During the opening ceremony at BlizzCon 2016, Blizzard Entertainment officially revealed their upcoming hero, Sombra, through an animated short. A notorious hacker from Mexico, Sombra is a powerful infiltrator armed with a machine pistol, who uses her hacking abilities to disrupt and weaken enemies. Her stealth and teleportation abilities also make it hard for enemies to pin her down, making her a powerful offense character.
- Her primary weapon is a Machine Pistol, that fires in a short ranged spread
- Her first ability Hack, lets you temporarily disable your opponents, stopping them from using their abilities or ultimates. Enemies are still able to use their primary and secondary fire; and health packs can also be hacked to prevent the enemy team from using them.
- Sombra can use her Thermoptic Camo to turn completely invisible, also boosting her speed for the duration. She jumps out of the camouflage if she attacks or gets damaged.
- She can toss out a Translocator which she can teleport to at any time, even in mid-flight – this ability helps her get around the map
- For her ultimate ability, she sends out an EMP that destroys enemy barriers and shields, also hacking any opponent caught in the blast.
- Her passive ability lets her see weakened enemies through walls, that is if their health falls below 50%. Sombra is also able to disable Tjorbjorn’s turret, take out a Reinhardt shield and stop a Mcree during his ultimate,
The animated short is set in the Volskaya Industries map, seeing that Sombra is now working for Talon, and is tasked to eliminate Katya Volskaya, the CEO of Volskaya Industries. Alongside Reaper and Widowmaker, we can see a lot of personality in Sombra’s gestures and dialogue, acting very confident and playful. Then afterwards, transitioning to a more sly and shady character seeing a different side to her, failing the mission on purpose and threatening the CEO.
If you have not been following the ARG for Sombra, fans we’re given several hints about this new character and her activity in the Overwatch universe. Starting back in July, people started to notice hidden messages and codes from official Blizzard videos and began decoding these message. Moving forward 3 months later we ended up with an anti-climactic and somewhat unsatisfying end to the ARG – it was still fun seeing how quick the community jumped on and helped.
Sombra, Arcade and Ecopoint Antarctica will be available on the Overwatch PTR sometime this week, with their new map Oasis planned for the December PTR.