Overwatch‘s annual April Fools’ mode Underwatch is here, and the character kit changes are easily among the best seasonal gags in the game’s almost decade-long history. So much so that I kinda wish most of them were permanent, or at least existed in a semi-regular arcade mode.
Take Cassidy’s new skill, for example. When you emote “hello,” he normally does finger guns. In Underwatch, he does finger guns and fires a piercing bullet that causes bleed damage. It’s like his Silver Bullet perk, only there’s no cooldown timer, a fact my teammates quickly became acquainted with when I clogged the message system with enough “hello”s to temporarily disable system text. Sorry (not really). Junker Queen’s gun shoots knives in Underwatch, which is incredibly on-brand for her and, since they count as projectiles, a steep challenge for a player trying to gauge their trajectory. Or it would’ve been, if Queen hadn’t slayed too hard, tanked everyone’s framerates, and been taken out of the mode.
Breaking the game aside, what makes this year’s April Fools’ kits so good is that they follow the rules of telling a good joke, leaning into the familiar and juxtaposing it with something completely ridiculous. What if Freja couldn’t move except by using her abilities? What if Pharah, the jetpack human, had no jetpack, but gained movement buffs under certain conditions? The answer is that after a few self-knockbacks from her Concussive Blast, she’s hitting the skybox with every jump and moving at about 75mph. Swapping Mei to the tank role removes all confusion about why she never dies anyway, Blizzard said in the patch notes. (Au contraire, Blizzard; Mei dies a lot when I’m playing her, no matter the circumstances.)
