When Hearthstone came out I thought I was above it. Blizzard IPs don’t typically do much for me. I despise Diablo, I’m lukewarm at best to Warcraft and Starcraft, and so I truly didn’t believe they could serve up a card game that I’d be interested in. Of course I had to repeal my proclamations when reviewing the game from the site and even now I’m still playing Hearthstone at least once a week. Now here we are again and Blizzard is once more serving me up a fine plate of crow to eat with their very first first person shooter, Overwatch.
Overwatch aims its sights on the ever growing multiplayer online battle arena genre. A subset of gaming that frequenters to the site will know we generally don’t derive any pleasure from. Personally I always found it difficult to get into Team Fortress 2, and I could never understand how a person could acquire any pleasure from games like DOTA 2 and League Of Legends which excel at reducing even the most rational level headed humans to foam-mouthed malcontents. So initially I was unimpressed by Overwatch, and in fact made no plans whatsoever to pick the game up. But now after an unusual trade-in scenario at GameStop I’ve now spent a fair amount of time with the game on both PS4 and PC.
The game steals a page from League Of Legends by bolstering a respectably populous cast of characters. Not only is the roster large but there’s nary a weak spot to be found among the 21 available heroes. The characters design is top notch across the board both in usability and charm. It’s impressive how much personality the characters are able to impart solely through two second emotes and marginal voice clips. Even characters I initially disliked like Mei, Zariah, and Hanzo have all grown on me substantially after extended play.
Overwatch dispenses with traditional FPS battle modes, instead favoring objective based games across each of its 12 maps. It was interesting to witness this game play out on both PC and PS4. I noticed that players on the console were more inclined to head out into battle as lone wolves to rack up a k/d ratio that ultimately wouldn’t help them or their team. Conversely PC players seem much more competent, with the trade off being that they’re also much more angry and vocal in chat.
Blizzard has taken some pretty great steps towards shutting down a lot of what makes team based arena games so toxic, the most notable of which is the lack of a kill/death ratio or scoreboard during (or even after) play. Instead after each match players are shown a short list of highlights and are given medals based on their performance. This offers hints as to how well you performed within your team, but doesn’t necessarily pinpoint any one player as being a weak spot. You can still often tell who’s holding you back but its by witnessing actual bad plays instead of looking at a chart to determine who the worst is.
While Blizzard should be commended for doing a substantial amount to reduce the level of pissed off people in their very competitive game there are still some decisions that will make sure people will be pissed at you. One is the game’s training mode which is remarkably short and pretty much only covers a single character. It would have been nice to see some kind of training mode for other characters as well. As it stands you’ll either have to learn how each character works on the battlefield or against AI opponents. There are short explanations that you can display at any time that will tell you each characters ability, but reading about them and actually performing has more nuance to it than you can probably gleam from a two sentence explanation.
Compounding the issue is the recently released competitive mode, a place that you will almost certainly want to avoid if you don’t hold up well to other players saying terrible things about you and your family. Of course the mode is smartly designed (although sometimes its inner workings feel broken or ill explained) I will concede though that there’s only so much you can blame a developer for what at the end of the day is basically just human nature.
I wouldn’t say that the game is terribly light on content, but I will say that I’m less than 20 hours in and I’m already tired of the repetition of the maps. I also think the game is being pretty generous when it asks for an extra twenty dollars for the game’s “Origin” version, which grants you a paltry amount of skins on top of the base game. Actually Overwatch feels kind of stingy with rewards in general, with loot crates very rarely spitting out anything above a single rare item. And I’m saying this as a die-hard Hearthstone player.
Blizzard does seem invested in long time support though. There’s already word of three more characters being added to the roster, and since I began this review multiple characters have seen balance adjustments and fine tuning. The Overwatch devs seem to be much more vocal and transparent than the Hearthstone ones, and honestly that was already a community that I felt was pretty responsive to player grievances.
Even with adjustments happening on the regular Overwatch feels relatively well balanced. Perhaps the best indicator of that can be found on the official game’s forums where players cry afoul left and right regarding which characters are overpowered and unfair. The funny thing is that if you search hard enough you can find that claim being made for nearly every single character in the game. The complainers out there all agree the game isn’t balanced, but generally none of them can seem to come to a consensus as to how specifically that balance is skewed.
So although I’m left desiring a bit on the content and tutorial fronts, I think Blizzard has done a remarkable job of taking a genre I have almost no desire to play and getting me to return to it night after night. Even if you’re not a fan of MOBAs this is very possibly a game worth checking out. It helps that almost everyone you know already owns it. Seriously, you’re probably just reading this so you can nitpick my review and tell me what an idiot I am for not giving the game a 5/5.
Oh well, get to it in the comments section below.
