Red Hood

Can give out Christmas spirit when touched.

**Red Hood** is a large brute armed with a heavy machete and dressed in an American flag print jacket vest, a black and yellow shirt with blue highlights, black pants, and a brown and red-stained GP-5 gas mask.

He can be acquired during the Christmas Event by opening a Christmas case with an extremely low chance of obtaining him.

## Functionality

### Basics

He is a heavyweight, meaning he is a slow but strong unit with high health. He is also a damager, meaning he will attack enemies and the barricade at close range while excelling at inflicting large amounts of raw damage to high health targets.

Although Red Hood is a heavyweight unit, he lacks the full (or any) knockback resistance all other heavyweight units typically possess. He is also fairly susceptible to the fear debuff, lacking in any fear resistance all other heavyweights possess some amount of as well.

Some time after dying, Red Hood will turn into Sergeant.

### Perks and Abilities

Enemies struck by Red Hood's critical hit will be knocked back. After taking a proportionally small amount of damage, all of Red Hood's melee attacks will cause knockback.

At level 13, unlocking Red Hood's special ability grants him the ability to turn his normally cosmetic psi waves into a damaging attack. Despite appearances, only a part of the wave effect has the capacity to deal damage to enemies. Essentially, there is a small radius around Red Hood that will deal damage to enemies whenever he creates a psi wave. The damage is pitifully low, making it super unlikely to have any meaningful impact during combat. However, since this move is capable of hitting enemies behind Red Hood, it can forcefully turn them around and away from the direction of the bus. While this can bring some niche utility to Red Hood, it is unlikely for it to be used effectively against more agile enemies and doesn't do much to address his other glaring flaws.

## Gameplay

### Main Campaign

Red Hood can be viewed as a questionable mix between Soldier and Chopper in terms of stats. While lacking in resistances, he shares the high health and slow speed of the former, the damage and courage cost of the latter, and the knockback perk of both. Unlike the two, however, he prepares comparatively quicker and has decent attack speeds.

Red Hood has an interesting and distinct quirk to the way he attacks and deals knockback. When above 95% health, Red Hood will always attack with a simple floor-scraping slash that knocks enemies back only on critical hits. When below 95% health, Red Hood switches to a different melee attack in which he strikes his weapon down to the ground using both hands, causing a psionic shockwave blast capable of rippling the air around him, exactly the same as those caused by Psy. Despite using the same effect, this ability doesn't mimic what it is capable of with Psy. Up until unlocking his special ability, these waves are only a *cosmetic* *effect*. The alternate attack has the benefit of causing knockback with every hit regardless if it crits or not. If Red Hood is healed back to 95% of his health or above, he will return to using his floor-scraping slash attack again.

Red Hood's role as a tank is extremely limited in large part due to having no resistances, specialized perks, or abilities related to tanking damage like his other fellow heavyweights. His incredible base health tying with Soldier's means almost nothing without any damage resistances to truly make it count. Additionally, his unique knockback quirk doesn't do all that much to make him any better at keeping enemies away. Topping all of that off with his incredibly slow movement speed, Red Hood proves to be an incredibly underwhelming and, in worst cases, redundant unit. At best, he can serve as a replacement for Chopper should a tanky melee unit be necessary a bit sooner even though units from the damager class may fit the situation better as well.

### Skirmish

In League, Red Hood ties with Chopper for being the absolute worst possible unit to use in teams. High courage cost, slow speed, lack of resistances, and knockback being disabled in the game mode all add up to him being an absolute handicap to any serious skirmishing.

## Skins and Synergies

Red Hood is part of the Psychos team.

Red Hood is perhaps some of the worst options to date, similar to how Chopper works. Compared to the usual psychos, he is not as disposable and does not cost rage to deploy, so while he can assist support items, benefit from damage boosts and acts as filler for team powers, he isn't doing much. Nevertheless, he and Chopper, being the only psychos on budget, can be sustained through a different strategy as useful support items like Generator that are necessary to compensate for their downsides can be expensive and they help to deploy such items much more frequently, even if it isn't much. Still, players would often find Saw and Berserker vastly more efficient in this regard despite said units being locked behind an expensive pack.

## Trivia

* Red Hood is currently one of four units available as a reward from an exclusive event.

 Humans
 TMF Squad