One of the most anticipated characters to arrive on the wildly popular Blizzard first-person shooter game, Overwatch, came out yesterday. In the most dramatic single update the game has seen, gamers finally get the opportunity to play as the Sombra. The latest hero to the game, Sombra has been teased to the Overwatch community for months prior to her unveiling at Blizzcon earlier this month. For months, cryptic clues and leaks floated around blogs, and its official ARG seemed to never quite reveal when the character would be coming out. But Blizzard finally revealed her to fans during their annual convention and now gamers can jump into play as the anticipated character. After about week of public testing, Sombra came out yesterday across all platforms (PC, PS4, Xbox One), with the 1.5 update according to Kotaku.
The Mexican hacker known as Sombra will add a new layer of mechanics to the mix, which can dispel enemy shield, shut down their abilities, and make it generally more difficult for people to embed themselves in a defensive position. This proves quite troubling for any Reinhardt, Torbjörn, or Lúcio because she will essentially take away their principle form of defense. Blizzard released another animated short featuring Sombra, as well as those staples of the Overwatch universe Widwomaker and Reaper. Below is the clip:
PlayOverwatch also released this 2D animation, which covers the story behind Sombra’s orgigins:
Sombra is an offensive type hero, which means she’ll join the likes of Soldier 76, Genji, and Tracer in a cluster of heroes that pose a high-damage and high-mobility threat. She’s an infiltrator who can temporarily become invisible, teleport to a beacon, disable enemy shields with EMP blasts and hack both health kits as well as Torbjörn’s turrents.
Although Sombra vastly overshadows this new update, there are many other additions Blizzard made. This includes adding 3v1 and 1v1 dueling modes to a new map, Ecopoint: Antarctica, which is the frozen base where Mei first found herself cryogenically frozen. There’s also an arcade mode that will rotate maps. The update has also made some technical upgrades for the PS4 Pro support.
There are several rumors that are floating around claiming that there are a couple more heroes in the works for 2017, but as of yet, there’s nothing official from Blizzard. But given how much excitement both Ana and Sombra generated, it’s safe to say that any new heroes to the game will likely create more hype.