Keep Rollin’
Last year I took a break from Overwatch. I was too close to the rabbit hole and had to step away. At the time a friend of mine was job seeking, and watching his stats go through the roof scared me into going cold turkey. I recently started playing again and the first thing I noticed were the new heroes. Scanning through the line up, there was one who stuck out: Wrecking Ball.
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Wrecking Ball appeared in the Public Test Region late in late June 2018, rolling into general rotation on the 14th of July. But even during development he was a divisive figure. Reception of the genetically modified rodent has been mixed. His agility makes him a good option for getting behind enemy shields, and he is quick to get across a map, but for a tank his firepower is light and in the hands of less skilled players he’s a griefer: tethering him to a control point and whirling around spamming out damage has become a standard, yet strangely satisfying, tactic. Overall though he is proving relatively popular, currently sitting around half way in the usage stats. Not bad for someone one forum user described as a “fat Genji”.
Even by the standards of Overwatch lore, Wrecking Ball’s back story is far fetched. Jeff Kaplan stated it’s unlikely there will be another character as odd as the hamster. For some his back story pushed the boundary too far, but picking apart the Overwatch universe in this way is missing the point: if you can’t enjoy a hyper-intelligent hamster who escaped his captors, hitched a ride back from the moon and made his fortune as an arena battler in the outback, then you should probably go and play Battlefield. As long as we agree we’re not calling him Hammond.
