In the age when the infinite warfare’s of the world release games that they already know a large portion of their audience does not want, Overwatch comes as a breath of fresh air. This game does have its ups and downs but, Overwatch is another posterchild for Blizzard being Blizzard. Overwatch, overall, is super polished already with a plethora of great heroes to choose from and a ton of maps. It seems like Blizzard has learned from every other first person shooter that has been released lately.

To start let’s talk about how this game looks. I have a mid to low range gaming pc and this game looks really good. I run on medium settings and I have seen what it looks like on all high settings. This game will run at 60 fps 1080 and look amazing. I have yet to experience a time where so much was happening that the fps dropped drastically. It may drop down to 57 or 56 but you would not know unless you were displaying the stats on the screen and constantly looking at them. Overwatch seems to be optimized so well already. The beta that was just released was  very polished. The beta did have its flaws, like players not appearing right away when you play mystery heroes (which I will get into later), and random black screens in between loading times. But I am sure those will be patched up before the game is released. I saw nothing that would scare me about the released date coming in the end of May. I have already pre-ordered this game and do not regret it at all!

Overwatch is a hero based first person shooter. When you look at the gameplay it tends to remind you of games like Team Fortress 2. However, Blizzard has stressed that it is hero based not class based. These are “totally” different considering the fact that the heroes are set up in classes… Granted the heroes do all feel different and have their own abilities but so did the characters in Team fortress 2. Whatever Blizzard wants to call this game, it looks a lot like Team Fortress 2. I never got into Team Fortress 2 too much. But, Overwatch is a game that I can jump right into. There are heroes for every kind of playing style. You can play the quick dash in do damage dash out playing style of tracer. You can play a massive tank with a shield with Reinhardt. You can run in with shotguns with the Reaper. Or you can play the beloved support like Mercy or Lucio (which we also will talk about later). You can even play as a walking turret with Bastion. There are tons of heroes to play and they are all a lot of fun. In this game I honestly feel like if you get good with any one hero, you will be very good at this game. In other games I feel like some mastered characters are far better than any other character in the game. But, I have not felt that way with this game. If you find your niche in this game, you will be very good at it.

Regardless of how much I love this game, I will still admit that it does have some flaws. The first main flaw is that it is so hard to know how to counter some of the heroes. A great example of this is Bastion. He can lay himself down as a turret on the objective and can kill almost any hero before they can get to him. Because heroes light up in red when they get in front of you, it is so easy to see them. This would be easier if explain. If not, it is going to take a long time to figure out how each hero works and who to fight them with. The second thing that is awful in this game is the supports. Every other class has five heroes in it. However, there are only four supports to choose from. To make that worse, they are all pretty boring. You need a support in this team game and yet all of them are so boring to play. Why would I sit and just follow another hero around so they can have health when I can dash in with a massive hammer and smash my enemies to death. The people that want to play supports are so far and in between. They did try really hard to make the supports fun, but they just are not. I think if they would add another support that would make me at least feel a little better about the situation. But, as of right now, the supports are just plain boring and I would never want to play one.

There is no campaign in this game but the multiplayer is not limited. There are 12 different maps from places all over the world (I would say that the American maps are the most fun) and over 20 heroes. There is push the objective, king of the hill, and capture the point. Sometimes capture the point and push the objective happen on the same map which is still confusing to me (I am hoping that will be fixed by the time the game is released. Even with the time that I have put into this game, I still do not feel like I have understood a fraction of the maps. It feels like I am constantly being surprised by Overwatch’s maps. There are really only two options for playing games right now for playing pvp (ranked future maybe?). You can either play a quick play or mystery heroes. Quick play is just what it sounds like and getting in a game is quick. I think I had an average wait time of 45 seconds for a game. This is great because I sometimes wait almost 400 seconds for heroes of the storm. The games do not take very long to complete either. I would say most of them are under 10 minutes. You could just jump in and play a game and jump out and be done in under 15 minutes easily. Mystery Heroes is basically the ARAM of Overwatch. You spawn in as a random hero and every time you die you become a new random hero. It is played on the same maps as quick play just nobody can select their hero. For new players this is a great way to be forced to learn many different heroes.

Overall, Overwatch is going to be a fantastic game. I think there will be a huge audience playing and it is a ton of fun to play with your friends. In the beta you received a 20% xp bonus for playing with your friends. This is a huge incentive to play with or make friends online. I would highly recommend that you pick up this game for the summer (which is just around the corner). If you just buy the stand alone game it is only $40 USD. That is a steal in comparison to other similar games. In my opinion this is an easy buy for anyone that loves First person shooters or Blizzard games.

9/10

Tyler Hull Digital Media Producer

Tyler was born at a very young age and has since grown into a caffeine dependant adult pretending his is good at video games.