Review: Overwatch’s Switch Port Is Great on the Go but Not at Home

On the Nintendo system, the game will fare its absolute best with the uninitiated.

Overwatch
Photo: Activision

There are no surprises in Overwatch on the Switch, at least not for anyone who’s played enough ported games on the system, or played enough of Overwatch on any other one. Beyond the inherent benefit of the Switch letting you take the game just about anywhere, the only major change is the addition of gyroscopic controls, which work better as an augment for precision shooting rather than a default way of looking around the game world. Veterans will be able to simply pick the game up and go to town, but those are also the players most likely to be aggravated by all the ways that this port feels so inferior.

On the Switch, Overwatch will fare its absolute best with the uninitiated. This impeccably crafted game has always been tailor-made to be immensely accessible and friendly to those who don’t normally cotton to multiplayer FPS titles, and Overwatch comes to the Nintendo system as a complete experience, with 30 characters and all the tweaks and adjustments the game has seen in the past three years. It’s even launching right in the middle of the current Halloween-focused special event, which is probably confusing as hell for anyone coming into the game completely blind, but it’s at least a prime opportunity to see one of the, honestly, infrequent moments where Overwatch uses its mechanics to break from formula.

That formula is, generally, that of a team-objective game that has two teams of six attempting to either capture specific control points on a map or escort a payload from one end of that map to the other. There’s nothing terribly innovative to that approach on the surface, but the beauty of the game is in the details. Overwatch is, above all else, a game about superheroes from all over the world coming together to work toward a common goal and, in so many ways, its strength is in its diversity. Indeed, from a strictly mechanical standpoint, there’s very little overlap in how each of its 30 characters operate, to the point that handling each one will make you feel like you’re playing a completely different game every time.

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Soldier 76 is the archetypical assault rifle-wielding entry-level shooter avatar, but you also have more intricate characters like Sombra, a Mexican hacker who can render herself invisible, as well as hack and disable an enemy’s special abilities. There are also oddities like the super-intelligent hamster who drives a cybernetic hamster ball into battle, and can latch onto surfaces to swing himself around like a wrecking ball. Even for those who don’t do well with killing and precision in these types of games, there’s a whole range of ways to support your team without ever needing to fire a gun. That diversity is equally reflected in the excellent, and eye-catching, character designs, and to the point where it’s honestly baffling that Marvel didn’t go to someone with this concept first, using its most famous characters to fill a roster.

There’s not much story that actually happens during the course of day-to-day gameplay, but the expanded story material is out there and freely accessible in various other media. Think of it as a sort of Watchmen-lite tableau of superheroes being made illegal and rallying to action once the world goes sufficiently to hell. But that’s still a fairly empty framework, given that we don’t actually see our heroes do a whole lot of fighting against injustice.

Despite the extensive amounts of mid-match chatter delivered by the characters, as well as between them, there’s nothing you can do in-game to the same level of heroism as, say, saving civilians, stopping a natural disaster, using a public platform to show support for people living in a civil rights crisis, risking your livelihood to stand up against an unjust employer, or not being afraid of the financial blowback of upholding the values of the country in which you reside. Here, there’s only the option to work with others to move payloads or capture points—all in exchange for cosmetic loot boxes and the self-satisfaction of victory. And in regard to those loot boxes, thanks to outcry early in its life, Overwatch is fairly generous with them before you need to break out your wallet, though the game still wouldn’t mind if you did.

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That emptiness doesn’t necessarily preclude Overwatch from being an absolutely engrossing experience in the moment, and as much work as has been done by the game’s developers at Blizzard Entertainment to make its 30 disparate experiences mesh in the field, equally tough and admirable effort has been devoted to squeezing it all onto the Switch. Nonetheless, while everything great about the game is still on display here, it’s all been pared down on the technical side: 60fps knocked down to 30, fewer environmental details, mild but frequent performance hitches, and so on. This version of Overwatch may be the only one you can take with you on the go, but it’s definitely not the best version you can play at home.

The game was reviewed using a review code provided by Blizzard Entertainment.

Score: 
 Developer: Blizzard Entertainment  Publisher: Activision  Platform: Switch  Release Date: October 15, 2019  ESRB: T  ESRB Descriptions: Blood, Use of Tobacco, Violence  Buy: Game

Justin Clark

Justin Clark is a gaming critic based out of Massachusetts. His writing has also appeared in Gamespot.

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