It is quite impressive considering there are so many! It is quite good going through the vast roster and just reading up on the characters. The champions – aside from the few with outside inspiration – are very well designed, each with their own personality and style. The game seems to have a lot less focus on teamwork in the casual game modes with no real incentive to have a good team composition like in Overwatch, but it gives the game more of an arcade feel without the stress of a teammate not playing the champion the team needs, and just having fun. From the handful of champions I have played, there are some that are very easy to pick up and there are more with quite a steep learning curve but can dominate with practice. The smallest group is Support with 8, but the other groups don’t have much more so it is very balanced. It is helped by the different roles they play as the game splits them into Damage, Front Line, Flanker and Support. Now onto the good stuff! The 37 champions are very diverse in the way they play. In most cases it’s not a bad thing since Overwatch is a beautiful game, but when you are competing with them, you want your game to stand out and not be looked form the outside as a clone. It doesn’t help how the art style is very reminiscent of Overwatch. It isn’t such a big deal since escorting a payload isn’t exactly a new concept in gaming but that mixed in with the Overwatch feeling champions makes it feel like an Overwatch clone and not its own game. Team deathmatch is pretty standard but siege – capture an objective and escort the payload. The champions are one thing but the game modes are another team deathmatch, siege and onslaught.
The only difference is his primary weapon being a short-range flamethrower. He is a bruiting knight in shining armour who moves slower than most other champions, has a big shield he can bring out, a charge and a fire strike. The similarities between the two are even more obvious. Another character Fernando, the Reinhardt clone. Androxus for example, the design of the champion is obviously based off Reaper and the weapon has a very McCree feeling with his famous ‘Fan the Hammer’ ability being called Defiance but being practically being the same. Out of the impressive 37 champions, there are more than a handful that seem like Hi-Rez weren’t even trying to cover up the inspiration. People comparing this to Overwatch aren’t wrong – they have very valid points, after all it is a team based objective game with several champions, each with different roles and ultimate abilities. I will get the negatives out of the way first, but don’t let that push you away. With Paladins being the first to come to the Switch, it makes the game stand out more than before.
There are some cases where Overwatch influence is obvious and the overall feel of the game does have a very ‘Overwatch’ feel, but to write it off because it plays like a very loved game is a mistake in my opinion. It makes sense that Overwatch would be the standard for the MMOFPS genre, so when Paladins was announced from Smite developer, Hi-Rez Studios, the world called it an Overwatch clone. In a world where a new battle royale game is announced every month, on game goes on without being effected by the surge of the royale genre – Overwatch.
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