Overwatch is great, it's one of these Blizzard games that you can see yourself playing for a good while. First forays into the first person shooter genre from that company that I like so very much, Overwatch is the remains of a cancelled MMO project where you play a cast of colorful and various characters with different abilities and playstyles to shoot your way to victory in a handful of maps with predefined objectives. The characters are great and the gameplay loop is so polished that I didn't hesitate for a second to give this game a perfect score in my book.
I'll admit that Overwatch does not do anything particularly new, I would quickly describe it as "Team Fortress 2 mixed with a MOBA". You have the classes of characters (offensive, defensive, tanks and supports) with the map types (Payload, capturing/holding points, and just good old point capture) that feel similar to something a TF2 would do, but each character has a few abilities and an ultimate move that activates when a meter is filled to 100%, much like a MOBA. With a varied cast of character, each more or less unique, you can replay the same maps over and over, trying different strategies - and just flat out trying characters you haven't used much - without the time commitment of MOBAs matches. In Overwatch, even if you lose, it's usually after about five to ten minutes, not an hour or so.
There are only a few maps and after a while you'll know them all and maybe wish that there were more, but it's something I can almost expect from Blizzard, since they always have great after launch support for their titles. And even if they don't, the number of hours I've put in Overwatch makes it worth it already. This game suffers a bit from the same downs that MOBAs do; You more or less need a team that works together to win and that means having a good balance of the different classes of characters. I've most of the time picked the healer or tank class because nobody else wanted to do so, but they're fun to play and you can contribute to your team victory as much as offensive characters that everyone always rush to pick.
During matches, everything is perfectly clear. Enemies are highlighted with red outlines, the audio design is engineered so that only from sound cues, you know what's going on. Characters will say different things when they use their special abilities depending if they're on your team on the enemy's. The maps are well designed and most of them have many paths that you can take to flank or backstab even the most entrenched defensive heroes, but I do think that some maps have really punishing walk times if you die, some of the slower characters with no movement abilities will take what seems like a long while from respawning to getting back in the action since they move so slow. Most of the time tho, the spawn rooms are well placed and you're at a manageable distance. Many characters have movement skills, so it's even less of an issue for them.
When games end, you're only shown the things you did right. You get medals for your kills, time spent on the objective, healing done, stuff like that. You also get cards highlighting a metric that you excelled in during that match and people can vote on them. There is also the play of the game, a great mechanic where the game will show a thing that happened during the match that was very cool, usually it's getting a bunch of kills in a short span of time, but it also can be interrupting an enemy's ult, things like that. It's great when you get one.
All of these stats are compiled into your experience score, which is used to level you up. Sadly, the level-up system is a bit of an afterthought. You get 'better' character portraits as you go up in rank, and you get loot boxes, but that's pretty much it. You apparently can restart from level 1 once you hit a hundred, but I assume that the progression might be really slow then. Loot boxes are a bit controversial, since all the things you can get from them are cosmetic - sprays, voice lines, costumes, player icons - and credits (you get some credits if you draw a duplicate) - and there are no ways to buy credits (that can be used to buy the cosmetics directly), so you can only spend real money to buy more boxes besides the one that you get from leveling up. This doesn't affect me, but I can see how it would annoy some people.
I really enjoyed Overwatch! In fact, I'm enjoying it right now! I have about a 50% win/loss ratio, so their matchmaking systems are probably fine, and if they never added anymore content, I'd be happy with my time and still would recommend the game to anyone who enjoys FPSes. And if they add more maps, more modes and more characters? Even better!
