A quick look at the Overwatch Christmas update

Blizzard have made somewhat of a habit of putting on special events for holidays (and, well, the Olympic games), and I can only imagine there will be plenty more to come. At this time of year, it’s only fitting that some merry, Christmas themed content be made available, and the Overwatch Winter Wonderland event brings a sleigh-load of it. In the arcade, there’s a special mode for the holiday season. Mei’s Snowball Offensive offers surprisingly tense gameplay, in a permadeath, one hit to kill team deathmatch. Teams will run around the Antarctica map, using their blasters to fling snowballs at opposing players as opposed to the standard freezing spray. Ammo is limited, but you can refill your snowballs by stopping and sucking up piles of snow on the ground. Be careful though, as you can easily get hit and killed during this time! All of Mei’s other abilities are completely functional, her first two work as normal, and can be used to both set up plays and block incoming snowballs. Her ultimate ability changes though, and instead of creating a blizzard, gives you unlimited ammo for a short time. Levels now have Christmas theming too, with snow, trees and presents scattered around. There’s of course a special Winter Loot Box too! Going up a player level during the event will grant you a Winter Loot Box, as opposed to a standard one, and simply logging in for the first time during the event will net you one for free. In fact, getting your first win on each of the modes in arcade, with extra boxes given out for winning even more games! These rewards reset each week too, so make sure to come back and keep playing. But what’s the festive boxes? A lot of really nice stuff actually. There are plenty of special sprays, voice lines, player icons, victory poses, emotes and highlight intros to be had, as well as what is of course the main draw, Winter skins! Not to say the the Halloween skins were bad by any means, but these skins just feel like they’ve had a little more effort put in to them. Particular stand outs are the legendary Santaclad Torbjorn, and the Yeti Wintson, but even the Epic skins are fairly fantastic, and some pretty transformative. Whilst many of the Halloween skins were simply palette swaps, almost all of the Christmas skins really change things up. Pharah gets icicle covered armour, and Roadhog receives a light-up belly button and reindeer antlers. Keep in mind these are the 750 gold skins too, not the 3000 gold ones! I would still argue that 3000 is far too much for a special skin, and perhaps even 2000 would be far more reasonable, but if you really want the skins, by all means buy them, as they really are only here for a limited time.

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