Overwatch's new hero has been canon for years, but her support-tank playstyle is all new

Brigitte Lindholm has been here since the beginning, but now she's donning the armor and heading into battle herself as Overwatch's latest hero; if you have the PC version, she's available for play on the PTR right now. Torbjorn's daughter and Reinhardt's "squire" (she first appeared in the Reinhardt: Dragon Slayer comic from April 2016) protects her friends with an intriguing new support/tank playstyle.

You can watch Brigitte's backstory up above, or go in for a deeper dive into Brigitte's hero design with Overwatch director Jeff Kaplan below. If you're looking for the one-liner on how she fights, think Reinhardt but with a smaller shield and the ability to heal allies by attacking enemies. Brigitte's flail does paltry damage next to Reinhardt's hammer and lacks its disruptive smack-around potential, but it's faster and can even be used for a mid-range push (AKA boop) that's just begging for environmental kills.

Her shield bash is a shorter, much-less-likely-to-get-you-killed version of Reinhardt's distinctive charge and is great fun for stunning harassers like Genji or Tracer. And her repair pack is a big, targeted heal that applies temporary armor to allies who are already at full health; don't worry old-school Symmetra players, the armor only lasts for a few seconds so it won't be a return to the old "shield everybody all the time" days.

Overwatch already has "hybrid" support heroes like Ana and Zenyatta, but Brigitte trades their damage dealing potential for tanking and enemy management abilities. I'll be interested to see how she works with a variety of party compositions as both a secondary tank and a secondary healer. Hopefully it won't be too long until Brigitte lends her shield to console players in her full release.