When it comes to characters with a high skill-ceiling, Zenyatta resides near the top of the list. A glass cannon with the ability to heal teammates, a good Zenyatta has the opportunity to completely shift a match in his team's favor, which is certainly a strong case for giving him a shot. Let's get his downsides out of the way right off of the bat: everyone's favorite robotic monk sports a mere 150 hitpoints and doesn't have any movement-based abilities or perks, making him an easy target when in the thick of battle. Still, his main weapon, the Orbs of Destruction, do a great deal of damage for a Support hero, as they can either be fired one-by-one with extreme accuracy, or charged up and fired (with the amount of orbs that are fired based upon how long the secondary fire button is held for). If you're the type of player that is really good at aiming your shots, consider giving Zenyatta a shot, as he is an absolute blast when played proficiently.

With Overwatch, the charming hero shooter from Blizzard, launching this week, we want to make sure that you're as prepared as possible to help your team dominate. Overwatch's main focus is clearly on the interplay between its dynamic characters, so in order to become competent, you'll need to understand how every character works. Throughout the week, we'll be publishing guides on each of the 21 launch heroes, three at a time, with the hopes that you'll be able to recognize certain patterns on the battlefield.

That parenthetical is important--it’s perfectly understandable to feel uncomfortable with a game asking up to $60 up front, and then asking for more in the form of smaller fees. However, Overwatch isn’t a disaster like Dead Space 3 , which integrated its microtransactions into the heart of the gameplay. Instead, it limits its extras to packs of "loot boxes," which contain rewards like skins, victory poses, and spray tags that are all earnable in-game simply by playing. It doesn’t create separate player bases, it doesn’t result in a "pay to play" or "pay to win" situation, and it doesn’t detract from the fun of the game. Everyone is still on the same level, and they’re going to stay that way, becaus

To top all of this off, none of my teammates were communicating whatsoever. Needless to say, I was extremely frustrated and decided to start playing quarterback, directing my teammates through my microphone. After getting one Tracer and one Reaper to switch to Reinhardt, who rocks a giant shield that blocks enemy bullets, I hung in the background, healing everyone possible and positioning them on the control point in a way that I felt would be successful. Granted, my tone was far more authoritative than I would like to admit, and I'm sure that my teammates probably thought I was a huge jerk, but something very funny happened after I started to take control: we won. We had a completely unbalanced team that was doomed from the start, I chose a character whose main role isn't inflicting damage and somehow I ended up empowering the team as a whole. This was such a different experience from anything that I had ever experienced in a shooter, and despite the initial frustrations, it was the single most satisfying multiplayer match I was a part of (in any game) in the past two or three years.

Tracer's signature move is her Blink, which allows her to warp in any direction up to three times in a row. The key here is to make sure that you always have at least one blink at your disposal, as getting caught in a standard one-on-one firefight without movement abilities almost always leaves Tracer at a major disadvantage. One of the cooler aspects of her Blink is that it can totally be used to get across large gaps, allowing her to sneak around characters like Bastion and Widowmaker. Tracer's Recall ability allows her to rewind time in a manner similar to that seen in Super Time Force, allowing her to move back to a previous position. What makes this ability particularly special is that Tracer's ammo and health counts will be restored to whatever they were at that particular point in time, so this ability is absolutely crucial for fighting against characters with far more health than her. Finally, her ultimate is the Pulse Bomb, which is essentially a sticky grenade with a massive damage count and relatively low area of effect. Bear in mind that the Pulse Bomb can totally kill Tracer, so if you're looking to throw it into a crowd of enemies, make sure that you have your Blink or Recall available to get out of the danger zone.

There are many superficial similarities between Overwatch 2 stadium modeand Battleborn , Gearbox’s character-based shooter released just a few weeks before Blizzard’s: both feature large rosters of cartoonish, over-the-top characters, and both are multiplayer-focused games with an emphasis on teamwork and roles. But there are significant differences between the two games that actually make the comparisons a little unfair. For starters, Battleborn does have some single-player offerings, but its main differentiator is in its inspiration. From the structure of its maps to the low-ranked AI units serving as cannon fodder to the way players slowly level up over the course of a match, Battleborn is clearly trying to blend first-person gameplay with frantic MOBA elements perfected in games like League of Legends . Overwatch is far more similar to Valve’s legendary class-based shooter Team Fortress 2 . It takes that game’s concepts (learning a class, wildly differing roles based on attacking, defending, and support, and changing roles constantly to adapt to new situations) and cranks them up to eleven, as more characters means more slight tweaks on the same central id