Assemble! - Shooter Archetype Squad - The Sniper

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 SNIPER

One of the most straightforward archetypes, The Sniper is a character armed with a high-powered, long-ranged rifle (or sometimes, a bow and arrows), whose main draw is getting quick kills with precisely placed shots. Players need great accuracy to master these characters and how powerful the character is gets balanced out by how difficult they are to use. The best use they have is getting headshots, which are often one-hit kills. This character is often shown to be cold and calculating, a ruthless and remorseless killing machine.

Our pick for the Sniper is…

Zer0 from Borderlands.

This cyborg assassin for hire has several different skills that he can use within the series, but among them is an entire skill tree for sniping. The attributes within this skill tree make him a more efficient sniper when unlocked. They include inflicting critical hit damage for headshots, increasing zoom and decreasing disruption when taking aim, improved aim, and damaging multiple enemies by shooting through other targets, just to name a few. While most of his other skills or equipment have nothing to do with sniping, they do make it easier for him to take out the enemy quickly and with little hassle. They include a holographic decoy to distract the enemy, a stealth mode function to sneak around, and a sword as a melee weapon for close-up kills.

We won’t talk about the guns here because it’s Borderlands. They have lots of them, and we’d be here all day talking about them.

For his ability to be such a strong sniper while also keeping sharp skills in other areas, we now add Zer0 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!