Here’s a fun little exercise: type “game of the year 2016” into Google, and see what you get. I’ll bet you dollars to donuts that Overwatch is at the top of yo𝓀ur list, and for any link you click it’s either in the top 5 or at least honourably mentioned.

Sweet! Now you🤡 owe me donuts. Please m🌼ail said donuts to P.O. Box 1230, Station- hm? Oh.

Mꦕy editor has informed me I am not allowed to gamble with our readership for donuts. Spoils𝓡port.

Anyway, play for five minutes and it’s not hard to see why Overwatch is the game of 2016. It’s fast, it’s frenetic, it’s fun. Its got bright, vibrant colours, a bea♊utiful and memorable musical score, and charm oozing out of every pixel. Each character has a unique voice and a set of powerful abilities, and all of it comes together in a package so neat and tidy it goes way beyond the sum of its parts.

I’m not saying that Overwatch is perfect - far from it! When a game gets this huge its faults stick out like a sore thumb, making it easy to point out and criticize. Lucky for us, Overwatch is made by one of the biggest names in the biz. Blizzard Entertainment has made it their mission to make Overwatch the best multiplayer experience around, and so✤ far it's🥃 working.

Here’s🦹 what we love and what we hate about 201🍬6’s game of the year.

15 BEST: Hardware Optimization

Creating a game that works 🌌on any old piece of hardware is just good business sense, since it maximizes your potential customer base. That’s been Blizzard’s modus operandi from the very beginning. Games like StarCraft and World of Warcraft may look a little plain when compared to other gamꦫes of the era, but anybody can play them.

Blizzard has found a hidden benefit with optimizing their games for the lower end specs; it actually makes the games perform better on higher end sy♔stems.

Speaking at the Game Developer’s Conference held earlier this year, Blizzard senior software engineer Ryan Greene said, "We fouඣnd that optimizing for the minspec yielded really good gains on the high end and on console."

Overwatch will still be eminently pla꧒yable on a laptop with integrated gr✤aphics, but it’ll also look amazing with a dedicated and modern GPU.

14 WORST: Roadhog’s Hook

Overwatch has struggled with Roadhog’s hook since the very beginning. Getting hooked often meant a one-shot kill, something that very few heroes received outside of ultimate abilities. Nobody likes getting one-shotted (just ask Widowmaker and Hanzo mains how popular they are at parties). What really♏ pissed players off, though, was that kill replays would often make it seem like Roadhog was outright cheating, by being able to hook players through objects or walls that would norm🐈ally be impassable.

Blizzard’s argument was that the hit detection was done on the Roadhog player’s side, and sometimes latency would cause things to look wonky on the victim’s side during a replay. That wasn’t good enough to silence the complaints, though. Adding more line of sight checks was one solution, however certain speedy characters like Tracer or Genji could be hooked while zipping around a corner, breaking the hook and returning the character to where they were originally.🐈 This caused Roadhog-players to coওmplain, which lead Blizzard to add a slow effect to the hook so that hooked players couldn’t just break line of sight to avoid a face full of scrap.

Rig🐲ht now there seems to be an uneasy peace, but we’re just a patch awaꦿy from an all out, pork-fueled flame war.

13 BEST: The Future Ain’t So Bad

I can’t tell you how many games - and especially first person shooters - paint the future as horribly dangerous, or depressing, or both. Overwatch doesn’t do that. Instead, it shows the future as ಌwhat you might expect; it has its fair share of hardships, but generally things are better than they were. In other words, there’s a ray of hope.

You only need to look at the cast to get a sense that world is in a better place in Overwatch. There are equal ꧋numbers of men and women, showing gender equality has been reached (there’s even gender equality among robots - one male, one female, and one Bastion). The characters hail from all over the world and it really seems that race and the colour of your skin are complete non-issues. There’s even a talking monkey! How much more diverse can you get?!

Sorry Winston- gorilla, I meant to say gorilla.

12 WORST: Loot Box Fatigue

One of the many awesome things in Overwatch is loot boxes. Loot boxes are how you unlock customizations for your characters, like skins, emotes, or sprays. Whenever you gain enough experience to level up, or during special events, you get a loot box. It’s like Christmas all the ti𒁏me!

The problem is it’♔s all random, with certain itemsꦡ being rarer than others, and simply obtaining one item doesn’t remove it from the pool of possible rewards. Starting off, everything is new and exciting as every loot box brings shiny new toys to play with. After level 100 or so you’ll start to notice you’re getting more duplicates than not. By level 200, anything new is cause for celebration.

Getting duplicates does gi𒀰ve you gold which can then be exchanged for new items, but it’s a paltry amount, making unlocking new content feel like a grind. The issue of duplicates is not unknown to Blizzard, who have seen the amount of people paying real money for loot boxes also drop off. Time will tell what they do to fix the problem, but for now it’s still there, and it still sucks.

11 BEST: Overwatch World Cup

Right along with the spirit of diversity featured in-game is the Overwatch World Cup. In the same vein as the Olympics, the top teams from nations across the globe duke it ou༒t for global sꦜupremacy.

Okay, that’s 🌸a little more violent than the Olympics typically are, but there’s going to be a podium and medals, so I’m going to let t🦩he comparison stand.

The qualifying period is c now, where the top 100 players from each country have their skill ratings averaged, and the 32 countries with the highest average score will be selected to compete in the regional finals. From there, each finalist country will then needꦉ to ♉select a team of players to compete based on votes from the fans. Once those players are selected, the regional finals begin, and the top finishers will move on to the World Cup and a chance for glory.

As a Canadian myself, hopefully Canada does a little better this year th🦹an last.

10 WORST: The Salt

As is so often the case in competitive games, it can sometimes be hard to check your emotions at the door. If you play Overwatch competitively for any length of time you’ll event🍎ually come across one player (or at least, hopefully only one player) who ignores the objective, curses the Mercy player for not healing, and just generally is a total douch🗹ebag.

You’ll lose, and it’ll be all his or her fault, and that feeling that comes up in your throat - t🌟o shout this guy down for being a complete poser - is called salt. You must never give in to the salt. You must rise above it, much like Zenyatta has, as an enlightened being above such petty squabbles.

But I swear to god, if that Genji runs off the point one more time I’m 👍gunna kill hi🤡m.

9 BEST: Play of the Game

When it comes to competitive gaming, there has always been this problem where you’d often make an amazing play, but nobody other than yourself ever gets to see how truly awesome it was. With Overwatch, that’s all changed ꦰwith the introduction of the Play of the Game.

When you make an amazing play, the game will actually keep track and record it, then play it back when the game ends. It’s just like a highlight reel in competitive sports, only it’s shown to everyone in the game you just played with. And I have to say, there’s no better feeling in the world. You can be complete garbage at Overwatch, but making that one killer play to get Play o൩f the Game… I swear it’s💯 better than sex.

On top of that, the formula the computer uses to recognize 🎀the Play of the Game isn’t perfect, and when it screws up it can be pretty hilarious. Like Torbjorn’s POTG here.

That is some real skill.

8 WORST: No Single Player Mode

Overwatch is an online, multiplayer game. These games can be a lot of fun, but as we have seen with our previous entry to the list, sometimes people can be jerks and I’d rather play by myself. Overwatch does have a versus AI mode where you ca💙n team up to beat on a bunch of bots, but they can be kind of trivial and unsatisfying 😼to play against.

There’s been a lot of speculation that Blizzard may one day implement a single player campaign to kind of tie together all these disparate story elements into one cohesive narrative, but those rumors have been going on for nearly as long as the game’s existence. I🐽 wouldn’t hold your breath.

7 BEST: Character Balancing

Another of Overwatch’s high points is how they’ve managed to make a diverse cas𓆏t of characters, each with unique and powerful abilities, and still have e💟verything feel like a level playing field. While there’s always going to be certain heroes that perform better against certain opponents, there’s a real sense that you’re never helpless and any character can perform well in the right hands.

On the back end, the game’s developers also closely monitor hero performance at all levels of play, and if they see one particular hero start to produce higher numbers than anyone else, they’ll be sure to address than in an upcoming patch. There have been numerous patches over the months since Overwatch’s release, and each one has either buffed a character to feel as powerful as everyone else, or has nerfed a hero to b🥂ring it back in line to the rest of the cast.

Except for a few 🔯times, bu💛t we’ll get to that later.

6 WORST: Bastion Meta

There’s a saying among Overwatch competitive players - to get out of the lower tiers, you gotta🎐 learn how to kill Bastion. When in turret-form Bastion can lay out a withering hail of fire that can destroy any hero, tank or otherwise. But as a turret, Bastion is also vulnerable since he’s stationary, and most heroes have an option for killing a stationary target.

In the early days of Overwatch, Bastion was nev꧟er seen in high level competitive games since most skilled players had already learned how to defeat Bastion. Blizzard then decided to buff Bastion to the point where he was a viable choice, but took things a little too far. A dark period known as the Bastion Meta was born, where every payload would have a Bastion riding shotgun, mowing down♛ helpless players with impunity.

They have since nerfed him back down, caus🅷ing some to believe﷽ the scourge might be over, but Bastion's beep-boop still strikes terror into the hearts of every Overwatch player.