As Blizzard’s highly anticipated first person shooter finally releases, we offer the best tips and advice on how not to be a complete burden to your colourful squad.
It’s safe to say Overwatch is one of the most refreshing shooters in recent years. Colourful, crammed with personality, and requiring completely new tactics from the usual modern stop ’n’ pop fair; its 6v6 match mechanics offer both a fun throwback and an entirely new intricate beast.
But for players who have perhaps grown-up on a Call Of Duty-based diet, Overwatch’s setup and wildly varying characters may come as a startling learning curve. So before you settle down to throw your online heavyweight status to the world, ingest these tips and remember – you only get one chance at a first impression. Unless you rage quit and start again, of course.
1. Find your gateway hero
One of the initial frustrations when starting with Overwatch can be finding your groove with a certain hero; are you cut-out to be an effective offensive gunslinger like Reaper? Or are you best suited on team support with healing and stat boosting abilities like Mercy?
When starting out, we found it easiest to get to grips with the defense-orientated class. Characters like Torbjorn and Bastion, while many argued were over-powered in the beta version, are a great place for newbies because their abilities encourage co-ordination with the team; laying down turrets, throwing out ammo packs and providing ‘overwatch’ support to your more experienced, direct players.
2. Utilise all your character’s abilities
Each character in Overwatch has around five unique abilities, and to succeed you have to utilise all of them on the battlefield. Each ability is designed to squeeze you out of a variety of tricky situations, with offensive ninja character Genji packing death stars, bullet-deflecting sword swipes, and crazy agility which allows him to scale walls.
Simply relying on the default trigger-finger death star manoeuvre as your main source of clout, will soon have you pining at the walls in frustration. This is a fast game of adaptability – where understanding when to use (and combine) your special abilities is often the key to success.
3. Be sure to change characters midway through matches
Once you’ve mastered one character, don’t cast aside Overwatch as another game conquered. In between deaths you’re given the choice of switching heroes for a reason; the different maps and opposing team characters will constantly challenge you to switch-up your tactics on the fly, especially during the tense back-and-forth payload wars of the Escort matches.
While you probably won’t get along with the entire line-up, it’s best to have a handful of heroes you feel comfortable with – so you can be a real asset to your team.
4. Target the opposing ‘support’ players
Support-based characters like Mercy and Lucio are naturally weaker to compensate for their tide-turning abilities. If you doubt the power of support, clearly you haven’t witnessed an entire enemy team resurrected on the battlefield after scoring a magnificent killstreak. Pride = dead.
So, much like Team Fortress 2, that’s why it’s often crucial to target the supporting classes on the enemy team in any open battle. They might not be coming after you at first, but cutting off potential saviours and ammo dispensers is a sure-way to weaken all the enemies in close proximity.
5. Don’t be afraid to duck out for health packs
Unlike most modern shooters, except the recent reboot of Doom, your health doesn’t regenerate when you take cover in Overwatch. Instead, you have to either rely on a healing team member, or collect health and armour packs scattered around the map like you’re playing Unreal Tournament 2004.
With this in mind, keeping an eye on your health is an art you’ll have to become accustomed to all over again. And as wise men/fantasy wizards always say: pick your battles. You don’t want to stride towards an enemy with confidence, only to find out you’re a butt-smack away from instant death.
6. At the start of the match – don’t be so hasty to leave the spawn room
Credit: Blizzard Entertainment
As human beings naturally implanted with small attention spans, any time spent locked in small confines during a video game often spawns rapid jumping, spins of the analogue stick, or pile-ups waiting for the clock to countdown to the next door’s release.
But if you’re on the attacking team, don’t be so hasty to leave the starting spawn room. Chances are the defending team will have lined traps, mines and assembled a legion of snipers with sights directly on the door runway. This is how massacres start, and no legendary parties start out with a massacre.
7. And always work as a TEAM
The essence of Overwatch essentially distills down to ‘working as a team’. So, you know… do it.
Ensure you have a variety of classes and characters when selecting your team, deploy group defenses to claim areas and don’t go rogue in search of glory kills. Overwatch is excellent because it cleverly rewards more than just blasting enemies into the ghostly abyss, and top players are even democratically voted for by the populous at the conclusion of each match.
So you want to be a master player at Overwatch? Simple, don’t be an ass.
As the servers only switched on at midnight, look out for our full review of Overwatch later this week.
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