It’s been a while since we’ve had an Overwatch event, hasn’t it? And by a
long time I mean like a month and some change or so. But for the first time
ever, this new event is not tied to a real-world holiday but is instead taking
a step back in time to see Overwatch back in its golden years.
Taking place after the Omnic Crisis
but before the fall of the organization, Uprising is set during Tracer’s first
ever mission on the strike team. The story team put out a fantastic comic
starring several major figures in the game’s lore, so if you want more
background on the event I highly recommend giving itself a read.
The biggest feature with this event is
the new brawl, creatively named “Uprising”. Taking inspiration from Halloween’s
Junkenstien’s Revenge PVE brawl, Uprising is a mixture of the tower-defense
gameplay Junkenstien did so well and some cover-based shooter stuff. You can
select Tracer, Reinhardt, Torbjorn or Mercy, and are placed down into a daytime
alternative King’s Row. Purple-hued omnics are everywhere you turn, and you
need to defend various points from them. To make things even harder, evil
versions of Bastion and Orisa pop up every once in a while to cause trouble,
equipped with all their abilities and even their ultimates. While the enemies
certainly aren’t pushovers, good coordination with your team will scrap the
bots quickly and quietly…on Normal difficulty at least. There’s also Hard,
Expert and Legendary difficulty, and while I haven’t tried these yet I know
from experience with Junkenstien that they’re likely pretty unforgiving.
Overall Uprising is a complete blast
to play, making Junkenstien feel pretty archaic by comparison. It adds a lot of
fantastic story elements to Overwatch we
really haven’t seen before. The four playable characters bicker and banter
throughout, and other Overwatch members like Soldier: 76 and Ana cheer you on over
comm. I don’t know if I can call it my personal favourite Event Brawl yet (the
Christmas Snowball Brawl drives a hard bargain and also haunts my nightmares),
but Uprising packs a surprise bonus. In addition to the story-based mode,
Uprising features a bonus second more where you can pick literally any
character in the Overwatch roster.
Want to try Uprising as Junkrat or Lucio? You can do that if you want. It’s
really fun picking more unusual characters like Winston or Zenyatta and seeing
how the enemy robots react to their abilities, and gives Uprising a fantastic
replayability that Junkenstien never had.
Of course there’d be no incentive to
fight the Omnics over and over again if there wasn’t some sweet loot waiting at
the end. Every hero gets one new spray and two voice lines this time around,
with a few getting new skins, emotes and highlight intros.
Starting with the emotes, Hanzo,
Pharah and Soldier: 76 each get some fun new ones. Hanzo throws a few punches,
Pharah bounces an unfired flare around, and 76 gets on the ground and does
push-ups. They’re all very cute and fun (although 76’s has an issue where his
Stunt Rider cape clips through him). Even better are the Highlight Intros,
given to D.Va, Torbjorn and Zenyatta. D.Va adorably takes a selfie with a
self-destructing MEKA in the background, Torbjorn flips through what looks like
some family photos before showing the camera the book and revealing they’re
full of turret pictures, and Zenyatta does some upside down meditation. Just
like the emotes, they’re very fun and definitely proves once again why Overwatch has more personality than most
other shooters currently on the market.
Last but not least, the new skins.
Almost all the skins are legendaries this time around, with only two epics, one
for Reinhardt and the other for Bastion. Bastion’s epic and Orisa’s legendary
make them appear like the enemies in the Uprising brawl, complete with purple
colour schemes. Honestly, I really don’t think I’d use them over some of their
other skins. Maybe it’s because I’m not a fan of purple, but I honestly think
both of them have legendaries much better than these.
The rest of the skins are based on
younger versions of the Overwatch crew, similar to other “young” skins we’ve
seen from characters like 76, Genji and Ana. The four characters from the Brawl
are each given a new skin, with Tracer and Mercy getting one legendary, Torb
getting two and Reinhardt getting an epic. They all look decent and reflect the
other Overwatch uniforms we’ve seen on other characters, but I don’t really
think they’re worth the hefty gold price on their heads. Torb’s Ironclad
legendary is especially ugly in my opinion.
McCree and Widowmaker also got new
legendaries, based on their time in Blackwatch and Talon respectively. Similar
to the others, they look nice and definitely look like how I’d expect the
characters to be in this time period, but I don’t really think they’re worth
the price unless you main the characters.
The true star of the show, however, is
the new Blackwatch Genji skin. I legitimately feel that this skin has become
the standard for awesome legendaries going forth. It’s just that cool looking.
An awesome twist on Genji’s Sparrow skin, Blackwatch Genji attaches several of
his cyborg parts to create an awesome design that really reflects the
difficulties his character went through during this time period. It’s fantastic
looking and has already become a must-have for any Genji main.
So with all that, how does Uprising
stand compared to the other events? In my opinion Winter Wonderland still rules
the roost overall, and I can’t say for sure whether it’s better than Year of
the Rooster or not just yet. For now though I’ve really enjoyed the new brawl
and I’ve become extremely excited for the possibility of more story based
content for Overwatch in the future.
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