Overwatch Review – Worth Playing Game in 2022

Overwatch is a multiplayer shooter that provides a dizzying blend of action and fantasy in the game packed with stunning graphics and a unique set of characters. The game submerges you into its enchanted gameplay and turns minutes into hours without any element of boredom and laziness. Maps are well crafted, drawn with details, and have a charming effect. The fun begins when you adapt to the characters that let you sink into the exciting gaming experience you ever had in your life.

Overwatch Review Score

Mathew Bradford

Gameplay
Characters
Story
Graphics

Summary

Overwatch provides an immense shooter experience with competitive multiplayer modes. It offers better graphics, well-crafted maps, and sounds that make gameplay even more enjoyable.

4.1
Overwatch Cover image

Almost five years till its release, Overwatch is still rocking the charts despite its unchanged gaming mechanics. The game centers around a simple but graphical layout, the controlling points, and payloads. While playing Overwatch, it feels like the actual gameplay is the little experience of a complete setup. Blizzard developed the game very well with dedication and deserved recognition for their excellent work. But aside from the gameplay, its characters are the main prompting point for most of us and leave a profound impact.

Overwatch is similar to many other notable games falling into MOBA (Multiplayer Online Battle Arena) genre. But it is not precisely a MOBA and has characters designed around it. The characters have different abilities and reflect their playing style and overall strengths and weaknesses. It involves no AI creeps, leveling up, or any item shopping. While you spend time getting points for attacking and defend. There are payloads, and you push your limits to climb up the leaderboard. The abilities of the characters give unique perks and have cool-down timers different for each skill and utility.

The game currently hosts 32 playable characters/heroes with a great diversity of abilities. Teaming up in the game is easy, and each team has a limit of six players. Player and character diversity bring uniqueness to the game because every character can add more power to the team. The developer Blizzard continues to introduce characters in the game and ensure ever-expanding pleasure. Overwatch is similar to Team Fortress 2 and has a light-hearted and multiplayer gaming experience. You get a character to play and get perfection on that character and unlocking its skills and retaliate with teammates for better ranking and fun.

Overwatch offers a uniques combination of maps and locations that include a sci-fi theme. There lot of games that follow the sci-fi theme but none of them give this blend.

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Perfection with Time

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You might come across this saying that Nothings is perfect and perfection comes with time, the same we have seen with Overwatch. The game proved as a giant and continued to evolve. For example, many characters felt utterly overpowered by other characters when first introduced. But with the passing time, the characters get patched to make the gameplay balanced. The character who used turrets felt more potent than others when the game launched, but they weaken and added balance to the game later with the patch. Aside from this game is evolving continuously, and strategies change with the launch of each character. Characters in the game get reworked with time, and you cannot guarantee your supremacy in the game with a single character.

When released, Overwatch had 12 maps to play and felt pretty thin to play and have at the time. But with time, the map count increased to 28 across all of the modes. New maps kept added to increase the interest in gameplay and adding support for the unique modes. Maps have been carrying a constant futuristic look but keeping the location close to the real world. Overwatch has added many maps on real places, including Paris, Busan in South Korea, Black Forest of Germany, and Rialto in Italy. Every map adapts to the unique modes of the game by skillfully crafted locations.

Game Modes

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Game modes have a very similar motto of attacking at a specific point in the map accompanied by the team and getting control over certain times. There is King of the Hill-based gaming mode in which you take the payloads and move them across the map. The game has different modes with similar mechanisms, including quick play, competitive mode, and Arcade mode.

Quick mode offers the same core level gameplay while the competitive mode is ranked match offering more serious combats with ranking rewards to the winners. At the same time, Arcade mode is the combination of different sub-modes such as Capture the Flag, Deathmatch, and Low gravity matches. Overwatch offers custom modes through its Workshop and lobby for seasonal events with the custom game and unique game modes. Overall the gameplay is similar and oriented around control, team play, and attacking the places.

Since the game’s release, the match type has made a lot of progress outside the competitive modes. Playing Overwatch circulates four core formats, including Control, Escort, Assualt, and a Hybrid model of Assault and Escort. Teamwork is the necessary element towards success, and these matches are still fun. Overwatch is not only fun to play but watching the gameplay is also fun. Twitch audience of Overwatch streamers explains that quite well.

The Characters Overview

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Heroes or characters in Overwatch work around the game mechanics. Four core categories of character in the game include defense, offense, support, and tank. Defensive characters protect the team, and they have less mobility; therefore need to wait for the enemies to come at them. Offensive characters are tremendously fast and have the attacking ability to sprint towards the enemies and hit hard. But they are weak and have less HP, therefore poor at defense. Tank Heroes are similar to the concept of other MMOs like World of Warcraft. They have higher HP than any character and can take more hits. They protect the team and can handle massive damage while their offensive abilities are not fatal and carry melee weapons. Support characters can heal teammates and perform very well in a battle with a combined team effort. They are usually less deadly, but their healing can prove fatal for other teams.

The team needs a balance of characters in a fight against the opponent. There are events when one character class has an advantage over the other class. To keep the game balance and prevent overpowering any character, the characters’ class is well balanced. For example, you can choose from Reinhardt, a german ethnicity man that carries a hammer. He can tank the team and build a wall behind which teammates can defend themselves. Another example of a tank is Winston that generates a portable shield and travels a considerable distance with leaps.

The beauty of Overwatch lies in the abundance of the choices that it offers the players. You do not feel accomplished or get bored after long hours of the gameplay. You can always switch between the characters and keep your gaming experience refreshed by learning that character’s new skills. You keep investing time into mastering skills like bow and arrow skill set, but you enjoy that skill after getting things right. Later, when boredom hits, you can switch to other characters and learn new skills. For instance, a player getting bored by the tank’s role can switch to an offensive character and get over those feeling, asking him to quit the game.

There is enormous potential in this game to explore the characters. You play hours of gameplay, and still, there are characters in the game with which you are still unfamiliar. Since not every character suits everyone but you still have a lot of character to try. The characters get added to the new events and have unique abilities that overpower them over. With the game’s advancement, the characters’ powers are balanced, and sometimes the abilities are tempered. The whole mechanism is possibly there to shift the player’s focus towards new characters in the name of balance. But we all know this is the way this character system operates.

Before Overwatch 2, final character of Overwatch, Echo, is introduced in the game. She deals severe damage to opponents and an airborne Ai with the advanced weapon. An electrified character that darts through the sky and is fun to play. Echo is a beast when it comes to attacking but also vulnerable to damage. She has 200 HP and can lose all of it on accurate attacks, but heroes like Soldier: 76.

Overwatch has made several changes to the characters and the system in which these characters work. But the significant revolution in all these years is the introduction of the role-lock system. For the years, this system was an immense demand. Before starting the match in competitive and quick modes, players have to define their team’s role. You have to select your role from the tank, support, and damage classes. Once you enter the match, you cannot switch your class and are bound to the predefined classes. This overall improved the gaming experience and added a balance to the game.

Overwatch Sounds and Graphics

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Gameplay in Overwatch is phenomenal and acts as an unexpected and enlightening source for the player during the movements. You can listen to even the slightest noise in the background of what’s happening. The player can hear sounds of getting damage and doing damage to others. Each event has a specific sound associated that distinguishes it from others and lets you know what is going on around you. You can hear a tracer needling entering your back, or a Genji is near you fighting and damaging. Special effects like getting a headshot or Reinhardt doing damage with the hammer are some of the game’s favorite sounds.

Overwatch offers a fictitious graphical experience with very self-effacing layouts. The maps are fantasy twists of real-world locations that represent the places vividly. Graphics are crispy, but animations are mostly cartoonish rather than close to the real world. You see different locations like Paris, and Man-made colonies on the moon, Eichenwalde towns on the maps. Moonlit streets of London are prominent in the maps, which offers excellent detailing towards the graphics. These superfluities separate the map pool of Overwatch from other multiplayer games in a similar genre. No details in the graphics are missing, and maps are accurate and fulfill fan’s fantasies.

Levels and Loot

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Overwatch works on the same system of leveling up as most modern games, primarily a multiplayer shooter. More the matches you play and get more achievements, the more you will gain experience points. Experience shows that how much of matches you have played and how much you are skilled. But skill is not always linked with experience, as some players can play better even at a low experience level. The experience contributes towards the overall rank of the account and not to the player’s specific character. Getting level up can be rewarding in Overwatch; you get loot boxes with the level-ups.

Loot in Overwatch offers excellent variability of customizations for the characters in the game. Loot may include skins and voice packs for the characters. Besides these items, you can have a chance of getting sprays for marking your maps and tickets to change the player icon in the game. You can customize characters with the skins from the loot. Therefore skins are the most sought-after items out of the loot. You can makeover your character with the new skins. For example, a Bastion can be changed to Steamboat skin otherwise, which is a giant robot. You can change Genji to Ryu Hayabusa by applying Young Genji skin from a robot ninja. Many character customization is present in the game that offers new skins, new events, and even some rare skins that come once in a while.

Despite the hype around the loot, they provide no real advantage in the game to the players. Loot is purely superficial and contributes nothing towards the end game. It’s only skill and strategy that decides the game’s fate rather than your item’s collection. Skins give cool looks to the characters and better views in replays and match screens. This system keeps the game’s balance because better loot could be unjust for many players. Still, the urge to get ther unique skins is there in the players and scavenge for these items. Fantasy and in-depth gameplay shift the players’ focus automatically towards new skin. This whole system works by manipulating the players’ desires for better and unique skins.

There is an element of randomness in the loot, and you need to level up to get more loot boxes. Another way to get loot boxed is by in-game microtransactions that Blizzard has offered. But the downside of these loot boxes is that you pay $40 for a microtransaction for skin, and you still have to deal with the randomness of getting an item. You should be paying for an item you want, but you get a random item from the loot box. In this way, you need to pay more for loot boxes, and even after several tries, you still have a chance of not getting the desired item. This randomness is a greedy system, in my opinion, but this is how they are operating things. You may get a really good skin from a single box, or you may open 20+ boxes and get nothing but player icons and sprays as a reward for your heavy spendings.

Opening the loot boxes is exciting and scary at the same time. In case you get a duplicate item after opening the loot box, this item converts into the in-game credits. These credits are the in-game currency that is only attainable from these loot boxes. Credits allow to buy customizations and skins from the store but getting those credits depends on chances. This overall system might be good for a mobile-based free-to-play game, but this is an unpleasant system on a PC game.

Parental Guide for Overwatch

Overwatch is rated for teens and has relatively less blood and violence in the gameplay. Characters in the game are animated and cartoonish. The violence is present in-game but at a very moderate to low rate with no real-life-like events. Weapons in the game are fantasy-based with no involvement of gore and blood, and guns in the game have a cosmetic appearance that eliminates the element of violence. Swearing and bad words are not allowed in the game chat. Game chat is easy to turn that off and avoid any unpleasant event.

What Overwatch does right?

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Both on PC and Consol, Overwatch has an excellent rating and gaming experience. It shows the futuristic earth with real-life maps based on real locations. Graphics and artwork in the game are vibrant, and attention to the details is evident. The characters are colorful with vibrant colors in the skins, and the weapons are well polished.

Overwatch has a cast of characters known as heroes, which show profound lore and backstories of these characters’ dialogues. All the heroes have some background and story to continue with in the maps. Overall makes the gameplay enjoyable with good character development.

Overwatch is a blend of MOBA and shooter game that offers an enjoyable and uniques experience. Players can choose from different roles and work together to defend or attacking the area. There are various abilities that a hero has, and it makes them unique, making the gaming enjoyable. Even after hours of gameplay, you still feel fresh and never get bored.

What brings it down?

Overwatch does not have any lags or graphics issues. Most of the time its works smoothly on a decent gaming setup. There are no drops in frame rates, while glitches are not evident in the gameplay. However, it’s the balance in the game that causes problems over the years. Regarding the balance of the game, there are no significant changes. The perfect example of the issue is GOATS, composed of three healers and three tanks and dominated the Overwatch League’s second season.

Later changes happened in the balance of the game, and Blizzard introduced Role Queue. And to prevent meta-shifting, Hero Pools later included in the game. These changes affected positively as well as negatively, and the community raised a voice for it. After the introduction of Role Queue, the waiting time increased a lot. Sometimes queue lasted for solid five to eight minutes and annoyed the players.

Minimum System Requirements

Overwatch runs smoothly on low to medium graphics setup. But it would be best if you have a decent PC for running this game and explore its full potential. Following are the minimum requirements:

  • CPU: Intel Core i3 or AMD Phenom X3 8650
  • Graphics: Intel HD 4400 or NVIDIA GeForce GTX 460
  • RAM: 4 GB
  • Hard Disk: 30 GB
  • Operating System: Windows 7, Windows 8, Windows 8.1, Windows 10

Recommended System Requirements

For getting the most out of Overwatch gameplay and get a smooth frame rate per second, you need relatively higher graphics to build on your PC. For optimum performance following are the requirements

  • CPU: Intel Core i5 or AMD Phenom ll X3
  • Graphics: NVIDIA GeForce GTX 660
  • RAM: 6 GB
  • Hard Disk: 30 GB
  • Operating System: Windows 7, Windows 8, Windows 8.1, Windows 10

Final Verdict

Overwatch provides an immense shooter experience with competitive multiplayer modes. It offers better graphics, well-crafted maps, and sounds that make gameplay even more enjoyable. Characters in the game are well balanced, and in-game mechanics ensure player’s engagement with the game. With a bundle of fun-packed modes and unique characters, I would recommend Overwatch to anyone without any hesitation.