While everyone is overwhelmingly excited (and rightly so) for The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild and Horizon: Zero Dawn, I am losing my mind over the announcement of a brand new Overwatch hero. Blizzard has been teasing the release of a brand new hero for its competitive multiplayer shooter for several days now. On Thursday morning, Blizzard finally revealed its twenty-fourth hero, Orisa, who appears to be some sort of robotic lady centaur robot, a.k.a. everything I never knew that I was missing in my life.
Unlike the robots of Rick and Morty, Orisa’s primary function isn’t to pass butter, but rather to provide protection to her teammates. Billed as a “mechanical peacekeeper,” Orisa is a quadrupedal robotic tank that, according to the in-game lore, was created by eleven-year-old child prodigy Efi Oladele in the wake of the Omnic Crisis, the robotic uprising that pit humans against deadly murderbots. You can get a better idea of Orisa’s backstory in the video above.
Orisa is meant to serve as an anchor around which the team can build itself. With a fusion-powered machine gun as her primary weapon and array of powers that will power up teammates abilities, Orisa seems to be an interesting hybrid of Reinhardt, Zarya, and Mercy to a certain extent. Her Fortify ability provides instant damage reduction that will provide extra survivability from those pesky DPS characters; Halt functions like a low-grade version of Zarya’s Graviton Surge, slowing nearby enemies and pulling them together toward a central point; Protective Barrier places a stationary shield from which you and your allies can seek cover; and her ultimate ability, Supercharger, provides a damage boost to all allies who are within its line of sight. In short, Orisa is a highly versatile tank character and a great, more defense-oriented alternative to Reinhardt for lineups looking for a beefy, damage-soaking warrior around which to form.
Orisa is playable right now on the PTR (Pubic Test Realm) server . Overwatch game director also provided an in-depth developer commentary that better explains Orisa’s functionality and how she will gel with teams in a video, which you can watch below:
Unfortunately, Orisa is not yet playable on the console version of the game, but hopefully the shortened timetable of this hero’s reveal means that Orisa will become playable sooner than Sombra did. In the meantime, let’s start speculating on when Terry Crews as Doomfist will finally be revealed.
What do you think of Orisa? What other heroes would you like to see added to Overwatch? Let us know in the comments below.
Image: Blizzard
Dan Casey is the senior editor of Nerdist and the author of books about Star Wars and the Avengers. Follow him on Twitter (@Osteoferocious).
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