Overwatch (2016)

I'd rather not leave a score, just words, but Grouvee won't let me do that. I've only played the beta (for about 10 hours), but I think I can still say things about the core game. I played mostly McCoy and Hanzo, but played a bit of most of the characters.

Overwatch is a class-based team FPS, similar to e.g. Team Fortress 2. Each class is represented by a character, and they have a particular weapon, skills, and an ultimate which are unique to them. Overwatch makes a lot of smart decisions with regards to character design, like giving the rocket launcher user a high jump skill (essentially a rocketjump button), or incorporating tools that are usually considered cheating, like an aimbot or wall hacks, into normal skills. And there are a TON of classes, each of which falls into one of four categories: DPS, tank, support, and medic.

The best thing about overwatch is that most characters feel overpowered as all hell when you play them. This makes them really fun to play, as you always feel strong. Take McCoy, who can easily outgun any character in the game at close range when he has his skills, including the tank characters and even the short-range specialists. Or Tracer, who can blink both forwards and backwards, with little animation difference between the two (and when you blink backwards, you get your health back, too). Or Reaper, who can teleport anywhere in his LoS for infinite flanking possibility.

The game very strongly favors teams with varied composition, which is a credit to the designers, but I can't really explain how/why so I'll just say that it's good!

Balance: Sure the game is in beta, and it's a modern game so anything can be adjusted with patches, but there's a bunch of quirks with map design (for asymmetric objectives, one side is generally easier to accomplish than the other) and matchmaking balancing (very few games come close, I suspect this is because there's no team balancing, so if one side is really good, they'll keep playing while the other team quits to find a more reasonable match, which propagates into most games having one side far superior to the other). I suppose the latter could be solved with a skill ranking system (right now it's just an exp = playtime ranking), if they implement it.

About character balance: there are definitely characters that are much better than others, but most of these could be fixed with a few tweaks in the design or just play strategies. A character I don't think can be balanced is Hanzo, simply because of these two conflicting forces: a headshot with a bow should be an OHKO, and a random headshot occurs maybe 20% of all hits. That means Hanzo has a large chance to OHKO anybody at any(?) range, potentially even out of LoS (as the arrows drop off). Add this to his skill that lets him see through walls, and you have a . This is unique to Hanzo because of this slow(ish, it's still about one per second) fire rate, while other characters with slowish (~0.5s) fire rates might kill in two headshots, the chance you'll randomly score a 2HKO is a measly 4%, which makes this a non-issue. Notice how I didn't even mention Hanzo's ult, which is a giant cone of death that goes through walls (remember that Hanzo has a skill that allows him to see through walls) (this can be addressed, of course).

The Play of the Game feature could be reworked, it seems like it needs about two "big things" to happen to even be considered. Even if you play real good, if the clip would be too short, it won't make PotG (I'm not so interested in showing off but rather so you can save the clip). Okay, I admit, I'm just salty that a McCree ult which killed the entire enemy team didn't get PotG, or even get saved to my own personal highlights.

An odd choice is that there is no "scoreboard" with kills/deaths/etc. like you see in every other FPS. It's an odd omission, maybe to contain snobbery, since how well you're playing might not correlate to how many kills you have (since the DPS characters should, naturally, be getting most of the kills), or simply to try and push the idea that kills aren't the most important aspect, a la Splatoon (there is no deathmatch game mode, all modes revolve around controlling an area(s)).

I had a lot of fun playing in beta at first, but I was done with it way before even the beta weekend was over. That's due mostly to the team balancing issues, but also I'm just not that into this kind of game. I'm impressed with the amount of characters (and how most of them feel really good), which is why I wanted to write this.