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Overwatch’s next hero is Wrecking Ball, a superintelligent hamster in a giant, rolling mech suit

Overwatch’s next hero is Wrecking Ball, a superintelligent hamster in a giant, rolling mech suit

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Overwatch has revealed the latest hero to join the roster of the popular online multiplayer shooter — Wrecking Ball: a hamster named Hammond who pilots a giant, rolling, machine-gun equipped mech suit. That’s a series of words that I would wager have never been put together in that sequence before today.

Wrecking Ball will be the 28th member of the roster. He’s a tank-class hero, with fast mobility options that let him roll around the battlefield, and some serious durability due to his Adaptive Shield ability, which generates extra shielding for him when he’s surrounded by more enemies. Wrecking Ball also has a grappling claw that will let him swing around the field (and damage enemies that he hits), as well as a “Piledriver” ground pound ability for slamming foes into the floor. His ultimate ability is “Minefield,” which — as the name suggests — allows him to deploy a field of mines, which should be useful for closing off lanes for flanking foes or defending checkpoints.

Wrecking Ball doesn’t technically speak any human languages — but according to Blizzard, his mech automatically translates his voice in a “fittingly menacing tone.”

While Hammond might seem a bit out there as a concept, there is precedence in Overwatch’s lore for technologically advanced, hyper-intelligent animals — one only need to look at Winston, a giant gorilla who is a cornerstone of the Overwatch brand. In the game’s lore, Hammond was part of the same experiment on the Horizon Lunar Colony as Winston, and secretly escaped alongside the heroic gorilla when the other experiments rose up and killed the scientists on board.

Wrecking Ball should be rolling out (pun intended) on the Overwatch PTR test servers now for PC players, and will presumably hit consoles sometime in the near future.

Update June 28th, 2:25PM ET: Updated post with more information now that Blizzard has officially announced Wrecking Ball.

Update June 28th, 10:33AM ET: On closer inspection, it seems the new hero is a hamster, not a chipmunk. Like in a hamster ball.