‘OVERWATCH’ REVIEW

When developers set out to make team-based games, Overwatch is what they’re hoping to achieve.

In Overwatch you can play as a giant, super-smart gorilla who leaps into battle and blasts enemies with a gun that spews electricity; a gun-slinging cowboy who can drop enemies from 100 paces; a robot who’s also a tank; or an Australian pyromaniac who sets irritating traps, among more than a dozen other characters. Oh, and you can teleport, fly, shoot rockets, rewind time, construct strategic defenses, freeze your enemies solid and summon a gigantic ghost dragon to tear folks apart.

You can do all that stuff in the same match, quickly and easily. Overwatch is a surprisingly accessible team-based multiplayer shooter with a deceptive amount of depth. Most gamers with any experience at all will pick it up in almost no time, and dump hours into uncovering all its details and strategies.

UPPING THE GAME

Overwatch isn’t a mold-breaker. Plenty of people have likened it to Valve’s Team Fortress 2, or multiplayer online battle arena games like League of Legends and Dota 2. It’s not especially different from class-based shooters that have come before it, like Battlefield, Brink, or even Return to Castle Wolfenstein way back in the era of the original Xbox and PlayStation 2.

What Overwatch brings to the table that other games of its ilk don’t is a perfect combination of the moving parts found in those other titles. Watching Overwatch in action is like seeing a puzzle box solved. It’s baffling how well all of its components interact.

Those parts are, namely, its characters. At launch, the roster of uniquely cartoonish playable characters in the game stood at 21, and four more have subsequently been added in free updates. The personalities players can inhabit in the game are broken into four categories, recognizable to people who play MOBAs or massively multiplayer online games like World of Warcraft: There are damage-dealing attackers characters, characters that dish out short-term supportive boosts and healing, area-denying defenders, and “tanks” — the big brutes whose primary function is to draw fire and take punishment.

The classes and roles are familiar to online game players, but it’s the variety of moves the characters offer that makes them so much fun to play. There are several characters whose primary function is just to rack up kills, or just to play tank, but each one has very different abilities, uses, and strengths and weaknesses from the others. Playing as Winston, the science-minded gorilla who leaps into the fray, is very different from playing Reinhardt, the shield-bearing hammer-swinging knight who lets players hide behind his protective barrier. While both occupy the same “class,” that of tank, they’re worlds apart in how they play and function.

Overwatch lets you switch characters basically on the fly to adjust your strategy and change your tactics mid-game. Your primary goal in every match is not to eliminate the other team like in most shooters, but to capture or defend objectives — specific areas in the level, or a moving “payload” that only advances when the attacking team stands near it, and which stalls or even reverses when defenders approach.

Teamwork is essential to victory. There’s no real benefit to being a “lone wolf” in Overwatch, unlike most other shooters on the market. You’re just as important healing your teammates or protecting them with shields as you are gunning down the opposition. Teams that pay attention to their composition, picking complementary characters and working together, always beat out teams full of players used to going it alone in Call of Duty.

That’s as Blizzard intended, and it’s what makes Overwatch such a blast to play. Other people — especially friends you bring along with you and can trust to work with you — are the engines that fill out the carefully crafted, almost perfectly interlocking pieces that Blizzard has created.