The Knife Finish (Project A)
In the waiting room, a Rioat staffer played us a video on the new agent, Echo. It gave a short explanation of her four skills, plus a few clips of them in use, and of those four, the one that stuck with me hardest was her ultimate. Thrash.
Thrash is a seven-point ultimate, and like Echo's other three skills, it works through a summon. What sets it apart is that your view switches over to the summon, so you pilot Thrash yourself. On cast you steer a pink, shark-shaped summon for six seconds, and if you trigger it again, Thrash charges and sticks Detain on every enemy in the area for six seconds.
Detain. Yes — Detain. The same hard CC bolted onto Killjoy's ultimate, Lockdown.
Unlike other shooters, Project A is full of crowd control, and that CC is a big part of what sets the game apart. Vulnerable doubles incoming damage. Concuss forces single-fire and blurs your vision. A flash cuts sight entirely, and Paranoia goes further, choking off sound on top of that. If I had to name the strongest of them, I wouldn't hesitate. Detain.
Why Detain, when there are so many others? Think about it for a second and the answer is obvious. Does landing Concuss win the fight every time? Paranoia? A flash? Vulnerable? No. You can still shoot, one bullet at a time, through Concuss. Even blind, a stray round can take your head off. Land Vulnerable and it still might not matter, because Project A is a headshot lottery — one bullet to the head and the duel is over.
That's why I pick Detain. Luck or skill can still play through the other CC. Detain leaves no room to fight your way out. Even Apas of Lord, exalted as he is, dies to an Iron's gun if Detain is on him. The lowest bracket in the game. Because while Detain lasts, you can move, and that is all you can do.
Not that Killjoy's Lockdown is flat-out better than every other CC skill. Only that if you judge the CC by itself, Detain sits at the top. For all those reasons, hearing that Echo's ultimate came with Detain had me expecting a lot. Lockdown is for flushing people out and sealing a zone for good. Almost nobody uses it just to stick Detain on someone. A skill built this openly for Detaining the enemy felt fresh, so I'd been looking forward to it since before the showmatch even started.
The performance, of course, didn't live up to the hope.
Like her E, Stun Bot, and her Q, Wingman, Thrash can be shot and destroyed. It has 200 health — ten times Stun Bot, twice Wingman — and it still goes down easier than you'd think. I used the ultimate three times in this showmatch. Every one of them popped uselessly before I got to do anything with it. One of those times... well.
If an ally is inside the charge, Thrash Detains them too, and that generous bit of throwing once cost us an entire round. Ahem. Anyway — Thrash has simple counters. Shoot it, or just move out of the way. Using it properly was clearly going to take more lab time.
So the flaw Echo showed today was this: most of her skills can be answered by moving, or by breaking them. Being able to recast is a real merit, no question. The price of that merit, it seems, is a weakness this obvious to play around.
"Ult's going out. Let's go!"
Thrash took off with the ultimate line, and of course its destination was B site. The summon sits lower than a player's view, but it's fast, and I had the enemy positions almost at once.
"Jett, B site!"
The one Thrash found was Jett — holding an Operator. Priority target number one for the attackers. I left-clicked the moment I saw her and sent Thrash charging straight in, but—
A rush of air.
"Ah, damn. Missed."
BS had heard the ultimate and pre-charged Tailwind. Smart. Unfortunately, that meant I failed to make him drop the Op.
"It's fine. Forcing the Op off is already value."
Didn't matter. Our teammates had come in with Thrash and already had B locked down, and the plant was only a matter of time. An Operator is at its weakest in exactly one situation: when the site is lost and you have to retake. Posted up and waiting, the gun is absurd. The moment you have to walk in yourself, that power gets cut in half.
That aside—
"Could someone watch this interact for me?"
Every Echo skill can be reused once by pressing G on the fallen bot. Thrash included. This was a showmatch to sell a new agent. Never landing the ultimate properly would look pretty bad. It absolutely was not because I was bitter about failing to have any fun with it even once.
"I'll smoke it off for you, too."
Omen's smoke covered the CT side where Thrash had dropped. Thankfully, nobody died to a smoke shot. They were arriving this late, which meant most of them were probably stacked on A. Looked like we'd won the rock-paper-scissors.
The ultimate was primed for a recast, and the spike was down. Even so, I didn't get careless. Their whole team was still alive.
"Alarmbot, Main!"
"I'll take this one."
"Footsteps in Market too. Door's broken — watch Market!"
Enemies closing from three lanes. Market, CT, and Main.
Tough for BS's team, but we won the fights. The score was already 12–3, and the momentum that gap had built wasn't even in the same conversation. They dropped B Main and they dropped Market, both of them helpless. Still up: the Jett who had rotated to CT, and an Omen who hadn't shown himself yet. If they'd been in Market or on B Main, a trade would have come. So both were probably CT. Jett had rotated there too. CT was the best bet.
Which meant, well...
"I'm ulting CT and swinging out."
It was a CT entry that brought a pistol round to mind — something I didn't need to do. I still wanted to. The peek BS's team had taken was a risky one, Jett swinging with a Stun Bot. What I was doing was no-risk: just sending Thrash into CT. And not using an ultimate I'd gone to the trouble of recasting would've been such a waste, right?
Thrash went out again. It rushed into CT, and there he was — Jett, Operator up.
Beep, beep, beep — pop.
I charged him a second time. Tailwind was already gone. Thrash hit him square.
"Jett's tagged. I'm swinging CT!"
"Okay."
Between the frame just before Thrash burst and Echo's line, the connect was certain. We were already well ahead, and I wanted to see what someone looked like after eating Thrash, so I committed to the peek—
Gunfire snapped out to meet me.
What welcomed me wasn't a Detained Jett. It was Omen, right beside him, eyes on CT.
"Omen, CT!"
"Eunha, get ou—"
Not that I was particularly surprised.
One shot.
"Nice!"
A single gunshot. A clean one-tap. I'd held my movement key through the whole peek, ready for exactly this, so their Omen was only shooting space I'd already left. A wide peek. I dropped him clean, then looked at the Jett in front of me.
BS, stuck in Detain, reduced to shaking his head no. Maybe five seconds left on it? I could have sent him off neatly with the rifle...
"Eek!"
"M-me? With Eunha?"
Letting him off easy didn't feel right. He'd given me too much to look at today. I didn't know why BS was avoiding me, but if he was, I ought to give him a proper reason. I hit 3 where I stood and ran at Jett.
And the 3 key? Please.
"God, that's cruel..."
"Pfft— ah... B-Byeongsik-hyung, farewell!"
It's the button that pulls your knife.
Project A has an unwritten rule. The last enemy alive, if they're caught in Killjoy's ultimate, gets finished with the knife.
A wet thud.
"Huh? Is this about to wear off?"
There isn't really a rule. It's just something you do to break a person's mental. A knife does 50 on a left click and 75 on a right. One right click won't kill, so Jett ate the slash and stayed up.
Another thud.
"Whoa. I really thought that was gonna wear off."
"It pretty much had, right?"
"Pfft... Byeongsik-hyung just now, doing anything he could to stay alive... God, this guy is hilarious."
The instant Detain let go, the second knife landed, and Jett was on the floor. Hmm. I could've sworn I heard a scream from somewhere. Imagination, probably.
And that was the new-agent launch showmatch, run under Rioat, finished in a clean 13–3.