Overwatch King’s Row map gets stunningly detailed Minecraft recreation

Theo Salaun
overwatch kings row

King’s Row is Overwatch’s most beloved map, and a fan has done it justice with an incredible recreation of its first two points with beautiful, dimly lit details.

The Bastion LEGO skin already proved how perfect a blocky art style can be in Overwatch, and ‘u/DDoom3099’ has pushed that a few hundred steps forward by turning King’s Row into a blocky Minecraft wonderland.

While DDoom3099 hasn’t fleshed out the entire three-point map, they have essentially perfected the attacking spawn, first point, streets phase, and defender’s first spawn. 

lego bastion overwatch
Look how neat LEGO Bastion and Ganymede are. So neat.

No map incurs as much unrelenting nostalgia as King’s Row does, as it holds a place nearer and dearer to the Overwatch player base’s heart than any other. And their ode to the London location was proved fruitful as they received a variety of awards on Reddit for it: a Platinum, a Heart Eyes, two Golds, a Timeless Beauty, two Silvers, a Bravo Grande!, and a Home Time. 

And it was all worth it. Minecraft’s lighting and textures may be limited, but the structural composition of King’s Row is on point—with perfectly scaled columns and buildings—while the details are excellently composed, like the big red bus ahead of the first point’s choke or the attacking spawn’s chandeliers.

Using a variety of miniature lamps to light the map is a tremendous workaround as well, as it gives King’s Row the energy granted by the original’s various sources of nighttime luminosity in street lamps, windows, and the infamous clock tower.

DDoom3099’s effort to replicate said clock tower is commendable, as it’s the map’s brightest and most notable feature. But the spacing is what really tugs at player heart strings, as seeing those spawns and attention to various flanking routes makes this map feel truly playable.

This isn’t the first Minecraft ode to Overwatch, nor is it likely to be the last. It might be something about Cancer season because back in July 2019, an Imgur user, ‘halvencyon,’ recreated the (much smaller) Control map, Oasis: Gardens.

While one can continue sending positive energy in DDoom3099’s general direction in hopes that they’ll finish up the final point since that subterranean lava area would be wild to see recreated, some energy should also be sent Blizzard’s way.

We’ve seen how good a LEGO skin looks in the game and an entire LEGO World map may be too ambitious, but this Minecraft creation should serve as excellent inspiration for map creation tools that could be added to Overwatch’s Workshop Mode.

About The Author

Théo is a former writer at Dexerto based in New York and built on competition. Formerly an editor for Bleacher Report and philosophy student at McGill, he fell in love with Overwatch and Call of Duty — leading him to focus on esports for Dex.