Skip to main content

Overwatch: Widowmaker Stars In Animated Short, Alive

I've just been watching the latest Overwatch [official site] animated short, Alive. It's the second of Blizzard's trailers which give you a smidge more backstory on the characters from their first-person shooter.

This one focuses on the assassin, Widowmaker, as she attempts to assassinate a leader preaching peace between robots and humans. Timeshifter, Tracer, has a secondary role – you can take a peek below:

Watch on YouTube

Ignore the Playstation branding - it's for PC as well, it just has PS all over it because, I guess, marketing budgets and platform awareness-building etc etc etc...

If you ask me - and I am going to assume you did - it's not as good as the Winston one. I think the main thing for me is that the dialogue is pretty hokey ALTHOUGH I did see that someone has made a version of the trailer where the opening and closing monologues are in French which I liked:

Watch on YouTube

The other thing I just want to raise right now is that I don't really get why Widowmaker has been given the femme fatale styling.

Like, that whole femme fatale thing is about being all alluring and sexy, attracting people and then killing them, right? And yet she's the snipiest sniper in the game. She stands the furthest away from people of the entire cast and shoots them in the head, sometimes without them even seeing her. Who could she possibly be alluring? Are her opponents all Binoculars People from a Binoculars Planet? And they just spend their lives looking at leggy, catsuited women from miles away and are so captivated they ignore the fact she's got a gun aimed at their faces which they would also be able to see through the binoculars?

Read this next

Philippa Warr: Pip wrote for Rock Paper Shotgun between 2014-2017, covering everything from MOBAs, hero brawlers and indie curios. She also had a keen interest in the artistry of video game creation, and was very partial to keeping us informed of the latest developments in British TV show Casualty.
View comments (45)
In this article

Overwatch

PS4, Xbox One, PC, Nintendo Switch

Related topics

Rock Paper Shotgun is better when you sign in

Sign in and join us on our journey to discover strange and compelling PC games.

A line drawing of a cartoon planet with a smiley face, surrounded by a couple of stars and a ring.