Overwatch has risen quickly in popularity since it was first released (though it was already popular and hyped up even during the pre-release beta), with well thought out and finely tuned gameplay, a developed universe and interesting and cool-looking characters. It stands as a great example of how multi-player competitive games can be so much fun and influential to the world of gaming.
Part of the reason Overwatch has been able to stay in the limelight is also due to how it always reveals something new, whether that be new features or characters. And this time at Blizzcon a new character, one that fans have been waiting a while to see, was finally officially revealed.
While Sombra has been known to fans for quite a while, she wasn’t officially revealed until Blizzcon 2016. In fact, she was already being developed before the release of the game. During this long development process, her character and abilities went through significant changes. While she was always meant to be a hacker she was originally going to double as a ninja of sorts, a feature that would later be given to two other characters (Hanzo and Genji).
Because of this, Sombra was put back and reworked through all these months, but that didn’t stop the developers from putting allusions to her in the game, whether it’d be Easter eggs about her or characters mentioning her.
This all culminated a few months back when the last announced character, Ana, was first revealed. Her information was leaked by Sombra herself. This was the first of many puzzle games that would later be known as the Sombra ARG (Alternate Reality Game) where Sombra, ever the troublemaker, would interact with fans and drop hints or have them play puzzles in order to find out more information about her.
This went on for months (a lot more than it should’ve for some fans) which ended up causing the whole experience to become tedious as she came up with more and more puzzles, each one just as intricate as the last, without any word from Blizzard on when she’d be added to the game.
However all of this, finally, changed yesterday when Sombra was given the chance to be played at this year’s Blizzcon, allowing anyone attending to get a chance to test out this bad-ass Mexican hacker in all her (fabulously intricate) glory.
In the game, Sombra is a hacker originating from Dorado, a city located in Mexico. Any information on her background is unknown, even her name, with the exception of the fact that she was a hacker since her youth, breaking the security of anyone and anything (This chick’s got moves!) and selling it to the highest bidder, all for her own enjoyment. She even aided a gang called Los Muertos in their attempts to take over the Mexican government.
She continued living like this until she became mixed up in a global web of conspiracies, causing her to finally be found out. This slip up led to her discarding her old life and becoming Sombra (I think every teenager goes through this phase at some point) as well as joining the terrorist group Talon, of which Overwatch’s other villain characters like Reaper and Widowmaker are a part of.
And so she’s been using her conniving and sneaky tactics as well as her top notch hacking skills to aid the organization ever since.
Blizzard also released a new short film titled “Infiltration” (people are still waiting on a full-length feature film with how good these are) detailing one of Talon’s missions in which Sombra helps infiltrate a Russian compound and targets a very important business tycoon. The video does good work of showing both Sombra’s abilities and also who she is as a character.
Right now she strikes as the playful and sarcastic type, always doing things that seem like they are just done for her own amusement but secretly form a part of some plan she wants to carry out. The video itself doesn’t reveal much about Sombra’s own goals but she certainly seems to be a character that stands by her own rules, even outside of her mission with Talon.
But of course, Sombra is, above all, a character in the game, even though her personality stands out a lot more, and along with the trailer and the short film, Blizzard also revealed all of the details on Sombra’s abilities and equipment in the game.
Needless to say… a lot of people are going to be very upset when facing a well-played Sombra. Her character’s main skill is the ability to hack other character’s abilities as well as render their health kits useless, essentially getting rid of them, this means that players can incapacitate others heavily, especially if she’s put together with Ana (who can get rid of healing) and Mei (who can freeze other characters and prevent them from moving).
But this magnificent hacker wouldn’t be complete with just that. Sombra can also detect critically injured enemies through walls, and can turn invisible, which in turn increases her speed for a while (though this can be disabled if she’s hit by an attack).
She can also jump around in the stage through the use of her translocators that allow her to warp around wherever she stations them and finally she can break through any barriers and shields with the help of an EMP bomb that also lets her hack into anyone that gets stuck in the radius.
It’s easy to see that Sombra comes with quite the arsenal and you can be sure that it won’t be long before players have all kinds of opinion about her character and how it affects the game. Of course this all also makes her fun to play and changes things around in the game, stopping it from getting predictable or stale.
Sombra was released to the PTR (Public Test Region) on November 7th, where players will be able to test her out and give their thoughts on the character. As stated before, it’ll remain to be seen how Sombra influences the game once she’s released but there’s no mistake in saying that she’s a wonderful addition to the game.