The Gunner: The Last of the Free Companies

The gunner is the last of the free companies, which is a grand title for one man with a jetpack. Before the war, the free companies were the closest thing the foundry cities had to soldiers — small outfits of paid hands who did the jobs nobody else wanted, mostly involving things that had broken in places that were dangerous to stand in. They were not an army and were never meant to be one.

He is what is left of them. He flies on a salvaged jetpack, which is worth explaining: it is not military hardware. It is a mining rig that somebody bolted to a harness and learned to steer, and it explains everything about how he moves. He does not glide. He hangs in the air and gets pushed around.

His armour is patched from four different foundry cities. You can see it if you look at the sprite closely — the shoulders do not match the shins, the plating changes colour halfway down one arm. Every piece came off something the Legion left behind, and wearing it is its own kind of statement.

The gunner does not carry a weapon into a fight. He carries a board. Every tile on the board is something he can pick up and fire — a shotgun, a set of blades, an SMG, a sidearm, or one of the Legion’s own leaking Hazard canisters, which he is using anyway because it is there and it works.

That is the whole reason the game is a match-3 and not a shooter. He is not choosing a loadout. He is working with whatever the armoury hands him, in the order it hands it to him, and the skill is in reading what is available and putting three of it in a row.

It also explains why matching more tiles hits harder. A line of five is not a better bullet. It is a better volley — more of the same thing, all at once, from a man who is standing still in the air and has nothing else to do with his hands.

From Warden upward, the gunner can transform. The gauge that drives it fills as big combinations land — specials forged, cascades chained, power cells built — and when it fills he goes off for thirty seconds, hitting harder and taking less.

It is not a magical power. It is his own furnace running hot, and the flame that wraps him when the gauge triggers is the same fire the jetpack runs on, turned up past what the rig was built for. That is why it is temporary: it is a machine being abused, not a spell being cast.

Higher ranks push it further. A Vanguard can go past Heroic into Superhero, and a Legend carries all three forms. The forms stack on the same idea — more fire, more damage, less incoming — and they are the single biggest reward the rank ladder gives you.

The gunner is not fighting the Legion, because the Legion cannot be fought. Every loss it takes gets fed back into the next one. What he is doing is walking toward the one thing the Legion actually needs — the tower in Steel City — and taking territories off it on the way, because each territory is a commander, and each commander is a piece of the machine that is not easily replaced.

It is a long shot and he knows it. It is also the only shot there is, which is roughly the mood of the whole campaign.