I was gonna give more of an honest to god chance with Overwatch 2, despite literally everything that has happened giving me all the reasons to ignore them, cause I had a pretty OK time with friends when I decided to hop in with them. However, upon seeing news of yet another sexual harrassment lawsuit being filed against ActiBlizz, I realized this is basically gonna be one of those cases where I can't exactly separate the art from the artist, since the artist themselves keeps getting into so much shit.

I won't really give this a score cause I only played like, 2 hours worth and as much as I'm rather valid for wanting to jump on the review bombing wagon, I'd rather just let people who, ya know, played the game for a substantial amount of time do that. I'll do a rapid session of what I thought so far: Maps are rather sterile looking and I'm not really into how spread out the spawn points are, Sojourn and Ana were cool to play as, Genji is aggressively fine, sfx is weak as shit, having to unlock heroes by playing the game is such a weird thing for this type of genre and I'd rather just all of them be fully available.

I obviously can't stop people from playing this if they want to, but it does make me feel uneasy regardless.

I initially had no desire to play Overwatch 2 as I had already made my peace with the first game and was content to move on. However, as I had friends who were interested in playing, I went into this "sequel" wanting to give it a fair shake. I know it's only been out a week at this point, but given the largely unchanged nature of the experience, I feel it's easy to render a verdict: Overwatch 2 is the most lateral change from one game to the next I've ever seen.

That lateral movement, by the way, is mostly in regard to gameplay. We'll get to the Battle Pass situation later. But in terms of enjoyment, it's still primarily the same experience. What was fun about the first game will still be fun in Overwatch 2, and what was frustrating about it will remain a frustration. The change to 5v5 is the big switch in vision for this game, and while I have always been vocally opposed to this change, in reality, all it's done is allocated the flow of the game in a sideways manner. Instead of shooting shields and nothing ever dying, you're now shooting one tank that's never dying. This is because to compensate for the removal of one tank, Blizzard has decided to massively buff them all to allow for better survivability. As a tank main, this is something I feel very confident commenting on.

This is where your enjoyment may vary when it comes to Overwatch 2. If you're really good at tank, or if you're playing with a really good tank main, it's become much easier to clean up and dominate a match. Tanks have always low-key been the carry of Overwatch but it's shifted even further in that direction now. If all you care about is winning, get good at tank and reap the rewards. You don't need to rely on someone else because they've given you incredible tools for sustaining on your own. However, this also comes at the cost of what I enjoyed about tanking in Overwatch, which was the focus on protecting your team. There are fewer plays to be made here, as tanks are now functionally just fat DPS heroes and the game encourages you to be selfish with your abilities to survive. The satisfaction that came from playing that role in a team environment is all but gone.

As for supports and DPS? Eh, kinda the same as always. Supports have less protection so have fun with that. It's why I rarely play the role in this game. DPS does have more opportunities for big plays themselves but you're going to find yourself in more duels now so it'll be sink or swim for the egos of people who love to shootbang. I will give credit to Blizzard for the design of the three new heroes, as they seem mostly well thought-out and balanced. Junker Queen in particular is a good example of properly designing a hero for the 5v5 format as her kit wouldn't have made much sense in the old environment. The new maps and game mode will take some getting used to but I don't have particularly strong feelings about them one way or the other right now. Either way, this certainly doesn't make up for the lack of content for the base game these past three years. I expected a lot more here.

Now let's get into monetization. Overwatch 2 has switched to free-to-play and with that comes the now standard Battle Pass integration. For anyone that played the original game, this is a straight downgrade. There is no getting around that, and there is no excusing it. It sucks. I know loot boxes in general are on the way out, and I'm not going to tell you it was the most ethical implementation of cosmetic unlocks, but Overwatch was VERY generous in letting you earn them and easily accumulate new items and credits to get what you wanted, even if playing casually. This was especially true of people who had been there since the beginning, like me, who had earned enough credits to basically have everything unlocked. Now? Pay money or you get nothing.

I understand there needs to be an incentive for people to spend money on a F2P game but the reality is they've done it by taking stuff away. This isn't a brand-new game where everyone's on the same starting line. Stuff that used to be earned easily is now locked in a shop for ridiculous prices, and the best new stuff requires the premium battle pass. Worse yet, you can't even earn credits through completing the battle pass to pay for the next one, a fairly standard feature for games that use this monetization system. Instead, you can earn those credits by doing weekly challenges, which at the moment grant a pittance of 60 a week. The Battle Pass costs 1000 credits, without even factoring in the use of those credits for anything else. As such you are looking at MONTHS to earn enough to do anything with them. This is just not acceptable, and that's not even getting into how difficult it likely will be for casual players to complete the battle pass in the time required.

Worse still is the decision to work new heroes into the battle pass system, requiring players to grind to level 55 to unlock them if they don't want to pay. For a game that's entire identity is built upon switching to the right heroes to use in the right situations, Blizzard is putting those on the free track at a competitive disadvantage. This is even more concerning for the competitive mode itself, where if the hero becomes meta and suddenly you're stuck with players who don't have them because of this decision, you're now ruining the game for everyone, regardless of whether they bought the battle pass. This absolutely must change for the game to have any sort of future going forward, but given this seems to be their big ace-in-the-hole in terms of forcing people to spend money, I don't expect them to give in. This decision alone is worthy of the game receiving a low score. It could be the best experience I've ever had and I would still hold this against them strongly.

And of course, the real elephant in the room is that this is just straight-up not the game we were promised. Overwatch 2 was sold on being a sequel with the PVE campaign at the forefront, and at launch, it is nowhere to be found. Instead, Blizzard will deal out campaign missions out on a seasonal basis, further straying from what was originally promised. It's starting to feel like the big story mode we all hoped for will end up feeling as disjointed and disappointing as the prior seasonal event story modes found in Overwatch 1. That, coupled with the MASSIVE connection and stability problems for the game's launch, all serve to offer up the reality that despite the lengthy development cycle, Overwatch 2 was pushed out to market well before it was ready. As a result, it feels half-baked in every conceivable way. This is a shame because much like I said in my review of the original Overwatch, this is a game and franchise with so much potential, but it seems like Blizzard cares more about making a quick buck instead of building something truly memorable that will draw disillusioned players like myself back in for more than just a few weeks.

Wow this overhate is insane

It is a good game
+ most of the gameplay changes are great, gameplay feels amazing
+ bp is surprisingly good
+ upgraded engine graphics are really good
+ junker queen is great, kiriko is good, new maps are really fun to play
+ junker mommy

- people who picked prices for skins should be sent to hell
- ui is clearly unfinished
- sojourn is so underwhelming
- push mode is not fun to play, and it must be really annoying for level designers to make mirrored maps
- removal of level system is... not good

NOTE: I know you hate the ABK, but if you didn't play the game don't write a review to mislead people. If you played it and didn't like it, I respect it, write all your rage and your problems with the game and ABK. But posting "reviews" without playing the game, that's just despicable.

I played the "first", therefore I played the "second"! Thanks Blizzard for saving me some time to fill out a larger backlog!

This game is offensive by just existing. Same game, same blizzard, only now they can suck money from people with a stupid battle pass with stuff that was free (even if lootbox rng based)

Blizzard is becoming one of the worst, and I really hope to live to see its well deserved downfall with all its stupid harassers in jail. If you believe Microsoft is going to save it, good copium to you.

Holy shit guys, they did it. They gave Bastion a hat.

Overwatch 2 might be the saddest game I've ever played. Don't get me wrong, it's pretty fun - but it's not new. It's literally Overwatch 1 with some (mostly good) balance changes, three new heroes and a new game mode.

Now if you'd be very bored, you could go to my profile and look for my rating of Overwatch 1 and see that it's a 3/5. So how come OV 2 has a lower rating if it's the same game? The answer is simple - Battle Pass. Are you seriously telling me, that they want me to pay $ for a bunch of grafitis and voice lines? Or in other words shit I don't even want for free? Well at least it's not like I HAVE to buy the pass, I could just get some in-game currency and buy whatever I want, right?

No.

Do you guys remember that tiny little thing from the first game called loot boxes? Well guess what - our friends at Activision Blizzard finally realized that this kind of system is toxic as hell and decided to get rid of it. I'll give you a quick reminder of how it worked in the first game. Each time you leveled up you got one free loot box which would give you some random stuff. Of course, if you were a moron, you could've bought more loot boxes for money. Loot boxes sometimes also dropped coins for which you could've bought items of your choice.

Now you might be wondering what do you get for playing games in OV2. Well the answer is simple - aside from the free bullshit from the pass, you get nothing. So basically a free to play player has literally no way to express themsleves with any of the cosmetics. The only way to get what you want is to spend money on the in-game currency. Or grind. Because there is ONE way to get the currency for free - weekly challanges. Now if you complete them all you get 60 overwatch coins or whatever this shit is called. Now if you go to the store and look at the prices, you might notice that the MOST BASIC SKIN for each character costs 300 of it. For a WEEK of playing you get fucking 20% of the MOST BASIC SKIN for a character of your choosing. In other words, you need to grind for 5 WEEKS to get a MOST BASIC SKIN.

I think this perfectly sums up what Overwatch 2 really is - the last try from blizzard to squeeze some money from players of an otherwise dying game. Remember the co-op mode? They never intended to realease it now. It was just an excuse to announce this "game" and redirect the negative attention the studio was and still is getting.

Here's what's gonna happen next. In a couple of weeks they will realse The Revenge of Junkenstein (or whatever it's called in English) for the billionth time, people will realise that this the same game, the queues will disappear, the queue times for games will get long as fuck again, they will release the PvE which will attract some players again, but after that the game will go under even more than OV1 did.

And the cherry on top is the 81 Metascore for this piece of shit. This "game" is everything wrong with this industry and it should've never fucking existed.

Go play some indie games instead.

Review Edit:
This is still a predatory, cash grabby game that does not deserve the title and promotion of a sequel, but i’ve increased my rating by half a star simply because they have made some solid adjustments, the new heroes are actually quite fun and the balance isn’t bad. I still wish it wasn’t 5 heroes per team and believe it or not I miss 2cp, they could have reworked it slightly to make it more fair on attack by widening choke points or something, I personally don’t think it needed removing entirely. They make it hard to truly like this game but boy is it addictive.

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I have a lot of history with overwatch and have been playing since the beta way back in 2016 when I was 19, from early on I was hooked and spent ages playing it with friends and when their interest died out, mine only grew. At the absolute lowest point of my life, overwatch, bizarrely, kept me sane (which considering that its a stressful and frustrating experience most of the time, is quite surprising).

I have a LOT of thoughts on overwatch and overwatch 2 in general, far too many to list them all (as I often do lmao) and i've expressed them, some good, some bad, among friend groups and communities for literal years. Overwatch has meant a lot to me and despite its only increasingly evident flaws, it was a fundamental escape for me at a time when I was suffering and felt helpless. Because of the hours I poured into this game at a competitive level (around high diamond to low master rank) I became very familiar with the stagnating nature of overwatch and its completely chaotic meta shifts. At launch overwatch was huge and in many ways reinvigorated a genre, it was fresh and fun but with each and every patch & update it became increasingly clear that none of them were fixing its problems or actively improving the experience. Overwatch's entire lifespan was a downhill slope as people got fed up with the same repetitive gameplay, the same tired comps, the same headache inducing choke points and the same shield shooting simulation every time you loaded it up. Like most, I retired from it, around 2019 i'd decided I was wasting my time by still playing it as all my friends had left it and, to add insult to injury, blizzard outright stopped caring about it - farting out carbon copies of the exact same seasonal events, the occasional ugliest cosmetics i've ever seen & still no worthwhile changes to be seen. While I appreciated the overwatch team's forthright approach to communicating changes with the community, said approach felt like throwing shit at the wall and seeing what would stick. For all of overwatch's charm, its colourful vibe and cast of characters and its apparent impact, it just could not follow it up.

The reason why, in a review of overwatch 2 I am talking about overwatch 1 so much is because they are the same game! When it was announced I remember audibly laughing to myself because it felt like a joke, it was announced not long after i'd fully given it up and after seeing the game stagnate, it was getting a sequel. Except it clearly wasn't a sequel, its a title thrown onto overwatch with a coat of paint and a laughable lack of new content. The main difference was to be a new focus on pve modes, which remains to be seen, and the visual changes to its cast of characters are absolutely cringe worthy - add a couple accessories, give them a beard or a hat or something then call it a day.

This is pretty much the result of constant failures on blizzard's front - disturbing scandals, walkouts, a complete lack of organisation and a real lack of new ideas and creativity. On top of that I do think overwatch 2 is the kind of game that corporate executives and investors eat up - a free to play 'games as a service' platform, a battle pass system to unlock content that used to be completely free and what feels like the bare minimum in terms of content and scope to merit a so called 'sequel' - when it could easily have been one extra large update or even remaster of overwatch 1. I'm particularly peeved that even though I transferred all of my hard earned unlocks from my many many hours in overwatch 1 - it didn't carry over my credits. Credits are now excessively valuable where they were once expendable and easily obtained just by playing casually. Not to mention the costs to purchase them with real money - £16 / $20 for ONE legendary skin, are you actually having a laugh hahaha. Besides I feel like most of the new skins are horrendous.

Anyway yeah overwatch 2 is a joke and deserves its negative public reception - its still decently fun at its best moments because its fundamentally still overwatch, but its past its sell by date and playing it now feels like opening up an old wound and that is just sad. Blizzard has tarnished their own reputation and to see them come back from it would be practically miraculous. It would be nice to see new ideas and new game modes that aren't just more of the same shit but more of the same shit is what they do best and i'm growing out of it.

Crazy that they drop this very very surprising bombshell right around the time I start having way less fun with the game. Like Clockwork.

I thought PvE was the whole reason they branded this game as Overwatch 2. It's even less than that now. It's a skinned version of the original with better aspects on some fronts, I'm ngl, but way worse on other facets. What a fucking disappointment. At least this game gets me get a lot of discussion out of the query "What makes a sequel a sequel". I'm really starting to think multiplayer shooters just aren't my thing.