Marathon’s med drone is for emotional support and, to a lesser extent, healing

Marathon is frightening. Especially in solo mode, where the silence of rival players is so acute you can hear the blood pumping in your ears, Bungie’s extraction shooter slips into a form of unscripted survival horror. One that makes you entirely responsible for your own safety, on a world that would be awful enough without all the murderers. Have you seen the wildlife? The bugs splatter you with ichor and the birds tell on you, giving up your position to any rivals who might listen. "Caw! He’s here, lads! Grease your elbows for a knifing!"

It’s a terror that turns even the sensible visitor superstitious. Leaves you hankering, on some level beneath active thought, for a good-luck charm or totem. That’s what I realised the first time a teammate hurled a med drone in my direction. The little blocky bot made a gleeful parabola across the crags of Perimeter and settled comfortingly over my left shoulder. Some enterprising robotics engineer had tuned its digital display to show a reassuring smile - much like the face of Minecraft’s iconic creeper, but with the frown turned upside down.

The magic of the med drone is that it takes care of life’s little scrapes. When a clumsy escape from gunfire finds you stumbling off a low cliff, into the spore radius of a toxic plant that exfoliates with alarming enthusiasm, the med drone handles repairs. It saves you from snarfing all your patch kits and shield charges before you’ve found anything approaching a real fight. And yes, it smiles at you. That might have been saccharine in a less relentlessly miserable game, with fewer scalding rainstorms and lethal lightning strikes. But as a constant presence in the corner of your first-person view during a desperate scavenging mission, it’s a powerful balm. Like a family dog failing to read the room on a traumatic day, the med drone is capable of cluelessly breaking a tension that threatens to become debilitating.

You’d need to bounce 28 med drones off the bonce of a player to down them.

I think of the med drone as the successor to Titanfall’s MRVN - ironically named after the depressed android in The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy - who used to usher you out of the dropship at the beginning of the match with a joyful emoticon on his tummy, like Tinky-Winky as built by Boston Dynamics. MRVN ultimately proved so popular he became Pathfinder, an Apex Legends avatar determined to find his creator via the medium of battle royale.

But Marathon’s med drone, to its credit, refuses to be effectively weaponised. According to an experiment carried out by Bungie, you’d need to bounce 28 med drones off the bonce of a player to down them. And in fact, the drone has been my saviour even when equipped by an enemy. On one occasion, the familiar electronic squelch of a drone’s deployment clued me into the fact there was an opponent standing right behind me, preparing for ambush. The unexpected sound cue gave me a moment’s grace in which to throw down a smoke grenade and disappear into the wilderness.

Of course, there comes a time when the med drone’s battery deteriorates and it clatters lifelessly to the ground. But you can prevent that outcome by drawing near to a second drone, draining its charge to top up your own bobbing pal. Clearly, Bungie knows where my head’s at: attached to the drone I already have and holding on tight. Clinging to my blankie, in the hopes of making it through the long night of getting-knifed.