It's always been a game of contradictions. A game with a light, inviting atmosphere, playful abilities that are designed to be "just fun to press" in the developer's own words and wide, forgiving hitboxes for those abilities that ensures even the bottom fragger on your squad can participate, making it the perfect squad game on paper. The heroes are lovingly crafted homages to 'superhero' culture around the world, coming with their own powerful and unique skills that'll make up for any deficet in your FPS fundamentals. It's a garuntee everyone will have a favorite.

but that quickly crystalizes into a hardcore competitive FPS any time you're in a state of actual play. Everyone swoops on the low performers like vultures and it's not hard to see why. If you're performing even slightly suboptimially, your team gets ran over instantly and you're unable to even press any of those fun buttons we've just talked about! None of the downtime of a game like Fortnite that allows for whole conversations with friends to take place as you explore and scrape together supplies means that you're always expected to be "on" and in the thick of it in Overwatch. One whiffed ability or lazy play could mean your entire team gets snowballed. Those strong individualized roles for heroes quickly backfire as you realize that counterpicking is key, meaning that you'll usually be swapping off the hero you want to spend time with in favor of what hero you need, or worse, be pressured off into what your team thinks they need. That character select screen goes from a well of infinite possibilities into a spreadsheet with optimal picks and no-hopers very quickly.

It's a hardcore team-based FPS, and yet it's competitive mode is dysfunctional. Strict restrictions on who can play with who means that you can't actually play with whatever team you've cultivated and usually have to settle for scraping together some kind of rapport with randoms. Que the insane amount of bitching I talked about earlier being tripled. You simply can't play this team based game with anyone you might have actually been practicing the game with at a high level.

The final nail in the coffin for competitive Overwatch is, ironically, the heroes themselves. The game had a good sense for risk vs reward when it started, but a series of overwhelming additions seemingly added out of obligation have broken this idea over it's knee. A new overwatch hero has to turn heads in a game that's already filled with broken abilities, so it seems like with each subsequent released boundaries get pushed and rules get broken. That might be part of the fun in a casual game, but in a competitive one it makes for a nightmarish hellscape where a bad decision by the hero designer can turn the game into a boring slog where you fight the same comps using the same strategies for months on end. If you think Kiriko's easy to use, Ultimate ability denying cleanse or illari's autohealing turret are a little frustrating to deal with in quick play imagine dealing with it in every game.

No hero bans in sight give you no control over your experience either, so the community can't even pick out problem heroes until the developers fix them like they can in games like Rainbow Six Siege. Blizzard has remained adamant that players should always have access to the full roster to pick from..or at least they did, until they started locking new heroes behind predatory battle passes. It's fine if it lines their pockets, essentially.

All of these had knock on effects on the game's ambitions as a pro esport. There was no variance in team comps and the few characters with skill expression were outgunned by boring, fire and forget cooldown rotation. It was sluggish from the word go, but it limped along through sheer force by activision until sponsorships dried up in the wake of Blizzard's notorious sexual harassment scandal and viewership hit all time lows.

So the competitive scene is in shambles and the game is a joke at high level play, which funnels sweats back into quick play and ironically makes the experience woeful for the casual player. There has to be some kind of third option to just relieve some stress and fuck around. And there is...if you don't mind playing the same shallow, reheated arcade modes that have been in rotation since 2016. Modes like low gravity and Mei's Snowball fight didn't hold anyone's attention back then and they barely do now. The odd inspired mode like limited duel can be fun for a lot longer, but the rotation means you'll have to wait until the day it's available. Even the casual modes are uneven and designed to exploit fomo.

The obvious third pillar Overwatch has been missing was planned to be an extensive single player mode built in with replayability and RPG progression, with the team able to lean into making abilities more overpowered and fun without any of that pesky obligation to balance. Not only would spending time with your favorite heroes be allowed, it'd be encouraged as you'd unlock new abilities for the time spent. Alas, after a quiet, protracted development cycle it fell through and left the lopsided experience we're left with today.

What little progression there was in Overwatch 1 was gutted out. It used to be possible to earn special skins in event challenges or by just completing enough games. You could probably make a great point about how such extrinsic motivators can directly contribute to low match quality by having people force themselves to play beyond what's satisfying to earn virtual goodies, and I'd probably agree, but the current system is far worse. A lot of the same trappings still exist, just rearranged and forcing you to drop real money on overpriced currency to participate. That cool Tracer skin is still locked behind a grind, but now the GRIND is locked behind a 10$ buy in. It cuts into the fun for the crowd who doesn't want to spend money and exploits those who can't help themselves. it's a lose, lose unless your name is Activision-Blizzard.

In 2024, after almost 8 years, it feels like Overwatch is buckling under it's own weight. I've been playing since 2016, and while I can say for a fact that parts of the game are still good, they're mostly things that came out that year. Making risky plays with Tracer's extensive movement, landing a critical dive with Winston or saving a friend at the last moment as Mercy still feel good, and syncing those risky plays up as a team to cover each other still feels like nothing else in the genre.

The problem is they're experiences that become increasingly rare, suffocating under poorly considered addition after poorly considered addition. Your old favorites feel obsolete in the face of new characters that can do their jobs in less interesting ways or deny their impact entirely with no skill required. Good times with your friends feel fleeting as the game quickly turns into a sweatfest with half the modes bent on breaking up the squad anyway. Any cool addition is underlined with increasingly growing price tags.

It seems like it wont be much longer before the dam busts. A pivotal leadership change from microsoft could stem some of the damage, but from where I'm standing it feels like too little, too late. I loved you, Overwatch, but I can't stand by what you've become. Blizzard needs to stop and decide once and for all what they really want from this thing. Until it does, I'm taking an extended sabbatical.

The pitch here only gets more novel in the era of damage spongey bosses and slow, meticulous movement: Kill every enemy as fast as possible, with the quirk that every defeat in an encounter powers up your sword. Use your extreme mobility to dart around the battlefield, killing smaller enemies so you can fell the larger ones in a single strike. Bosses that would take 15 minutes in this game's peers have the potential to take 15 seconds here with the right approach. It's a uniquely sega approach to 3D action games and while it's not a perfect translation of the Ninja-flavored 2D shoot-em-up the OGs were, it's repsectable in it's own right and that's more important. The demon sword feasting on the blood of enemies and eating away at the player's own health if they're too passive is both the perfect modernization and contextualization of a classic arcade timer, incentivizing active play in all the same ways with a sinister edge that fits the new tone like a glove.

The gameplay loop on paper is perfect, but the developers were averse to fleshing out anything outside of it. Shinobi isn't a 2D action game where you retain perfect control of your character, it's in 3D which requires the game to step in to make up the difference in precision possible with the extra dimension with a lock on system. It's shockingly unreliable for a game who's entire strategy revolves about picking out specific targets. If there's a horde of enemies on screen and you want to start with the small target in the back to build up cursed energy and stay on the move, good luck making sure the camera doesn't snap to any of the enemies in-between. Sometimes it doesn't even snap to enemies at all, with the camera staying stationary when you press the lock on with enemies behind you. That's the time you'd most need the game to snap to attention. It's the most imprecise tool possible in a game trying to encourage precise play. That's a long enough scarf for the game to trip over.

The core premise of your clan being possessed and you being forced to pick them off one by one is a good enough hook, but the story overall isn't fleshed out enough to work any meaningful drama from it. The boss squad makes for some entertaining fights and diverse personalities, but the first time the player meets most of them will be in these battles even as Hotsuma recalls cherished histories for them all.

Level design is of questionable importance when given a well fleshed out, varied combat system but for something this simple and to-the-point it was an opportunity to add some much needed variety. They only manage it some of the time though, with battles over bottomless pits or in narrow hallways that leave little room to skirt around enemy fire the best the game can come up with. Repeated level chunks in the same area don't help. Sometimes it feels like you've replayed a level a few times by the time you've gotten through it once.

Varied enemy design tries to pick up the slack here but despite there being some decent variety on the art side there's not a ton separating them all mechanically. You have smaller, floating turret enemies meant to be fodder, more standard types on the ground meant to gang up on the player and corrall them in with defensive play, and larger varieties of each that take a fully charged sword to take down effectively Even in the most varied cases you'd ideally be killing the enemies before they can get their gameplan going anyway so they all start to blend together.

Bosses usually are a highlight though. The lack of a tutorial is baffling at first but you'll quickly realize that the strict damage thresholds of the bosses are the method the game chose for teaching players about the Tate system. You simple won't make any meaningful gains on without understanding it. I'm not sure if the boss in the third level is even beatable without taking it in consideration. It's easy to see how this game got it's reputation, but the bosses flip on their head in a really cathartic way once you "get it". This might be the only action game that I've ever gotten an S rank on a late game boss on my first try. The way this game's systems flip from obtuse and frustrating to simplistic and empowering once the gap in understanding is crossed is the most extreme I've ever seen.

Once you "get it" it's a hard game to hate. It fufills the ninja fantasy well enough with it's focus on speed and precision and there's enough depth here to make for some pretty decent score attack fun here too, but a lack of polish and variety hold it back from it's true potential. It's got me interested in checking out nightshade, since I feel like it could really succeed with a second pass.