Overwatch: Blizzard brings us a Shooter

If we’d been asked to guess what Blizzard was going to do next, an FPS probably wouldn’t have been our first choice. That’s largely because first-person shooters don’t seem very… Blizzard. Once you’ve seen Overwatch, though, it starts to look very much like the kind of game you’d expect to see from that studio. We’re not talking so much about the colourful and cartoony art style though that is something that is shared with the likes of Warcraft and Hearthstone but the way that the game is meant to play.

Hanzo appears to be a stealth-based character by virtue of his silent bow. He has an ability that enables him to track enemies through walls via sonar.

 

Overwatch is very much a class-based shooter, one that clearly takes influence from the MOBA and MMO genre in the way that it provides players with a range of characters to choose from that play in radically different ways. Characters or heroes’, in the game’s parlance aren’t only specced towards defence, support and attack roles, but seem to play in completely different ways within those categories, with an array of bizarre and interesting abilities on show in the game’s trailer. The approach Blizzard is taking to the first-person shooter is fresh and fascinating and, as such, we’re eager to see how the game’s genre-blending, six-on-six multiplayer action handles. We’ll get a taste of that when the beta runs in 2015.