Overwatch Gameplay Trailer Introduces Hanzo The Archer

One of the characters that has managed to stand out from the bunch in Blizzard's Overwatch is Hanzo, the Japanese archer. With bow in hand and the ability to scale walls and take a perch up high to snipe silently from many hidden places scattered around the game arena. You can see him in action below, courtesy of GamesPrey HD.

Hanzo is a mid-to-long range specialist using his bow and arrow to dispatch enemies from afar and doing so silently. He's one of the rare characters on the Overwatch roster whose drawbacks are diminished in the face of his skills and zoning capabilities.

His major special, for instance, allows him to shoot through walls and have a dragon specter attack foes. Again, since you can't tell when he's using his specials and there's nothing telegraphed in his end, this makes Hanzo especially dangerous when you can get atop a location unseen and rain down terror with the special.

Additionally, Hanzo has a buff that allows him to track enemies through walls briefly, making him perfect for utilizing subversive tactics to overthrow enemies from behind.

Given that Hanzo's arrows only do major damage when charged and they require a bit more aiming skill to nail moving targets, this definitely makes him a harder character to play than McCree as far as learning curves go, but at the same time this makes him a far more dangerous and capable character than his gun-totting counterpart.

Added to this, Hanzo is one of the only few characters who scale to high places in Overwatch, making him keen for getting the drop on opponents time and time over again. We've seen this tactic applied rather frequently in a previous video where Mercy, the healer, was attempting to keep teammates healed but was constantly being killed by an opposing player using Hanzo. That kind of lets you know just how badass a character is when they're constantly stealing the spotlight during another character's preview video.

In this video we also get to see how Mercy and Hanzo work well together, despite him constantly having to stay on the move. So long as he's not directly engaging opponents head-on he seems to do quite well, but it's pretty obvious that in a one-on-one firefight on the ground or in a tight corridor, characters like Reaper, Tracer or Zenyatta can take him down pretty quickly. At a distance, however, Hanzo has a clear advantage when he can move about the stage and lay down the law silently and stealthily.

Overwatch is slowly being hyped up as the beta quickly approaches, and Blizzard is doing a fine job of keeping gamers talking about the characters and content by frequently releasing videos. Right now I would say that Overwatch definitely has more positive chatter going for it than Gearbox Software's Battleborn.