Above: Yeah, Hanzo is not going to survive this encounter.
Chokepoints suck
The biggest problem I had with the demo is how two of the maps (the Egyptian-themed Temple of Anubis and Hanzo’s hometown of Hanamura) lock their objectives (capturing territory) behind artificial chokepoints. The attacking team has no choice but to funnel through these small areas and try to withstand the wrath of the defenders. In both maps, the defending team spawns right near the last objective.
The final showdown in Anubis is tricky when you’re on offense. You either have to go through the front entrance of a temple or try to flank your opponents from a small passageway on the side. Either way, it’s easy for your enemies to spot you (especially if they place turrets in there) and light you up. Hanamura has a few more attacking options in its two-story building, but I found it equally frustrating.
You can get some amazing kills
On the bright side, you can score some awesome kills with your hero’s powers. During a battle on Anubis, a player was chasing me down a narrow street. I was attacking him with Tracer and kept backpedaling away. The important thing to know about Tracer is that her Recall ability allows you to time-travel: It takes you back to where you were three seconds ago, resetting your health bar to whatever it was back then. Before this match, I mostly used it to retreat if I was in danger.
Above: Tracer’s pistols are like shotguns: They’re most effective at close range.
That was my intention in this case as well, but something even better happened: I ended up right behind the guy, and took care of him before he could turn around. In retrospect, it makes sense. We were fighting in a relatively straight line for a couple of seconds, so of course Recall would drop me behind him. But in that moment, I wasn’t thinking of that at all. And I felt like a badass for pulling it off.
Tracer is the perfect mascot
Tracer also seems like the official mascot of Overwatch. She’s the hero that Blizzard talked about the most during the game’s unveiling, and in one of the BlizzCon 2014 logos, she was posing next to well-known figures from StarCraft, Warcraft, and Diablo. It’s not hard to see why after playing. Her time-traveling skills are one of the more visually impressive abilities in the game (it feels fantastic when you chain them together), and her positive, perky attitude just makes her a likable character.
You can see a glimpse of her charm in the gameplay trailer below.
