Overwatch is the first person shooter that the genre needed. With its cartoony characters, bright visuals, and a game that is just bursting with personality, Overwatch is a breathe of fresh air in a genre that has been over saturated with military shooters. Blizzard’s take on the team shooter is a thing to behold with many different characters that fill many different roles in a team. While they can be separated into Blizzard’s own 4 separate roles, each character also feels unique and plays differently enough they can be used in any role on any team, if played correctly.
The graphics are cartoony, colorful and filled with a unique personality which makes them wonderful to look at. The characters look amazing and are detailed. They simply look fantastic, as do the maps where the textures are bright and colorful. The characters are recognizable from even far away, making it so that you know who you are fighting at all times. The sound is amazing as well and only adds to the gameplay and immersion. The musical score works with whatever map you’re on and becomes a part of the fun cartoon world that Blizzard has made. I constantly found myself wanting to know more about the characters and it excited me that Blizzard was going to keep building on this world as a whole. I can’t wait until Blizzard adds more down the line.
The characters themselves are varied and bursting with personality and the game is bursting with character unlocks like taunts, costumes, voice lines, sprays and other such things that you can earn while leveling up your profile through playing the game. All of them have unique abilities and all distinguish themselves as unique characters. Some characters feel more powerful than others, but Blizzard can fix this with future patches and balance changes. Some of the biggest abusers are characters like Lucio, who can heal and speed up an entire team while the other healers are relegated to single target healing. There are also characters that have pure damage on their side like McCree, who at one point took me, a tank with 600 health, to zero with a single clip. I feel like these small complaints can be fixed with balance patches though, so I am not that upset by them. None of the characters play anything alike, making them all fun to play and it’s, of course, exciting to find the characters you like to play specifically.
The modes themselves are varied enough but are all objective based, meaning there’s no Team Deathmatch-based modes yet. Perhaps this is the point of the game, as it seems to be very much based around the idea of objectives and capturing points. It seems to be what the game and characters were designed around and, while it can be frustrating if your team isn’t cooperating, you can still try and have fun as your favorite character.
The maps are varied as well, taking place in various countries and locales based around a futuristic and cartoony version of our own real world. They are all visually different and colorful as well, which lends to the game’s bright personality.
The leveling system lends itself to making the game more playable every time you dive in, giving you various unlocks to discover as well as currency for things you want to unlock for characters you play the most. The servers themselves are pretty solid as well; the connection worked 90% of the time I played and, though sometimes there was a jumpy connection, it never felt bad to the point where I didn’t want to play.
The controls are amazing as well, with tight controls that respond well to the first person perspective. Controls are one of the most important points when it comes to first person shooters, and Overwatch has a simple control scheme that works well for mapping abilities to buttons as well as using the dual stick controls. There were some points I wish I could map a jump to a trigger or bumper, but some characters need all the triggers and bumpers for abilities, so switching up controls really depends on the character. The default controls were what I used for a majority of the time, and they were smooth and worked fine.
Overwatch is a triumph of a game, a fresh new idea in a genre that has been filled with the same stale ideas for a while now. Blizzard has crafted a colorful world that lends itself to fun team-based gameplay as well as lending itself to creating more unique characters to add later alongside more modes and maps. The game will continue to grow, and I see this game, like TF2, standing the test of time and being played for many years to come. No two matches are exactly the same, and the replay value is through the roof. Overwatch might not be flawless, but it is damn near perfect.
A review copy of Overwatch was provided by Activison Blizzard for the purpose of this review