Overwatch Review

Overwatch came out of Titan, the MMO Blizzard cancelled after seven years, and it carries that project's one real asset, which is character. Every hero is legible at a glance: silhouette, voice, ability sound, all tuned so you know what is about to happen to you before you can see who is doing it. That readability is the achievement. Six players a side, a payload or a point, and a roster kept deliberately shallow per hero so the depth lives in composition and counter picking rather than in mechanical execution alone, which is how a Reinhardt player and a Widowmaker player can both be excellent at the same game.

Presentation carried it further than the design alone would have: animated shorts, a comic canon, a highlight reel that made clips shareable by default, and a cast that people wrote and drew about constantly for years. The story stayed almost entirely outside the game itself, which is the honest knock against it, and the meta eventually hardened into compositions Blizzard had to legislate away. For a year or two this was simply the biggest thing in games.