I wait at the door, finger feathering over a trigger. My champion of choice is a grizzled, stereotypical space marine, a flood of tracer fire and solid damage per second. When the assault begins, I charge out with a giant robot at my side, his mechanized hammer broadcasting an energy shield for me to shoot from. We lope toward our target between old-style Japanese buildings and cherry blossom trees.
Suddenly a grim reaper wannabe jumps out of a building, twin sawn-off shotguns blazing. Wait—are there more than one of him now? We both go down in a flurry of buckshot. Watching the instant replay before I respawn, I'm still not entirely sure what happened.
Overwatch, Blizzard's newest game, which has been in closed beta for the past week, is busy. It's dressed up as a first-person multiplayer shooter that pits teams of six against each other in small urban settings, but playing a few matches reveals that isn't all, or even most, of what it's doing. Overwatch takes the structure and gameplay of a shooter (run here, shoot this) and adds the character variety and strategic density of a multi-online battle arena. Imagine Blizzard's own Heroes of the Storm crammed inside Team Fortress 2.
