able to do, which is how she got the spot.

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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!