How to unlock agents in Valorant easily – Three quick steps!

Popular new shooter Valorant relies heavily on its characters or agents as they’re called. Similar to Overwatch, each available agent that can be unlocked has their own skills, abilities and equipment, and of course appearance. There’s a lot to selecting the right agent for a game, or even just a round.

Even the best Valorant players need to make the right pick! Well – in order to be able to make the right choice, you of course have to HAVE a choice first. In other words, you need access to the Valorant agents available. As of the most recent 1.02 update, 14 agents can be selected and played – but only the first two are free once you complete the tutorial. When you finish the first contract, you get the first five tiers for the two agents you picked in the tutorial, but no more – you have to unlock the rest via one of two ways.

Unlocking Valorant Agents

Unlock Valorant Agents for Free

The way to unlock agents for free is to simply grind the game for XP. You can activate a contract for each agent in your collection screen and eventually recruit them. You’ll have to pick the contracts for the agent you want to unlock, and then play them. Each agent has ten levels – you’ll need to get to level 5 to be able to unlock the character.

As any Valorant agents guide will tell you, this process can be time-consuming, so be sure to focus on the characters you are actually interested in. Otherwise, you’ll waste a lot of time for an agent you don’t like! To get a new character, you’ll need to collect a total of 375000XP on any one character you want to unlock. That’s a lot of grinding to do. The fastest way to unlock agents in Valorant is to focus on daily challenges, as they will give you more than 5k XP points per game. Combining them with normal challenges will net you as many points as possible.

These following three steps should help speed up the process:

  1. Play Normal Games and focus on completing daily quest objectives
  2. Deathmatch and Spike Rush can net more hourly XP than playing Normal/Ranked Games
  3. Unlock all agents to Level 5 before going for the full 10 levels

Valorant Agent Contract

Pay to access

The much faster way to unlock agents in Valorant is to, well, pay for them. The way to do so is to buy Valorant points via microtransactions. 200 points equal one level – and cost $2. In other words, unlocking a Valorant agent will cost about $10, or the local equivalent. Obviously, paying for the agents is significantly faster than grinding the XP, which can take significantly longer. If you are willing to spend money, combining grinding the game and paying for the higher ranks to get to tier 5 and unlock your preferred character.

Now most players would like to play the game for free, in which case use the tips above to unlock the agents faster. But if you are really not interested in wasting too much time or money, there are ways to pay less to unlock agents.

Here’s one trick to cut down on Agent unlock costs.

You should be able to grind at least the first or first two or three levels on each agent fairly quickly. Now instead of grinding your way through levels four and five you can move on to another agent and repeat the process. Once you have reached Level 2/3 on all the agents you wanna unlock, you can go and pay for the rest of the unlock for half or less of the investment it would take you originally.