Overwatch’s Roadhog and Junkrat gameplay previews now available

Overwatch‘s Roadhog and Junkrat, the game’s latest pair of villains, have been officially unveiled. Though we don’t yet have full gameplay trailers for them, we do have a short gameplay teaser, ability previews for both Roadhog and Junkrat, and character pages which provide more background. Roadhog appears to be a bruiser who brings a MOBA archetype to the FPS genre — he utilizes a hook to drag his opponents into close range, much like Stitches, Pudge, and other well-known MOBA bruisers. Of course, all of them owe their hook to Mortal Kombat‘s Scorpion.

Junkrat strikes me as a pyromaniac version of Batman’s The Joker: thin, clown-like, and manic with a twisted sense of humor. In combat, Junkrat utilizes explosions, explosions, and more explosions. His Concussion Mine allows him to both deal damage to enemies and hurtle himself across the map — which has gone poorly at least once, given one of his legs is a prosthetic. His ultimate, RIP-Tire, sends a motorized tire bomb — which he controls — across the map. It can climb over walls and obstacles, and Junkrat can either choose to detonate it on command, or run it straight into someone’s face to explode on its own. When Junkrat dies, he drops a cluster of live grenades.

While these two will no doubt create fun gameplay, I admit I was hoping for villains that were a little more compelling. Overwatch‘s roster of heroes is full of inspiring figures, but its villains are largely a bunch of weirdos — Widowmaker, perhaps, as the only exception. I was hoping for something more sinister and thoughtful — the sort of character you could consider an archvillain, or a direct rival to one of the heroes. Maybe that’s the role Reaper was meant to fill, but if so, I’m not feeling it.