Review: Overwatch

Yesterday evening (December 1st, at the time of writing this) was the night of the annual Game Awards show, a lavish live-streamed spectacle where the best and brightest of the video games industry gathered in Los Angeles - in order to receive awards voted on by industry peers and journalists, celebrating the year in gaming. It was a good night for big-name hits like Uncharted 4: A Thief's End , the reboot of DOOM and Blizzard's mega-selling team shooter **Overwatch ** , as well as respected independent titles like That Dragon Cancer - and it was a chance for those in attendance to show off all-new trailers for upcoming tit

With Overwatch, the charming hero shooter from Blizzard, launching this week, we want to make sure that you’re as prepared as possible to help your team dominate. Overwatch’s main focus is clearly on the interplay between its dynamic characters, so in order to become competent, you’ll need to understand how every character works. Throughout the week, we’ll be publishing guides on each of the twenty-one launch heroes, three at a time, with the hopes that you’ll be able to recognize certain patterns on the battlefield.

Each map was designed specifically for the game mode it's paired with, meaning nothing feels wrong about the design. An Escort map is designed with one straight path and a few off-shoot areas to accommodate different playstyles. A control map features one central point and multiple paths players can take to try and flank the enemy team and take the spot. These maps also play into the game’s meta. For example, a close-quarters Escort map will benefit Reinhardt whose shield would block everything straight in front of him, but an open control map would leave him vulnerable from many different directions. Being able to control the map with the right hero, managing choke points and figuring out the path that works best with your character’s range is imperative.

Speaking of new content, Blizzard will be releasing all post-launch content for free. To do this, they implemented an RNG loot system with microtransactions. Loot Boxes are earned regularly through leveling up and an infinite level cap ensures that players can continue collecting Loot Boxes forever. Unfortunately, the RNG system stumbles when it comes time to collecting the goodies. Much like a Call of Duty: Black Ops III Supply Drop, an Overwatch Comparison Loot Box contains a lot of unwanted items. Character skins, emotes and character poses are the coolest of the drops, while Sprays and Lines of Dialogue are the lamest. Players have no control over what they get and it can be frustrating to keep getting items for characters you don’t even use.

She's pretty interesting because her two primary abilities do not work without each other. What kind of makes her Tracer is how the Blink and the Recall work together. We have some heroes where the abilities might compliment each other, but they might not be as tightly tied together like that. From the beginning, she originated as a "whole" hero with those three abilities (the Blink, the Recall and the Pulse Bomb). With other heroes, we've gone through iteration where we thought, "Hey, we really like these two abilities, but we're going to work on this third one and change it all later."

There are certain developers out there that make games that are far more polished than everything else out on the market. Blizzard pretty much leads the charge here, and Overwatch is absolutely no exception. In my over one-hundred matches played during the Overwatch beta, I haven't experienced a single dropped frame or moment of lag. Think about that for a second. We live in an age where AAA games routinely launch broken, so for a beta (though this beta is essentially a final build) to be more polished than the final release of its closest competitor, that really says something.

We'd be lying to you if we said that we weren't absolutely stoked for Overwatch, the upcoming hero-shooter from Blizzard. The combination of tight shooting, frenetic team-based combat and some downright awesome design decisions have made Overwatch potentially the most promising multiplayer shooter of the decade thus far. With Early Access to Overwatch's Open Beta beginning at 4PM PST tonight (the flood gates officially open to the public on May 5), we caught up with Assistant Game Director Aaron Keller to learn the answers to all of our pressing questions.

The single biggest thing, if you're new to the game, is to coordinate with their team. One of the things you'll see with new players is they'll die, they'll respawn and then just rush right back into the battle. A lot of the time they'll be rushing into a one-on-six, and they'll get annihilated and they'll do this time after time. The biggest thing is to say with your team, coordinate with them; when you need to do a big push, coordinate that big push (or coordinate that big defense when you need to execute a big defense). For newer players, that right there will, far and away, make them better than most of the teams I've played with.