Platform Previewed: PC
Overwatch is an online team-based first person shooter made by Blizzard Entertainment. You play not as classes but as heroes with various abilities and roles in a team. The game was announced at BlizzCon 2014 and scheduled to be released on May 24, 2016. The game is similar to Dota 2 and Counter-Strike series but as fun as Team Fortress 2. The game is more focused on keeping it simple than its rival games.
The game has 23 heroes for you to choose from. You start the game by selecting heroes and they are grouped in four categories such as offense, defense, tank and support. The game has a small icon that gives an overview of the hero’s abilities and suggestions on the side that can help build a good team for example, too many of a certain hero, no support or low team damage. If the hero you chose doesn’t suit to your playstyle, you can always change your hero for the next time you respawn. You simply win the game by doing the objectives like Assault mode. The attacking team in Assault mode must capture the two capture points in the map while the defending team must simply prevent them.
Just like the heroes, the maps are rich, vibrant and cartoony. Designed with well balanced environments that players with certain roles can use to its potential such as sniping points, places to hide and sweet spots to guard the objectives. Music and soundtrack of the game matches to the theme of a map such as Hollywood having a western themed music which is pretty splendid and quite amusing as well. Map and music combined, they resemble real cities and our thoughts about them.
Graphics of the game still looks good in the lowest setting. The difference between the highest down to lowest would be the reflections, shadows, effects and rendering quality. I’m playing Overwatch on a GTX 980Ti setup and in 4K resolution. Frame rates go around 45- 60 but it should be stable on 1080P and 2K resolution setups. American servers seem to perform really well here in the Philippines than the servers here in Asia but the game is still in Beta and there is still a lot of room for improvements so expect quality gameplay when the game is released.
What I can say is I’m really impressed about Overwatch. It really teaches you team cooperation and it’s pretty simple and easy to learn but you may have to spend quite some time to master the whole game.
Overwatch will be released on May 24 to the Playstation 4, Xbox One, and PC!
This preview is based on the Open Beta that happened from May 5 to May 19.
Editor-in-chief: We will be getting a review code from Blizzard, please stay tuned for our official review!