'Overwatch' Tips and Tricks To Help You Be The Best Robot, Monkey, Ninja You Can Be

If you haven’t been playing the Overwatch beta, you’ve been really missing out. The character shooter has been taking the internet by storm ever since the Closed Beta launched and now players are starting to see why. It’s fun, it’s fast, it’s colorful, it’s Overwatch . Most modern shooters are dark and gritty and have a space marine shooting other dark and gritty enemies. In the field of bland that is modern AAA games, Overwatch stands out. It helps that its main competitor, Battleborn, isn’t doing so well with reviewers .

This is the first shooter I’ve played since Bioshock (the first one, not Infinite ) so I’m a bit rusty when it comes to aiming, running and shooting. Since the Beta on the Xbox One launched on Monday, I’ve been playing non-stop to improve. I’ve managed to come up with a list of some sure-fire tactics to help even the biggest newbie get better at Overwatch.

• It may be a shooter on the outside, but Overwatch is all about objective control. Kills help you gain an upper hand in controlling parts of the map but they will not win you the game. If you have the chance to push your payload forward or kill that Reinhardt that’s just taunting you, it might be better to help your car move.
• For the love of everything, stop wasting your ultimates. You see that little circle in the lower part of your screen that fills up when you fight? When it hits 100 percent don’t just use it to use it. When you are new to the game, these abilities can help you kill enemies way more efficiently than your normal gun. If you are playing McCree, you wait for that meter to fill up and live out your one-shot, one-kill fantasies. That goes double for Reaper, Genji or any of the other heroes with game-changing abilities.
• Don’t just stick to one champion. The best part about Overwatch is that unlike other games, like League of Legends , you aren’t stuck with one character for the entirety of a match. Switch out as many times as you like, especially if you are just trying out. Roadhog is nothing like Tracer, who’s nothing like Soldier 76. Experiment, just because you’ve been playing snipers in every other FPS doesn’t mean that you’ll like Widowmaker the most.
• Getting cool cosmetic goodies in Overwatch requires patience and a lot of dumb luck. Every skin, emote; player icon, tag and voice line comes from a Loot Box. These are obtained by leveling up your account, though other ways will be added when the game goes live on May 24. Different colors mean different rarities; blue is rare, purple is epic and orange is legendary (exactly like Hearthstone. ) I’ve opened about 12 and already gotten two legendary skins, but some of my other friends have just gotten Reaper color tweaks.
• All the progress you make in the Beta will not move over when the game goes live. If you want to grind for grindings sake, just so you don’t have to do it later, don’t bother. Every piece of loot and cool achievement will disappear by week’s end.

Finally, please don’t be so try hard. It’s a game in Beta and some of us are just trying to have a little fun. I will never get used to be doing told that I am a waste of life by a 12-year-old with a Midwestern accent, especially when my account is still level eight.

Good luck out there fellow Overwatch members, remember these simple tips and you might actually have some fun.