Bastion beep beep boops today’s Overwatch gameplay preview

Bastion is the focus of the latest Overwatch gameplay preview. Though often described as a powerful defensive character, we see Bastion playing offense on a payload map. There appears to be a good reason for that: it can use its stationary turret form on top of the payload, making it not-so-stationary. Given the enormous amount of damage that form can dish out, Bastion single-handedly shuts down the opposing team’s ability to approach the payload from a direction of its choosing.

The sort of dominance over the battlefield displayed by Bastion hasn’t been seen in previous videos — other characters racked up more kills, but when Bastion is camping atop the payload, no one can even get close. In the video, we saw a few characters try to take advantage of Bastion’s immobility by coming up behind it, but Bastion always answered that by using its ultimate — an even more mobile tank transformation which deals massive damage. And if you manage to get Bastion’s health low, but don’t secure the kill? Well, Bastion can hide for a moment and repair itself. Either Bastion’s opponents in this match weren’t very good at the game, or Bastion is absurd. Bastion’s team went from zero to victory in less than 7 minutes — only Reaper and Tracer‘s gameplay videos were over faster than that.

Beyond Bastion, it’s worth nothing that in every single one of these gameplay videos, our perspective’s player had a Symmetra on their team. Symmetra’s turrets and shields don’t seem to be the gamechanger — it’s her teleporter that’s proving itself to be priceless. Whichever player we watch, offense or defense, their dominance is partially as a result of that teleporter taking them directly back to the front lines. When the opposing team lacks their own Symmetra, they get bulldozed and are unable to recover. Either her teleporter is gamebreaking and needs to be reassessed, or other characters need to be added to the game with similar abilities. Granted, Symmetra does have at least one embarrassing teleporter placement in this particular video, but the point remains.