Valorant’s New Agent Is the Appropriately Named Killjoy

The Valorant team has officially revealed the competitive shooter’s latest playable agent: Killjoy.

“The genius of Germany, Killjoy effortlessly secures key battlefield positions with her arsenal of inventions,” reads a statement from Riot Games regarding the new character. “If their damage doesn’t take her enemies out, the debuffs her robots provide will make short work of them.”

As noted above, all of Killjoy’s abilities revolve around the use of some kind of device. As her name suggests, those devices will more often than not cause your opponents to have a bad time either through direct damage or lingering effects.

For instance, Killjoy can deploy an “Alarmbot” which hunts down enemies that wander nearby. If the bot reaches an opposing player, it applies a vulnerability affect to them. Another one of her abilities grants her access to a Nanoswarm grenade which deploys a “covert” swarm of nanobots. Players can then activate that swarm to deploy a damaging swarm to enemy players that wander nearby.

Killjoy’s Turret ability is particularly interesting. It’s capable of firing at enemies in a 180-degree cone, which should come in handy whenever you’re trying to defend a position and want to be able to more effectively cover your blindside.

Finally, Killjoy’s ultimate ability (Lockdown) allows you to equip a Lockdown device that detains all enemies in its blast radius when deployed. While the Lockdown device can be destroyed by enemy players, it should prove to be an effective way to ensure enemies remain in-place for that perfect flank or even just prevent them from advancing on your position.

You can check out all of Killjoy”s new abilities in action head of her August 4 release date by watching the trailer below:

Our initial impression is that Killjoy will prove to be an effective Agent for the right team, but the thing that really stands out about this agent is how thematically well-defined they are in terms of their abilities. Generally speaking, Valorant‘s Agents don’t feature the kind of game-changing abilities that we see in titles like Overwatch. That also sometimes means that their characters aren’t as defined by their abilities.

This may certainly prove to be an interesting step forward for Valorant in terms of experimenting a bit more with character distinctions. In any case, Valorant has been pretty impressive out of the gate from a gameplay perspective and it’s already providing a competitive cure for the battle royale titles of the world (such as Call of Duty Warzone) as well as direct competition such as Counter-Strike.