When Overwatch was first pitched more than a decade ago, a number of Blizzard employees told me, it was not pitched solely as a team-based hero shooter–it was pitched as a universe. Over the years, Blizzard has exemplified this idea by expanding the game’s story through comics, animated shorts, and more, ultimately creating the vibrant, superhero-inspired world we know it to be today. Now, a decade after the game’s initial release, we’re finally seeing that universe expand in an even larger way with something the team has been chasing after for some time: Overwatch’s first spin-off game.
Overwatch Rush is Blizzard’s new top-down, mobile hero shooter set in the Overwatch universe, and while it’s still fairly early in development, the hour-and-a-half I spent with the game was a lot of fun. According to the studio, Rush aims to finally broaden Overwatch’s reach to finally include mobile players, though it should be noted that it is not a port or extension of the core Overwatch experience and will have no interaction with the core game. That said, Rush’s roster–which includes Mercy, Tracer, Reaper, Soldier 76, Kiriko, Lucio, Reinhardt, and Pharah, to start–is pulled entirely from the main game and doesn’t necessarily reimagine them, making the experience feel fairly familiar. And despite Overwatch’s core team, Team 4, not working on the upcoming game, it retains a sense of familiarity in other ways too, with notably similar UI, the same in-game announcer, and the inclusion of Control-Point mode.
During my hands-on preview with Overwatch Rush, I had the opportunity to test out these eight heroes, the mobile reimagining of Control-Point mode, and the game’s two additional modes as well: Nano Grab and Free-For-All. Perhaps unsurprisingly, as they were designed specifically for Rush, Nano Grab and Free-For-All are the modes that I found most exciting. In Nano Grab, you and three other teammates are tasked with picking up small glowing objects called Nanos, then depositing them into a bank that changes its location periodically. The first team to bank 100 Nanos wins, though it should be noted that you can’t successfully bank Nanos if anyone from the other team is on the bank. This makes for a fast-paced, strategic mode, in which you must decide how to divvy up your team of four to be the most effective; do you band together, forming an unstoppable force but severely limiting your Nano-seeking capabilities, or send a few highly-mobile scouts out (like Lucio and Tracer) to grab Nanos while your beefier party members ensure the banking area stays clear?
