I have been playing a lotof Star Wars Zero Company this week, and for all the things it does very well–most of which we’ll probably get to over the next week or two–there’s only one thing that is so good it made me literally hoot out loud at my computer screen.
That thing, as XCOMlovers will have worked out already from the headline, is Overwatch. If you’ve never played those games (or any of the many other tactics games that use a similar system with a similar name), Overwatch is where you sacrifice a small amount of your current turn’s action points in order to direct a unit to cover a certain part of the map with their gun, and if an enemy unit enters that part of the map (usually depicted as a cone of vision) during theirturn then your unit will shoot at it.
“But why not just shoot at it in your turn?” someone who hasn’t played any of these games might be asking, to which I’ll say, “Great question! Here’s why”. You see, in turn-based tactics games, cover is usually a big deal. If you shoot at an enemy unit while they’re hunkered down behind some crates, or around a corner and out of sight, you’re wasting your turn (and some bullets) on a target you’re very unlikely to hit.
If you wait until you can catch them moving during their turn, though, you’ve got them dead to rights. An enemy unit running across an Overwatch cone has their weapon down, their gaze focused elsewhere and are usually completely out of cover. They’re like First World War soldiers trying to cross No Man’s Land, they’re like lambs being led to slaughter, they’re like rubes getting shot to hell because they walked directly into my trap.
Overwatch rules because while nothing has materially changed in terms of outcome of a battle if you use it–you’ve shot at and killed some enemies, same as you would have otherwise–the way it’s packaged makes you feel like the smartest guy in the room. Like someone who would say in a very whiny voice “You fool, you idiots, you had perfectly good cover! Now you’ve met your end because of my deviousplan!”
Zero Company also very smartly continues the XCOMtradition of telling the player that when enemy reinforcements are on the way, they will be coming from thisexact spot on the map, and so if you as the player decide to setup multiple overlapping Overwatch fields across that spawnpoint, and a group of enemies show up and the first thing they do is walk into a hail of blaster fire that makes you jump up and down in your seat clapping, then that’s just a thing that’s going to happen in this video game. A lot.
I just can’t stress enough how good Overwatch makes you feel. You get to set it up down to the most minute detail, arranging every arc of fire down to the last degree and likely percentage of landing a shot, and so there’s a huge sense of ownership of the end result. Even if you interrogate your own heart and realise that deep down you know the enemy is approaching clustered like this on purpose, and that the AI is designed at points to run straight into Overwatch just to make you feel good, and that you have been doing this for over a decade now across many turn-based tactics games, none of that matters. The fun never wears off.
It’s a perfect game mechanic. It’s theperfect game mechanic, a sublime mixture of work and reward, of feedback and subversion of the norm, and both XCOMand now Zero Company know it, because beyond just the tactical enjoyment of getting some cheap kills (in a game where kills can otherwise be harder to come by!) many Overwatch sequences are treated to badass, over-the-shoulder cinematic cutscenes, like showing your sniper snapping her laser rifle up and firing off a shot that traces directly into a Battle Droid’s skull.
So the next time I see someone trying to tell me that themost fun you can have in a video game is parrying, or drifting around a corner, orbeating some kind of elaborate Soulsboss, all I’m going to think is “yeah man, those things are fun I guess, but it’s also clear you’ve never put two heavy gunners on Overwatch and seen them mow down an entire enemy squad while it wasn’t even your turn, now thatis some good shit”.
