Overwatch First Impressions

Very recently someone gave me a free copy of Overwatch for PS4 and I've been playing it quite a lot over the last few days.  It's been a game I've been kind of avoiding for a long long time, not because I thought it would suck or anything but because I've got a huge backlog so playing online games like this was something I was trying to keep away from.  However I couldn't say no to a free copy and now I'm fucking hooked.

If you've been living under a rock and somehow don't know what Overwatch is, it's a team based first person shooter akin to Team Fortress.  Each player picks a character and then you fight to take an objective on each map which can vary from pushing a big car to the end of a stage or capturing points or sometimes even doing both at the same time.  There's some kind of story but I'm not really paying attention to it but each character seems to have a backstory you can get into if that's your thing but there's no single player campaign to speak of, it's all online.

The game itself is actually really fun, there's a lot of style and polish to it and even though I'm playing on a console rather than PC the controls are tight and each character has a nice varied play style which prevents things getting stale.  Aside from that I find it hard to think of things to say about this game.  Nothing about it is particularly new, we've been seeing this exact kind of game since 1999 but what the game does do it does extremely well.

At time of writing I've only played the quick play mode so there's still a lot for me to explore.  There's an "arcade" mode that has players competing in other sort of mini game type affairs and they seem kind of fun and there's also a competitive mode but you can't access that until you're level 25 and I'm only about 14 right now.  I'll come back and do a followup post once I've explored much more of the game.

The one thing that might turn people off is the loot crate thing.  I'm sure there's a lot of people who would be wary of the term "loot box" after the whole Star Wars thing but I can promise you there is absolutely nothing game breaking in these boxes.  There's a mode where you can customize the skins of each character or change their victory poses along with other things.  The loot boxes ONLY contain this cosmetic stuff so you don't have to worry about another player having better gear or anything like that.  The loadouts and skills of each character is set an cannot be changed so everyone is playing with the same set of tools.

I'm looking forward to playing much more of this game and I'll update once I've explored more of it's content but right off the bat it's a solid class based shooter that I could recommend for any fan of the genre.