Overwatch is a fun and fresh take on the team-based shooter that will appeal to everyone, even non-FPS fans.
Overwatch is a fun and fresh take on the team-based shooter that will appeal to everyone, even non-FPS fans.
Blizzard has conquered and revolutionized nearly every genre it has set its eyes on. From real-time strategy with Warcraft and Starcraft, to MMOs with World of Warcraft, to collectible card games with Hearthstone. So when it turned its gaze to team-based shooters, you always knew the result was going to be something special.
At first glance, Overwatch looks a lot like Team Fortress 2, a bright, cartoony team shooter with colorful characters battling it out over familiar map mechanics: Payload, King of the Hill, Point Capture. And in a lot of ways, Overwatch is heavily inspired by TF2. But in the same way World of Warcraft borrowed from Everquest, then fixed what didn’t work, Overwatch fixes everything that’s wrong with TF2 today.
Instead of massive maps of 24 players, Overwatch trims it to a lean 6v6, which emphasizes individual play while still requiring teamwork to succeed. And instead of complicated weapon and item loadouts, each of Overwatch’s 21 heroes has a specific, non-changing toolkit. So every time you run into, say Roadhog, you know he’s going to try to hook you. And perhaps the most polarizing change: there are no scoreboards displaying your kill/death ratio. You can see your own stats, but no-one else can. There are medals - gold, silver, bronze - that let you know how you’re doing relative to your team but that’s it. And without that all important K/D ratio, there’s less player toxicity, and more emphasis on map objectives.
With 21 heroes, you might think that some would be redundant or boring, but Blizzard has done such a great job designing each hero, you see almost everyone being played. There’s Zenyatta, the enlightened robot monk with the Shaolin attire, there’s D.Va, the South Korean pro Starcraft player turned mech-warrior, there’s Lucio, the rollerblading, wall-riding, freedom fighting DJ – everyone is fully fleshed out and has a fascinating background. The variety of heroes is huge too. While broadly being broken down into four archetypes: Offence, Defence, Tank, and Support, each character feels unique. If you like traditional FPS-style sniping, there’s Widowmaker, but if you want a cyborg ninja that double jumps, climbs walls, sprays shurikens and deflects bullets with his sword, you can pick Genji. In true Blizzard form, Overwatch even caters to players that don’t like or aren’t particularly good at FPS games with characters like Winston and Symmettra who don’t need to aim their guns, auto-locking onto nearby targets instead.
