Hands On With Overwatch On PS4

Blizzard are entering into the multiplayer shooter genre with a bang, on both PC and console. Overwatch has captured a lot of people’s attention since it was announced, and while you can see bits and pieces of other games and other genres in the mix, Blizzard have achieved a fantastic blend.

Having dabbled with the closed betas on PC, sitting down to play the PlayStation 4 version felt practically identical. It might not match the absolute graphical peaks of a top-end PC, but the art style works brilliantly well on console. It’s bright and colourful, and Blizzard have got it running at what, to my eyes, was a flawless 60 frames per second.

It’s a ‘hero shooter’, and we hear that term bandied about quite a bit at the moment, often in conjunction with the MOBA genre, but the game that comes out of having lots of unique characters is very different depending on the developer and the direction they want to take. The actual game and structure is best compared to the class-based shooter that is the immensely popular Team Fortress 2.

A lot of that is down to the map design and the game modes. You’re taken to all the corners of this far future version of Earth, with two teams of six fighting to attack and defend successive control points in Assault, before trying to escort or defend a dangerous payload in Escort or engaging in a round-based king of the hill mode in Control. They’re not particularly new, but they’re done well, with the pressure of the clock counting down as you push to reach the objective or halt the enemy advance. There’s also a scramble to extend the match right at the death, as it kicks into an overtime that grants the losing team one final opportunity to clinch victory from the jaws of defeat.

They’re game modes that would work well regardless of the shooter, but Overwatch’s wide cast of 21 heroes make this into a very broad and varied class-based shooter. In fact, Blizzard don’t even say it’s class-based, rather that the characters are split up into different roles. You’ve got the Offence, who are all about getting up close and personal, the Defence who are generally more distant and standoffish, while the Tanks can go in there and soak up or neutralise incoming damage. Finally, the Support characters back all of these up with healing and buffs, though they have plenty of ability to dish out a bit of pain when they need to.

A good example of the Offence combat role is Tracer, the game’s most prominent character whose posterior was at the heart of last week’s furore. Aside from her saccharine-sweet stereotypical British accent, she’s a very cool and fun character to play as. She has twin machine pistols, can dash forward a few metres in the blink of an eye and has the ability to rewind back to where she was a few second before. Charged up by dealing damage, her ultimate ability is a pulse bomb that explodes a few seconds after it’s dropped. It works brilliantly combined with the other abilities, getting close quickly, dropping the bomb and then rewinding back to safety. In keeping with her character’s bubbly personality, she’s a lot of fun to play.

Then there’s Widowmaker, who faced off against Tracer in the most recent animated short. Firing from the hip, her gun is an assault rifle, but aiming down sights it’s a single shot sniper, where the bullets gain more power the longer you wait before shooting them. Her grappling hook lets her get up to vantage points quite easily, while her other ability is a proximity bomb that hampers those who trigger it with a cloud of gas, while her ultimate highlights all enemies through walls. She slots well into that long distance role of a sniper and the Defence characters.

Or there’s D.Va, a former Korean gamer in a mechsuit – we all know how I feel about characters in mech suits. She looks like a more defensive Tank class, with a lot of armour and the ability to stop bullets in front of her with a force field, but she’s great on the front lines of an attack as well. Her mech’s thrusters let her close the gap quickly, and she can actually be great for taking out snipers by just flying up to them and unleashing the mech’s two cannons.

She’s unique in that, if her mech takes too much damage, she can hop out of the back of the suit and try to make an escape with just her pistol in hand. Though it’s more likely that you’ll die and respawn, you can eventually call in a new mech suit. This ability to escape also plays a part in her ultimate, which turns her suit into a bomb. Get it right and you’ll be able to charge your on foot ultimate meter in a few seconds and be right back on the frontline.

But there’s so many contrasting characters to choose from. Torbjörn places turrets, Bastion becomes one, Hanzo shoots arrows, Mei freezes people and makes walls of ice, Pharah can boost up into the sky and hover there raining down a storm of rockets. With 21 on offer, there’s bound to be a character that you like the look of and that suits how you want to play, but it’s also important to find characters that gel well with those the rest of your team picks. To that end, Overwatch tells you if your group’s character selection is lacking in any way.

The one thing that’s maybe a little bit lacking is the kind of progression and unlocks that you see in games like Call of Duty or Battlefield. The prospect of new weapons or characters is one way of hooking people in and getting them to play a game for longer, but as a retail game, Overwatch gives you all of the different characters from the off. Each character does, however, have skins, tags and different poses which, though purely cosmetic, allow you to show off a little bit if you’re get one from a loot crate.

Blizzard sometimes use those skins to truly transform the look of the characters, and as a way to flesh out the game’s overall universe. This is multiplayer through and through, but there’s plenty of backstory. The titular Overwatch was a kind of superhero team formed during the Omnic crisis to safeguard humanity from the perils of robots and AI. Their reputation was dragged through the mud and the organisation disbanded after a major attack on them.

That’s a story that ties into Soldier: 76’s current anonymity, with an alternate skin revealing his real name and being his persona from when he led the Overwatch. It’s things like this that will come to the fore in the planned comics, novels and the series of animated short movies that started recently.

But really it comes down to the game, and as with so many genres that Blizzard touches and tries to make their own, it plays well, it’s attractive and there’s already a lot of interest and hype surrounding it. Select PC players have already been able to indulge in the closed betas, but with release looming on May 24th, the flood gates are opening. You can pre-order to play the open beta on May 3rd, but it’s available for everyone between May 5th and 9th. It’s definitely worth trying out to see if it’s your kind of game.