Reviews

Three ways to look hard at a set of matches, and one place for all of them — the 07 Reviews tab (g r):

• Review yourself. Sit down with a handful of your own games in the film room, the way a coach would, and keep the review.
• Get coached. Hand your matches to someone else and read what comes back. Two files, passed between two copies of Recall — no account, no server, nothing uploaded. You send a bundle; they send notes; you decide which of those notes to keep.
• Coach someone. Open a bundle a player sent you and write the notes.

This chapter covers all three, in that order. Skip to Getting coached if you are waiting on someone, or Coaching someone if a bundle just landed in your downloads folder.

Reviewing yourself

You do not need a coach to review a match — you need the room, and the Reviews tab starts it: Review my last session opens the film room over the trailing run of games you just played, Review my last N over the newest handful, and Pick matches… walks you to Matches to tick exactly the rows you want (then Review these on the bar that appears — the command palette's Review my last session is the same start from a keystroke, and a row's right-click menu has Review this match for just one). The film room opens over them, inside the Reviews tab, in your own clock: the reel on the left, one match on the desk, the review's sheet on the right.

Per match, write a note and mark moments — a time and what happened — on the strip. The note is prose: a small toolbar gives you bold, italic, strikethrough, two heading levels and bulleted or numbered lists, and what you write renders that way everywhere it is read afterwards. Each note lands on its match the second you write it: open the match in Matches and the block is there, reading Your review · in progress.

On the sheet, give the review a title and fill in What to work on — a list, one line per thing. That list is the point of the whole exercise: it is what shows up under What you're working on at the top of the Reviews tab, and what Recall says back to you next time you are playing.

Finish review marks every match in the set reviewed by self (a coach's mark, if one is already there, stays) and keeps the review under section 01 · Your own reviews on the Reviews tab. The card shows the date, the record, and a small rail with one mark per match: filled where you wrote a note, hollow where you only looked; Show these matches → narrows the Matches list to exactly the set it covers. Open it again any time — leaving without finishing also keeps everything, marked in progress. Delete asks first, then removes the review and its blocks from every match; the reviewed marks stay, because you did review them.

A review travels in a share bundle with its matches (the dialog says so), and a profile move carries it whole — or refuses, if the move would split it across two profiles.

What travels, and what does not

Read this before you send anything to anybody.

A share bundle is a .zip containing, for the matches you selected:

• every screenshot Recall parsed those matches from — Overwatch scoreboards, which carry every player's BattleTag, yours and theirs
• the parsed stats, ranks and hero playtimes
• your own journal layer: notes you wrote, the moments you marked, tags, squad members you named, anyone you marked as a leaver or thrower, and replay codes
• your own reviews of those matches — notes and moments included, so a coach reads what you already noticed
• any review an earlier coach sent back and you accepted — a second coach sees the first one's notes
• your handle, and a message to the coach if you write one

It does not contain your settings, your file paths, or any match you did not select.

Two things worth knowing. Your coach can read the screenshots on their disk even though Recall does not display them during a session — the images are in the zip. And Recall stamps the bundle with a permanent id for you the first time you share, so a coach who reviews you twice can file both sessions under one player.

If any of that is more than you want to share, send fewer matches: the bundle is exactly the matches you tick, and nothing else.

Getting coached

1. Pick the matches

Pick the matches you have a question about. A coach reading forty games gives you forty shallow notes; a coach reading six gives you six useful ones.

One hard requirement, worth knowing before you pick: every match you send needs its replay code. A coach reviews by watching the replay, so a match without a code is a match they cannot act on — the send refuses until each one has its code. Codes live in the match's journal; the easiest habit is writing each one down right after the game, while Overwatch still shows it. (The dialog names any match that is missing one and offers Show the N on Matches → to go fix them; what you had typed is still there when you come back.)

Four doors, all landing in the same dialog:

• Send to a coach… on the Reviews tab, under 02 · With a coach — sends everything currently showing on Matches, so narrow the list there first to choose the set.
• Send my last session to a coach beside it — the same trailing run of games Review my last session opens, sent instead of reviewed.
• On Matches: tick rows and use the bar's send button for exactly those, or a row's right-click menu to send just that match.

Do not use Export backup… for this. That button is a backup of your data for you — the file it writes is not stamped with your handle, so a coach who receives one gets an anonymous zip: their Recall can still open it as a session via Open a player's bundle…, but it names nobody, and if they mistake it for match data and use the generic Import instead, it merges into their history. The send dialog exists so none of that can happen.

2. Send it

The dialog opens in place, over the Reviews tab, and shows a manifest — one row per match, each with its replay code or the gap where one should be — so you see exactly what is going to another human before anything leaves. Every row has an ×: the set is yours whatever put it there, and dropping a match is the fastest answer to one that is missing a code.

If you would rather not pick at all, Or start from offers two proposals: Everything since your last send, and Recent losses on what you're working on — the second reads your open focus items and finds the losses on the heroes and maps they name. Either one replaces the set in one click and stays fully editable. Neither ever suggests a match without a replay code, or one you have hidden.

• Your handle (required) — the name your coach knows you by. The bundle is stamped with it; that stamp is what makes their Recall open the file as a coaching session rather than data. Prefilled from the last time you sent; also settable in Settings → Coaching.
• Message for your coach — optional, and the most useful field in the dialog. "Watch my ult timing on control" gets you a better review than silence does.
• Save as — the file's name, prefilled with a recall-share-… stamp so it can never be mistaken for one of your backups later.

Save the .zip and send it however you like: Discord, email, a drive share. Recall has no opinion about that — but it keeps the receipt: the Reviews tab lists every send, and marks the ones a coach has answered.

3. Read what comes back

Your coach sends a .zip back. Open it with Open a notes file… on the Reviews tab — or import it the way you would import matches (Settings → Backup & Restore → Import matches or notes…, or the Import matches or notes… button in the Matches toolbar); Recall tells the two files apart on its own.

A return sheet opens: one card per note, each showing the match, the coach's note, any timestamped moments, and the tags they filed it under. For each one you choose:

• Accept — the note lands on that match, signed and dated, and the match is marked reviewed by a coach.
• Skip — nothing lands.

Above the cards, if your coach wrote one, is their What to work on list. Those are not decided on the way the notes are: they are already on your list the moment the file is staged. You can disagree with your coach — but you have to have heard them first, so there is no way to refuse one here. Discarding the whole file is the only thing that takes them back off.

Nothing is written until you press Finish — and Finish says what it is about to do: Finish · 2 accepted · 3 skipped. Press it while notes are still undecided and it asks first, because the inbox banner stays up until every note has an answer. Decide later saves exactly what you have decided so far and closes; the banner — Read the notes reopens the sheet — keeps count of what is left. Once a review lands, its card under 02 · With a coach shows the coach, the counts, and Show these matches →.

If the file was the wrong one, or you have decided you do not want the review, Discard… throws it away. That is not the same as skipping every note — skipping records a decision and marks those matches reviewed by a coach. Discarding drops the file.

Accepted notes appear on the match in the detail panel, under your own journal entry, in the coach's own block. You can remove one at any time — it is your history.

If they reviewed a replay code

A coach can review a replay without ever seeing your bundle, so a note may come back about a match your Recall has never heard of. It is matched by the replay code: if one of your matches carries that code, the note lands there like any other.

If none does, accepting the note creates the match, from what the coach wrote down while watching. That match is real — you played it — but it does not count toward your record:

• it appears in Matches, carrying the notes and a Replay review badge, and you can filter for it under Provenance;
• it is left out of the dossier and the Elo Calculator entirely.

The reason is that its result is what your coach typed off a replay, not what you recorded. A coaching session should not be able to move your win rate.

If you later add that replay code to a match you already had, the note binds to it the next time you open the sheet. Nothing to re-import.

4. Mark your own moments

You do not need a coach to point at a moment. The match journal has its own Moments strip: mark a time, say what happened, and optionally file it under a focus tag. It reads down the match, exactly as a coach's does, and sits above their notes because they are your words. (A review — above — does the same over a whole set at once.)

Pin a frame to a moment. Drag an image onto the moment, or use the button beside it to pick one. The picture is what the claim is about, so it lives inside the moment rather than beside the note. Recall takes custody of the bytes — the frame survives after you tidy the folder it came from, rides your backups and profile moves, and travels inside a coaching return, where the exported page inlines it so the page still shows it with the network off. The same frame pinned three times is stored once. Clearing the database clears them too.

Coaching someone

There are two ways in, and they land in the same room. Take a bundle when the player has exported their history for you; take a replay code when all you were given is six characters in chat, which is how most reviews actually start.

1a. Open their bundle

Open the Reviews tab (g r), then Open a player's bundle… under For someone else, and pick the file they sent. (The command palette, Ctrl+K, has the same action.)

Their matches are loaned, not imported: they never enter your history, and they leave when the session ends. While a session is open your own data is read-only — every affordance that would write to it is disabled, and says so.

Set your name first if you have not: Settings → Coaching → Your coach name. It signs everything you write, and notes cannot be exported without it.

1b. Or just a replay code

Use a replay code…, in the same place. Type the code, press Add, and start the review. You can add more codes as they arrive — the reel grows while you work, which is what you want when they are being read out to you over voice.

The code is echoed back before you start. Check it: it is now the player's identity for that match, so a mistyped code produces a review they can never be matched to.

You will be asked who you are coaching, exactly as you are for a bundle that did not name anyone. Nothing you write is saved until you answer — and if you have coached them before, their name is one keystroke away: the prompt suggests the names on your roster, and picking a known one files these notes with that player's existing history instead of starting a second file over a typo.

Or a whole team

The same prompt has a second answer: A team. Choose it when the codes belong to matches several of your players were in, give the team a name, and the whole session files under it — one shared review about the team's play, not anyone's individual game. Three things follow from that shape:

• The What you saw panel asks for the map, result and date but not a hero — a team review names no single player's pick.
• The review travels either way, both addressed to the team. Save a web page — for the team writes one file anyone can open; Export notes file — for the team writes the archive a captain who runs Recall can import. On their side it lands as the team's: no "this was written about somebody else" warning, the focus items join their list, and every block they accept is signed "— Ordo · for Sound Barrier · 2026-08-15" so it never reads as a note about them personally.
• The team sits on your roster like a player does, marked TEAM, with its own standing focus list — the next codes session for the same team picks the name from the prompt and continues the file.

A bundle can never be a team: it was exported by one player, and their manifest is the identity.

Two things are different in this room, both because Recall has never seen these matches:

• Each frame starts blank, and a What you saw panel appears on the desk. Fill in as much as you noticed — the map, the hero, how it went. Whatever you leave blank stays blank; nothing is invented. The date is filled in with today's, which you can change.
• Their Matches, Trends, Compare and Elo tabs are not there to step into. There is no history to step into.

Everything else — notes, moments, the focus list, sending it back — is the same, because it is the same coaching.

2. The film room

You land in the film room. Three columns:

• The reel on the left — their matches, grouped by day, in their local clock, not yours. Click a frame, or use j / k, ↑ / ↓, or [ / ] from anywhere in the room.
• The desk in the middle — the match you are looking at, the moments strip, and your note about it.
• The session sheet on the right — their record, what you have written so far, and the one thing to work on.

In a bundle session you can also step into their Matches, Trends, Compare and Elo tabs from the strip under the masthead, and come back with ← Back to the film room (or g r). A replay-code session has no history to step into, and the strip says so instead of offering empty rooms.

Beside the sheet, the stat rail answers the question you keep having: is this how they usually play this hero, on this map? It reads their winrate and average E·A·D on both, out of the corpus already on loan, and it follows the frame as you walk the reel — so you never step out to Matches mid-review. When a bucket is too small to mean anything it says too few to read rather than showing you 100% off two games, which on a six-match bundle is the common case. A replay-code session has no rail: those frames arrive as codes with no history behind them.

Replay codes have a shelf life, and the room says so. OW retires them at season rollover, so a code from an earlier season is marked likely expired where it is stored — and if every code in a bundle predates the current season, the loan slip tells you before you spend the sitting finding out one frame at a time.

3. Mark moments while you watch

The Moments strip is the point of the room. Mark the second something happened and say what it was:

  3:23  positioning   No off-angle — the tank ate the pressure alone.
  4:13  ult economy   No ult tracking.
  4:45                Cassidy flanked behind you.

Each moment carries the match's replay code with a copy button, so the player can open the replay and scrub straight to it. A timestamp they cannot get to is trivia.

When the match reported its length, the strip spaces the moments by the time between them — three notes in the last two minutes look clustered, because they were. A stamp past the end of the match warns and saves anyway: the length comes from OCR and is often missing, and it should not overrule the person who watched the game.

Everything autosaves. The note above the strip is for the overall read — what the match was about — and the moments carry the specifics.

4. Send it back

1 · Export notes file — for their Recall writes a .zip holding notes.json (what their Recall reads) and the review page. Send it back the same way the bundle came. Both export buttons need your coach name set — if it is not, they say so in plain text right there.

Save a web page — read-only writes just the page: one self-contained HTML file that opens in any browser, offline, with nothing to install. It is the same document that rides inside the .zip — use it for a player who does not run Recall, or does not want to import anything. Saving it counts as handing the session over: End will not warn you about unexported notes after a deliberate page save.

If you reviewed replay codes, the page is usually the one you want — but only the notes file can land notes back on the player's matches, so if they run Recall, send the file.

2 · End session hands their records back and lands you on the Reviews tab with a notice naming what ended (and where the notes file went, if you exported one). Your notes stay with you, filed by player or team.

The roster and the dossier

Under For someone else, the roster lists everyone you have coached — and each row is a door. Open their dossier shows the standing what-to-work-on list and two ways back in: Read every note lists everything you have ever written about them (labeled by the match's day, or by its replay code — the matches themselves left with their sessions, only your words stay), and Review new codes for them opens the codes door already knowing who it is for, so the room never asks.

The dossier also lists your sessions with them: the day each one opened, how many matches it covered, and what their focus list said when you handed it back — which is what makes "what changed since last time" answerable. A sitting you opened and walked away from reads never ended rather than vanishing, because it happened, and how often the two of you meet is the point of the list.

Inside a session, the same continuity shows up as a quiet drawer under the desk: Earlier notes about {them} — the notes you wrote in previous sessions about matches that are not in today's corpus. They were always saved and always exported; now they are also visible while you work. A second session builds on the first, and you can see it doing so.

What you're working on

At the top of the Reviews tab is one list: everything you are working on, whatever it came from. Your coach's items come first, then your own, each newest first.

Two things you can do to an item, and deliberately not a third:

• Accept — you have read what your coach sent. It stays on the list; accepting is acknowledging it, not agreeing to it.
• Done with this — you are done working on it. It comes off the live list and folds behind a count, because retiring something is not unsaying it.

There is no way to delete an item or turn one down — the band says so itself. An item you wrote is yours to retire; an item your coach wrote is theirs to have said. Each item's source line is a door: click it to reopen the return sheet the coach sent it on, or the review you wrote it in.

When you are mid-session — Recall knows, because a parse just landed between games — the top three come back to you once, in the corner, so you can take them into the next match. Once per session; close it and it stays closed until the next one. There is also a What you're working on widget you can add to the Matches dossier if you want it in front of you all the time.

Frequently confusing

Nothing you write in a session touches your own database. Not the notes, not the moments. They are filed under the player, and they leave the screen when the session ends.

A notes file names the format it is in. A build that does not know that format refuses the file by name rather than reading half of it and dropping the rest silently.

Two coaches can review the same match. Their notes accumulate as separate blocks, each signed and dated. Nothing merges — and your own reviews sit beside them as their own blocks, the same way.

A coach sees your own notes. The bundle carries your journal and your reviews, and the coach's desk quotes them under your note, so they read what you already noticed before they write.

Next chapter

• Read what the numbers mean: Reading your climb
• When a screenshot won't parse: Unknown screenshots