That's What's Up: Every Overwatch Character Ranked From Worst To Best

I'll be honest: I don't really get Road Hog. By all rights, he should be a comedy character, or at least the straight man to Junkrat's trashy antics, which is how he's often portrayed in media made by fans. In the game, though, he's taken way too seriously, trundling around growling nonsense like "life is pain, and so is death" and "I'm a one-man apocalypse."

That's pretty big talk for a dude who has a tattoo of a cartoon pig on his tummy.

Doomfist isn't a bad character, but he is a uniquely frustrating one. Like, my dude's name is Doomfist, and his primary characteristic is his gigantic metal arm. You know, the Doomfist? And yet, if you do a melee attack with that guy, he punches you with his other hand. Get it together and hit people with the big one! That's what it's there for! His name ain't Regularfist, people!

Zenyatta is actually a really cool idea, taking the question of sentient robotics to its logical conclusion. He's rooted in the exploration of whether sentience also includes a soul, and what it means for an artificial life form to seek enlightenment and a higher form of existence. Unfortunately, these are all questions that feel like they're never going to be explored in a game that's primarily about shooting people until the payload gets to where you want it.

Don't get me wrong, Sombra is extremely cool. Her powers, origin story, even her hair are totally on point, and shutting down enemy powers adds an exciting twist to gameplay. But you know what she's not as cool as? Literally any main character from 1995's Hackers, starring Angelina Jolie as Acid Burn and Jonny Lee Miller as Crash Override. Even Blizzard knows that — they gave her "hack the planet" as a voice line! If you can honestly tell me that it's not at least a little disappointing that cyberpunk aesthetics and names hit their apex about 23 years ago, then I will be happy to move Sombra to a slightly higher spot on the list, but here we are.

One of the best things about Overwatch is that the company that's still making endless amounts of money with World of Warcraft made a sci-fi game set 80 years in the future but were also like "hey, don't worry, it's still going to have dwarves and night elves in it." I'm honestly surprised we haven't gotten an orc yet. Emphasis on "yet."

Torbjorn does a better job translating fantasy ideas to the future than some, and his guilt over his partial responsibility for the Omnic crisis is a good underlying character motivation. That said, that one beardless "Young Torbjorn" skin is viscerally upsetting to me, and that victory pose where he's got a photo album featuring pictures of the turret is pretty weird now that we know he has an actual human daughter.

There's a moment in xXx: The Return of Xander Cage when Vin Diesel puts together a team of extreme sports commandos that includes a sniper who hunts poachers, an indestructible wheelman, and, no joke, a DJ whose military specialty is that he can "get the party started." This is amazing writing, because it means that they keep having to get into situations in which having a DJ around can give them a tactical advantage.

Lucio is that, but he also has rollerblades, and I honestly cannot tell if that makes him better or worse.

Soldier 76 is the most straightforwardly superheroic character on the entire roster, to the point where he's basically the answer to "What if Captain America Became the Punisher?" and literally has his origins as a comic book character. He's well-rounded and one of the easiest to get the hang of playing, with a cool design, a compellingly dramatic backstory, and even a slight action-hero sense of humor to break things up.

Unfortunately, all of those things also seem make him seem pretty boring when he's standing there next to French Night Elf Ballerina Assassin or An Actual Angel with a Gun. He's great, but in this context, he's not that exciting.

Here's the thing about lists like this: most people only care about who ranks first and who comes in last. The middle tends to dissolve into this big blur where whatever you're ranking is only defined by its relationship to everything else. That's why you never hear people arguing about why something was listed as the 12th best whatever of all time, and instead hear them getting mad that it was ranked higher (or lower) than something else.

Symmetra, on the other hand, is exactly the kind of person who would care about exactly where each entry came in, with a particular interest in who fell in the exact middle, which makes her a perfect midpoint for the list.

Widowmaker is... a lot.

I mean, at her core, she's a night elf from Warcraft that's been transported to a sci-fi setting, with her longbow swapped out for a sniper rifle. Unlike Reinhardt and Torbjorn, though, who are just "a dude who likes armor" and "a short blacksmith," everything even vaguely elfy about Widowmaker has been justified within the story. The result? A brainwashed French ballerina assassin who is blue because of mad science that slowed her heartbeat, and also she has no emotions. That's so much! And it's also pretty rad.

There are a lot of reasons to like McCree. His dark and mysterious past, his roguish and lighthearted charm, the Boot Scoot Boogie, those are all great. Let's be real with each other, though: the single best thing about him is the only thing that matters, which is that despite living in the future, my dude has committed so hard to cosplaying as a cowboy that he has spurs. Spurs! There are no horses in this game! Unless we see him jump on Orisa and ride off into the sunset, then those things are just a sign of how hard he's living that gimmick, and I love that.

I already went through the reasons that Winston's great way back in the opening paragraph, but there are two other things that are definitely worth noting. First, the crucial fact that when you start up the game, Winston is the first character you see. They could've opened with Tracer, the game's mascot character, or 76, who has the clearest connection to the backstory, but they didn't. They started this thing off with the talking gorilla in reading glasses trying to make new friends, so you'd know exactly what you were getting into.

Second, the entire "cinematic trailer" is pretty great, but there's a part where Winston hits Reaper with a straight up rolling powerbomb. It's just a shame he didn't hook the leg and get the pin, brother.

Ana has all the cool stuff from Soldier 76's origin, but with the added intriguing twist of a personal connection to her daughter, who still believes she's dead. That's interesting in its own right, but also makes her one of the few mothers, let alone older women in general, to take a featured role in a game focused on combat.

Plus she can heal you by shooting you in the face with special medicine bullets, and that's delightful.  

I will be the first to admit that I am a sucker for the trope of robots who strive to become more than the weapons they were created to be, and as the old saying goes, if you're going to steal, steal from the best. Thus: Bastion, whose animated origin story makes it Overwatch's equivalent of the Iron Giant. Just watch that thing and try not to get a little bit choked up when he makes a friend.

Overwatch is full of great characters, but D.Va rules on virtually every level. From a gameplay standpoint, she's easy to learn, but has plenty of tricks to make her interesting to play. She's the only character that gets a second chance at sticking around if her first form is destroyed, and the fact that she goes from a hugely powerful robot tank to a small and incredibly vulnerable human gives her a dramatic shift in how she plays. She also has one of the game's most iconic designs, both D.Va herself and the hot-pink bunny robot she rides around in.

What really makes her great, though, is the lore. It's only mentioned once, in a single paragraph on her official profile page, but the entire reason D.Va's there is that there's a gigantic Omnic Cthulhu in the seas off the coast of Korea that rises with a twisted new form every year to attack the country, and our pal Hana Song was so good at video games that the government decided she should be the one to fight it. And she did.  

In other words, she's a child soldier who battles a genocidal godlike robot created by the hubris of man, and livestreams it to her fans. She's the only character I can think of that's just full-on dystopian, but, you know, in a fun way.

Each week, comic book writer Chris Sims answers the burning questions you have about the world of comics and pop culture: what's up with that? If you'd like to ask Chris a question, please send it to @theisb on Twitter with the hashtag #WhatsUpChris, or email it to staff@looper.com with the subject line "That's What's Up."