Figure 1: A Group of Grunts in Halo: Reach During the campaign they primarily occur within encounters to create a lower challenge but increase the pace of the encounter. As a consequence, the player feels more empowered and will pursue a route that contains a higher ratio of grunts compared to any other path. This occurs in the level The Pillar of Autumn; often the designers put grunts down a particular corridor to encourage the player to move in that direction. This signals to the player that it is the correct route to follow while lowering challenge, increasing the pace, and lowering player tension. Figure 2: Two Metro police officers in Half-Life 2 Figure 4: An allied NPC, Tenzin, is being shot by a rocket soldier from Uncharted 2: Among Thieves. Uncharted 2: Among Thieves - A rocket soldier is a unit with a low amount of armor that maintains a passive movement type and deals with a projectile weapon type. It typically appears as a soldier in camouflage and bandanna that has an RPG with a band of ammo clips on its shoulder. It represents the atypical Grenadier, staying as far away as possible by forcing the player to move with high damage explosives. Thereby increasing the player’s pace through the level without directly exposing itself to danger. Figure 3: A Burning Psycho in Borderlands Borderlands — The Psycho wears a mask and the lower portion of an orange jumpsuit. He rushes the player at a high speed and wields a large hatchet that deals a high amount of damage when it hits. The unit will frequently attack the player and will run across the entire battlefield in order to engage them. A couple of this unit type is usually put into larger groups of enemies in order to put more pressure the player more by having a more aggressive enemy. Figure 4: A Butcher from Gears of War Halo: Combat Evolved — The Carrier Flood form is a carrier that has a low amount of armor and spawns units through an explosive weapon type at close range. It typically tries to assault the player in the middle of a battle when in a larger heterogeneous group. It increases the tension of theleve because the player knows it can inflict a high amount of damage if it explodes nearby and only serves to create more enemies. This creates a situation where the player has to choose the best time to eliminate it in order to mitigate damage. Figure 6: A Flood Carrier in Halo: Combat Evolved amount of smaller enemies increases the player’s tension level, since the player will only release more enemies when they kill the pregnant necromorph. Figure 5: A pregnant necromorph spawning units after being killed in Dead Space. Halo: Combat Evolved - The Hunter is a Turret unit that employs almost every single category for the unit type. This is because it utilizes attacks at long range with its beam cannon and then falls to short range to melee attacks with its shield arm. It has an aggressive behavior as it will continuously assault the player, has a high armor value to make it hard to kill, and all of its attacks do a large amount of damage. Finally, this unit travels in pairs. The reason for this is primarily because they have weak points on their backs so they will cover each other. The Hunter provides a large challenge due to its powerful weapon and high armor. The tension comes when a player is forced to try and kill one during a level, it is only increased by the fact that they appear in pairs. Figure 7: A Hunter from the Halo franchise Figure 8: Two Juggernauts from Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 Figure 9: A Jackal in the Halo Franchise Figure 10: A turtle unit getting attacked by the player in Uncharted 2: Among Thieves
