Press 'X' to Review Overwatch: New Hero, Zenyatta Buff, and Healers in general.

So, last week on Overwatch a new hero was added to the roster in the PTR (Public Test Region), which for those that are unaware is the place where people that own the PC version of the game can play the next update before anyone else. This hero was Ana, Pharah's mum and a new way to disappoint your team. She's a sniper-support class, which on paper sounds quite good; given that most support class heroes can't take more than 3 shots to the face, it makes sense that you would have a support class that can heal from a distance. How this works out, however, is that you snipe enemies and cause damage over a short period of time, or snipe an ally and heal them for a short period of time. Possibly the best example I can think of for why this is perhaps not the best idea is when a Junkrat was requesting healing, but was in the middle of a firefight with a D.va so I couldn't hit him, and my A.O.E heal ability was still on cooldown. In addition to this, she's a sniper with no movement abilities, so she has to pretty much be with the rest of the team anyway. At time of writing, what I'd probably suggest is to maybe increase the amount of aim-assist for allies by a bit, and maybe give her a short jet-boost or climb ability or something to make her viable as an actual sniper. That being said, I also had to play against her a fair bit and based on the skill level of some of the players I had to go up against I'd say that it's entirely possible that either I just suck at her and practice may improve my abilities, or that it's just a very specialised skill-set required to use her well. There's certainly a lot of room for improvement, but what's here now is still reason enough to go back to Overwatch for a bit if you've let it sit idle for the last few weeks.

Moving on to Zenyatta, another healer who experienced some additions in the PTR recently. I'll admit that I'd not played them much before, given that they had the same health as Tracer but with half the speed and because their damage seemed a little underwhelming. In the PTR, however, their health has been upgraded to 200 (50 health, 150 shields) and they've also received a buff to their primary weapon damage. It was enough that I was able to reliably have an even K/D with them, and even when I didn't I was getting the team's gold medal for healing. They're certainly a much more viable choice than they were before, and with a bit more practice I could even see myself using them as my preferred healer. I certainly noticed a few more Zenyatta players than usual, although in spite of this I was unfortunately still unable to convince a team to help me show the enemy the true meaning of tranquility with a full Zenyatta team. Regardless of my inability to debate the merits of one-hero team compositions, it's certainly a positive development.

The last thing I'd like to talk about here is Overwatch's Support class in general. The buffs to Zenyatta and the addition of Ana could not have come soon enough, because it means that Mercy and Lucio are no longer the only supports anyone picks, and as someone that previously default-picked Mercy whenever a healer was needed I'm glad that there are other viable options; that is, options that have decent weapons. It's also good that there are now support characters where saying that they're good doesn't need to then be qualified by the statement "for a support," because it means an increase in the number of people willing to play a support character if necessary, and a boost to the number that might consider doing it voluntarily or as a first choice. The thing with games like Overwatch and TF2, where the success of your team relies on the willingness of your teammates to fill a role and perform that role well, is that the community is just as important as the game itself. A toxic or un-collaborative player base can ruin a good game, but a friendly and co-operative community can save a mediocre or bad one. That's all for this week.

As per usual, anyone with a question, query, rant topic or review suggestion can email them to me at pressxtoreview@gmail.com

-Harry

Press 'X' to Review: Dark Souls | Journal, Part 1

So I recently acquired the Dark Souls: Prepare to Die edition during the Steam Summer Sale, on the basis that I have yet to hear a review about it that hasn't recommended picking it up. From what I could tell looking around the forums, it really is one of those games where everyone you talk to will have a different story and anecdotes of getting literally pounded into the pavement. I wondered for a while if it was the kind of game I should bother reviewing; for starters, it's notoriously ginormous (a quality that, while generally attractive in games, makes it a bit difficult to get through in a week to review. Secondly, everyone already knows that it's good, and reviewing it now would be akin to trying to review Half-Life in the sense that it would be a colossal waste of time. At the end of the day, I decided that I probably should review it given that it was the only game I actually got around to playing this week that I haven't already reviewed, and I didn't want to just do a rant for the second week in a row.

I started off playing Dark Souls with only a minimal amount of knowledge about the actual combat: I'd seen the Zero Punctuation review, which described it as the kind of system where "dodge rolling always works", and I'd watched a let's play of DS3 that was able to confirm that much. I rolled a Pyromancer with the Skeleton Key as my special gift, because none of the other classes seemed to have decent ranged attacks in a game where most enemies are melee-focused, and the other gifts seemed like they wouldn't be much use. After this, I was given a cut-scene that filled me in on the plot so far: the world was apparently ruled by dragons, until 4 beings somehow got their hands on 'Lord Souls', which granted them the supernatural powers necessary to overthrow their dragon overlords (with the help of another dragon that betrayed its own people). Somehow this resulted in the world being trapped in a cycle of ages of Fire and ages of Dark. The end of these ages is heralded by the dead rising from their graves to enjoy the consequent fireworks, which is where the player comes in. As an undead 'Hollow', I was dropped into a locked cell in an asylum with half a sword, because that's apparently what they do with undead people around here.