Overwatch Video Game Review (About In Description)
0After four years and one IGN Game of the Year Award, Overwatch has evolved into a multiplayer shooter that remains at the top of the class. It’s a dizzying amalgam of unique character design, stunningly realised style, and compellingly dynamic action. Minutes turn into hours as you’re caught up in round after magically exciting round, surrounded by gorgeously crafted maps packed with detail and charm. Overwatch, simply put, is the most fun I’ve ever had playing a video game.
Overwatch’s gameplay has remained almost entirely unchanged since launch and centres around taking and controlling points on the map or escorting payloads from one end of them to the other, all at the expense of the enemy team’s health bars. It’s a simple setup and not an altogether original one, but it’s the nuance found in how you go about winning each match that makes Overwatch so brilliant.
Each team of six can be stitched together from the current pool of 32 heroes. Not only does each play differently and bring their own tricks to the party, but they also affect the other heroes on the ever-expanding roster with each new addition. Overwatch is a game bursting with character, not least displayed in the characters themselves. Blizzard has created a world where anything goes and everything flourishes.
Blizzard has created a world where anything goes and everything flourishes.
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The robust Reinhardt harks from a high fantasy setting familiar from past Blizzard titles. The cyber-drenched Sombra is science-fiction incarnate and wouldn’t look out of place on the streets of Night City. Then there’s the wise and occasionally wild Winston, who could pass as a gorilla cosplaying as beast from X-Men. The beauty of Overwatch is that all of these different characters feel right at home and not simply copy and pasted from other media. They’re lovingly designed as both individuals and a unit, their interactions between each other before and during matches providing entertainment aside from the combat unfurling.
Most recently, Echo, Overwatch’s final hero (until Overwatch 2), has joined the party. She’s an airborne AI that darts through the sky, dealing damage with her powerful arsenal of advanced weaponry. She’s a really fun character to play, but not without a level of risk attached as she is vulnerable to accurate hitscan heroes like McCree or Soldier: 76, and can lose all of her 200HP in the blink of an eye.
Her ultimate, Duplicate, is a real game-changer though. It allows her to take the form of any member of the opposite team and use all of their abilities, and can even charge up their ultimate at a far speedier rate. Being able to clone an enemy Mercy, thus having two powerful healers on your side, can turn the tide in a game and harkens back to the very early days where multiples of the same hero were allowed on a team. It’s somewhat fitting that the last addition to the roster echoes back to how Overwatch was originally played.
Penultimate addition Sigma, an eccentric Dutch astrophysicist tank, proved difficult to counter at first, especially when paired with Orisa to create a double-barrier hellscape. His persistently moving shield can be a problem to anyone looking to deal damage at range with blasts of Ashe’s rifle or rain fire from above as the rocket launcher-wielding Pharah. This is just another puzzle to solve, though, and his introduction saw a noticeable rise in the amount of closer-quarter specialists, such as Doomfist and Reaper, appearing on the battlefield. As a result, I found myself enjoying stringing together combos as Doomfist, a character I had hardly touched before Sigma’s arrival, and unleashing a rocket punch into the side of an unsuspecting enemy. It just feels so much better than when you’re on the end of one.
A Role to Play
This is in essence the beauty of Overwatch. It offers choice in abundance, and if it ever approaches becoming stale I try out another hero and everything feels completely fresh again. I’ve put an amount of time that would disgust many into mastering Hanzo’s bow and arrow skill set, but when I found myself tiring of him slightly I decided to transfer my sniping skills over to Ana and healed my teammates instead, providing a different form of satisfaction.
Even after 700 hours played, there are still characters that I’m not overly familiar with and some that I look forward to losing time with in the future, even if I’ve resigned myself to never being able to pull off a mildly successful Dragon Blade as Genji. Not every character is for everyone though, and that’s absolutely fine and, to an extent, the point of Overwatch.
Not every character is for everyone though, and that’s absolutely fine and, to an extent, the point of Overwatch.
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To call Overwatch a “shooter” almost seems reductive at this point. Yes, it’s firmly grounded in solid first-person shooting mechanics, but there’s a vast arsenal of weaponry on display, ranging from the clunkingly medieval