Phovos reviews Overwatch – Getting into our heads!

Hi, Phovos here! And guess what? We’re finally playing Overwatch! After failing to get into every single beta so far, we’ve been playing the Open Beta that lasts until May 9th.

Overwatch is a ton of fun. The characters look cool, the maps are amazing, there’s free loot and it’s overall a blast to play. Very chaotic right now, because of the influx of players who don’t know what they’re doing, but still awesome. The maps are the best part of Overwatch, they’re really nice, good-looking maps, even with their long lines of sight and large amounts of choke points.

Thing is, everyone is comparing Overwatch to Team Fortress 2. The game modes, Control Points, Payload and a two-stage variant of King of the Hill, are really the only things that are similar. Oh and Mercy and Pharah, but even the obvious variants on Medic and Soldier play very differently. Rather than having different weapons, most classes have one weapon, often with a secondary fire and several abilities. Almost everyone has some sort of mobility to catch up to other players, and those who don’t often make up for it elsewhere. Reinhardt for example has a charging targe-like ability, Soldier: 76 sprints like in most other games and Junk Rat places a bomb on the ground and detonates it, Sticky-Jumper style. In TF2, your important keys are used for switching weapons, in Overwatch, you’re activating abilities with E, Shift, right click and Q.

Diverging even more from Team Fortress is the fact that essentially everyone has an Ubercharge, in the form of ultimates. These ultimates mean that everyone can have a big play if they use their ultimate at the right time, generally by catching everyone in a choke point, or clearing up all the kills with an auto-aim ability when someone else uses their ultimate.

There are downsides though. The HUD is pretty annoying, it’s both too small, two separated and too distant from itself. The ammo count annoys me most, as it’s bloody tiny. Every time someone gets a kill you assisted in, it flashes “Eliminated X” in the middle of the screen, with a big red skull if you got the kill. There’s a kill feed for a reason, Overwatch.

Unfortunately, no matter how much I like this game, I won’t be playing much of it. When I play Overwatch, I come away with a headache. Something about the game, either the flashy ultimates, the blinks and dashes, the FoV or the low quality settings I have, it all gives me a headache. This isn’t a one-off thing. I’ve played Overwatch three times now and it’s happened every single time, with the headache fading away once I exit Overwatch and do something else. The worst parts are the main menu and the HUD, I find myself straining to look at them and that I think is what the cause is.

It’s a real shame, because although I’m not ready to sink forty dollars into Overwatch, it’s a game I want to get into in the future.

That’s all for now. This was Phovos on the SPUF of Legend, see you soon!