Morning, there. To cut the fluff, I tried out the Overwatch open beta last night and basically here's my thoughts on it.

Pros:
Everything looks nice visually
Characters are simple and intuitive to use

Cons:
The rest, basically

But, to clarify.

First off, the game has some balance and design decisions that range from questionable to outright confusing. Just for sake of example, let's just say "you can build turrets on the payload objective" and leave it at that. It turns the "attack/defense" mode into "the defending team trying their best to assault a mobile fortress," and it's really kinda dumb.

Second, it really honestly feels like a lot of the characters simply weren't balanced with team gameplay in mind. For example, there's Reinhardt, who can toss up a shield basically at will that covers his front, extends to his sides generously to cover teammates, and has approximately an entire team's worth of health, which it regenerates reasonably fast when not in use. By itself this isn't a problem; he's a slow melee character, but at least he can sponge damage in a firefight.

When teammates are in play, though, he can hide his entire team behind a shield that has more health than all of them put together, and they can shoot through it. It seems like there's basically nothing that can get through the shield. You can flank him or attack from above since the shield is frontal, but that leaves you open to being ripped to shreds by his teammates. Icing on the cake, the shield shows no visible signs of damage, so you have no indication of whether you should go ahead and press the attack, or just regroup with your team.

These things wouldn't be a huge deal if the game had just now kinda released. However... Overwatch has been in closed beta for what, a YEAR? And all this junk is stuff that I saw streamers and Youtubers complaining about from pretty much day one. It's ridiculous, and it honestly seems to me like all they've done since the very start of the closed beta as far as updates is just fix up the visuals.

Also, the characters just... do not have personality. They definitely -look- like they have personalities, but it doesn't come through in their dialogue. From what I've seen you can pretty much sort them into three camps: fountains of puns, heartless assassins, and Bastion (he beeps and whistles and somehow has more personality than the other two groups put together). There's some exceptions, but for the most part the visual charm of the game starts falling flat when the characters start talking.

The last problem I have with it, and one that's super unlikely to change regardless of patches honestly, is that the skill ceiling of the game is incredibly low. Like I mentioned earlier, everything is really polished and feels nice to do, but at the same time it's like... you don't have to learn how to do anything. There's nothing to mechanically get good at, really, aside from "aiming." There's not really trick shots to pull off, no particular mobility tricks beyond "press the button for your mobility skill," et cetera. Obviously the game is built more around team coordination than individual skill, but from what I experienced there's really no sense of "getting good," which kinda leaves the whole thing unsatisfying to me. It's nice for there to be at least some aspect of the game that requires mechanical skill, or a little bit of timing, etc.

Overall like... I honestly had low expectations. The game's been in beta for, again, a damn year. There's been enough Youtube content for it for me to get actually bored with the game before it's even out. When trying the free beta, I was expecting "overhyped and disappointing."

I wasn't expecting it to be actually bad.