Right now, I hate Junkrat. He's a scrawny, impish explosives expert with a grenade lobbing Frag Launcher. His ultimate ability – a slow charging special attack that fills faster as you do damage and score kills – is a motorised, remote control tire bomb with a devastating area of effect. Put simply, he makes things blow up. Things like me and my team of disparate misfits, who, until Junkrat showed up, were seconds away from successfully defending the control point and winning the match.

That's Overwatch, a multiplayer character-based shooter in which 12 players compete across two teams to fulfil whatever objective the map asks of them. I say character-based rather than class-based, and that's an important distinction. Widowmaker and Hanzo are both snipers, but play completely differently. Mercy and Lucio are both healers, but one uses a staff that shoots healing energy, and the other, well, phat beats. Each character fits into a broader category, but is otherwise unique. Weapons, abilities, ultimates and even movement are all specific to that hero.

It's a shooter then, but with a MOBA attitude to character design. To be clear: Overwatch isn't a MOBA. Rather, it's like if Heroes of the Storm went to Team Fortress 2's house party, and left without cleaning up after itself. There's no lane-pushing, AI creeps, item shopping or levelling. Objectives are straight out of the class-based shooter playbook, with points to attack and defend, payloads to push and hills to king. But characters have abilities, each reflective of their style and personality. And those abilities have cooldown timers, each different depending on their power and utility.

http://www.pcgamer.com/overwatch-review/