Overwatch

Me: I know I’m a Blizzard fanboy, but I don’t think I can ever come around to buying another team shooter.

Also me: *purchases digital deluxe edition of Overwatch

Overwatch takes the essence of Team Fortress class based team shooting, strips it of everything that was wrong with it and delivers a polished, fast paced, and refreshingly new twist on the genre. When Overwatch was first announced by Blizzard, all fanboys stood in silence as this was quite the drastic step outside the RTS and MMO comfort zone we were all used to from the company, and man did it deliver.

The game pits two teams of six against each other in classic objective based maps like King of the Hill, and escorting the Payload. The roster of characters is your typical class-role system (Support, tank, DPS, and Sniper) and more often than not requires a healthy combination of all of the aforementioned classes on the team to win(though don’t be surprised if you’re pit against a team of ALL turret building engineers and losing to them).

All characters have an ultimate that you need to charge up by fulfilling your class’s role (Healing, dishing out damage, or absorbing it) that can turn the tides of battle in the most dire of situations. And a refreshing aspect is that comebacks are very possible EVEN in the direst of situations, so even a game that starts off as a complete squash match has the tendency to be turned eventually.

All games end with a highlight reel for the Play of the Game by a specific player, an MVP section for the top players in that game, and experience gains that work towards leveling up, with every level up granting you a loot box that contains random goodies from character skins, spray tags, voice lines, and different highlight reel poses. These loot boxes can too be purchased from the Overwatch store if that tickles your fancy and you’re too impatient to wait things out.

With a ranked matching system fresh off the latest patch, and several characters promised for release in the future, Blizzards Overwatch looks like it’s here to stay, and I’m unfortunately hooked both due to solid gameplay and malignant Blizzard fanboyism. Happy shooting!