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Blizzard took the mantle of #1 hero shooter from Valve’s Team Fortress 2 in 2016 when they released the best FPS of the 2010s, Overwatch . It’s a game that rewards teamwork (unless your teammates are jerks), and with 31 heroes to choose from, there’s bound to be a character that suits your play style. Yes, it’s had its ups and downs over the years (seems like a lot of downs recently), but that can’t take away the hundreds of hours many have put into this excellent shoo

Overwatch has received a lot of deserved praise and justified criticism for its growing cast of characters, two of which have been confirmed as members of the LGBT community. Tracer, the game’s cover star, is a lesbian whose partner has featured in the universe a number of times, while hardened marine Soldier 76 is also homosexual. This diversity is welcome, and a step above many other games out there, but much of the queer discussion surrounding Overwatch is pushed to the sideli

But for those not planning to pick up the premium battle pass or aren’t already cemented in the Overwatch ecosystem, some new heroes are locked behind progression in ways that actively discourages the experimentation this game is all about. Kiriko – the new fox girl support hero who I am totally not simping for already – is available immediately to premium battle pass holders or existing players of the original Overwatch, while everyone else must grind to Level 55 in order to unlock her. That’s a big time investment for a hero in a hero shooter.

For that reason I know that Kiriko is right up my street, and I’ll be playing her with a passion when launch rolls around, but knowing that potential to experiment is no longer possible unless I decide to grind my life away or make an investment kinda sucks, and takes away the free cadence of content I’d grown used to with the first game. This may be the price to pay for no loot boxes and a modernised progression system, but this feels like a teething pain instead of the game Overwatch 2 really wants to be. Perhaps I’ll be proven wrong and the payoff will be worthwhile, but right now I’m not so sure.

What can be said about Destiny 2 ? It’s the best damn looter-shooter ever made, hands down. It does guns and gunplay better than any other game. Slap on some interesting space magic to keep it interesting, along with thousands of different weapon and part combinations, and Destiny 2 never gets old. New content is being added all the time, and with its recent migration to Steam, the player base is bigger than e

Overwatch skins are nothing more than costumes to dress your favourite characters up in, so it seems silly for someone like me, who only plays rarely and not even as Soldier 76, to care about them so much. But it’s not really about whether the skins look good, whether I’d want them, and whether they’re better or worse than other sets. It’s that Blizzard had the opportunity to embrace the queer culture behind Soldier 76 and Tracer, a culture the company is happy to cater to in only the most minor of ways, and instead ducked it. A skin that was unabashedly queer was an opportunity to reinforce the diversity Blizzard often talks about, but Overwatch deliberately let the opportunity pass

ItsSliker admitted to scamming over $200,000 from his followers for his gambling addiction, sparking platform-wide controversy on Twitch. Gambling has long been a problem for the streaming site, becoming the latest in a long line of ‘metas’, and now several high-profile streamers have called on Twitch to ban them en ma

Meanwhile, the whole meta has stirred up behind-the-scenes drama, with TrainwrecksTV calling out Mizkif for allegedly covering up sexual assault for his friends . Why didn’t he speak up before? It’s a messy situation – calling out gambling is good, but Stacey argues that it takes the right circumstances for streamers to take action, all in the name of good pr

Edgerunners is a new anime set in the world of Cyberpunk 2077, the highly-anticipated game that had an infamously rocky and Overwatch2fans.com officially announced controversial launch. It was losing players and support fast. But this new anime has sparked new life into the game, as it now boasts over a million players a day, and the general conversations around Cyberpunk 2077 have shifted in tone – people seem to be swinging back around to enjoy this gem in the rou

That’s an issue for another day though. Today, I want to focus on the Archives skins, particularly those of our queer characters, Soldier 76 and Tracer. The Archives event is running until April 27, and brings eight new skins to the game, each designed around a given character’s cultural history. Both Soldier 76 and Tracer are included in the event, but it’s extremely telling that neither of their cultural histories includes any reference to queerness. Soldier 76 is becoming Soldier 1776 which, I admit, is a good pun. The American soldier is donning the jacket of the Revolutionaries, these days probably best known from the musical Hamil