Honestly I hear a lot of people trash the shit out of overwatch 2 but I really enjoyed what I played. Now this is coming from someone who never played the original overwatch and I can definitely see where the haters of overwatch 2 are coming from. Blizzard promised a lot of stuff including a campaign mode that they just gave up on which led to the games not so favourable reputation. It does now seem though that Blizzard is trying to turn the game around now with the most recent updates though. Putting all that aside, overwatch 2 still finds a way to be an incredibly fun and engaging team based shooter.

One of the worst "sequels" ever made. I hate this game with most of my being. Every match I play further strips me of any joy I can have with this game, even if I take breaks for days or weeks on end. I only play it because it's one of the few multiplayer games some of my friends play. Every day I try to steer them elsewhere. Maybe some day I can ditch this dumpster fire! Also imagine making this game for PvE and then cancelling that feature. Why does exist then? Slightly better lighting and a bigger filesize?

Played one match, just because that’s all I needed to see what the game I haven’t played in nearly 4 years has become.

This is a product. It has no character, no personality, no charm, no love, no life, no soul.

It’s a soulless product engineered by a soulless cooperation meant to milk every nickel and dime from the people they see as soulless wallets. I have never been more angry and sad before in ten minutes of my life from playing a game seeing what I once loved become… this. Fuck this game and everything it stands for.

I’ll forever miss what the original Overwatch was, not what the disgusting soulless product it has become.

If I went purely based on my rage I would give this half a star. But I can't deny the game is very very pretty and I still love the characters.

On that note. Overwatch 2 is an absolute travesty. Taking everything that made the first game so good and ruining it beyond comprehension. 99% of cosmetics available for free and obtainable through a loot box that you'd get every level up? Gone. Simple things that made it slightly more fun like stat cards at the end of matches? Gone. The entire second tank and 6 player friend groups in general? Gone. New characters available for FREE on update??? GONE! The entire campaign mode with so much promised and an incredibly fun looking skill tree system? Cancelled with only a few campaign missions released per season behind a god damn paywall with the rest never to be seen.

But what really grinds my gears about this game, is that it paved over everything I loved about Overwatch. I can never go back to when Overwatch was fun and had 6 player teams and regularly releasing characters. Because it was all replaced with this garbage. I went my first Halloween since 2016 without playing Junkenstein's Revenge with my friends and it made me so sad.

I'm a fair reviewer, so as a game sure it can have 3 stars. But as an experience it deserves nothing.

Overwatch 2’s PVE has been completely and utterly cancelled.

Blizzard killed the golden goose for good. The PvE initially promised as a sprawling experience got downgraded into small season excerpts, and now? Nothing.

One of the most promising, innovative and polished games of all time has been systematically butchered by executive incompetence. Overwatch 2’s whole existence was principled on this PvE. Now what is it built on?
A shop overhaul. No more free cosmetics every level. Pay for cosmetics. Pay for the Battle Pass. Spend. Spend. Spend.

Bleak stuff. I’ll always treasure the great memories I have of early Overwatch (heroes never die, after all), but I honestly doubt I’ll ever touch it again.

It's always been a game of contradictions. A game with a light, inviting atmosphere, playful abilities that are designed to be "just fun to press" in the developer's own words and wide, forgiving hitboxes for those abilities that ensures even the bottom fragger on your squad can participate, making it the perfect squad game on paper. The heroes are lovingly crafted homages to 'superhero' culture around the world, coming with their own powerful and unique skills that'll make up for any deficet in your FPS fundamentals. It's a garuntee everyone will have a favorite.

but that quickly crystalizes into a hardcore competitive FPS any time you're in a state of actual play. Everyone swoops on the low performers like vultures and it's not hard to see why. If you're performing even slightly suboptimially, your team gets ran over instantly and you're unable to even press any of those fun buttons we've just talked about! None of the downtime of a game like Fortnite that allows for whole conversations with friends to take place as you explore and scrape together supplies means that you're always expected to be "on" and in the thick of it in Overwatch. One whiffed ability or lazy play could mean your entire team gets snowballed. Those strong individualized roles for heroes quickly backfire as you realize that counterpicking is key, meaning that you'll usually be swapping off the hero you want to spend time with in favor of what hero you need, or worse, be pressured off into what your team thinks they need. That character select screen goes from a well of infinite possibilities into a spreadsheet with optimal picks and no-hopers very quickly.

It's a hardcore team-based FPS, and yet it's competitive mode is dysfunctional. Strict restrictions on who can play with who means that you can't actually play with whatever team you've cultivated and usually have to settle for scraping together some kind of rapport with randoms. Que the insane amount of bitching I talked about earlier being tripled. You simply can't play this team based game with anyone you might have actually been practicing the game with at a high level.

The final nail in the coffin for competitive Overwatch is, ironically, the heroes themselves. The game had a good sense for risk vs reward when it started, but a series of overwhelming additions seemingly added out of obligation have broken this idea over it's knee. A new overwatch hero has to turn heads in a game that's already filled with broken abilities, so it seems like with each subsequent released boundaries get pushed and rules get broken. That might be part of the fun in a casual game, but in a competitive one it makes for a nightmarish hellscape where a bad decision by the hero designer can turn the game into a boring slog where you fight the same comps using the same strategies for months on end. If you think Kiriko's easy to use, Ultimate ability denying cleanse or illari's autohealing turret are a little frustrating to deal with in quick play imagine dealing with it in every game.

No hero bans in sight give you no control over your experience either, so the community can't even pick out problem heroes until the developers fix them like they can in games like Rainbow Six Siege. Blizzard has remained adamant that players should always have access to the full roster to pick from..or at least they did, until they started locking new heroes behind predatory battle passes. It's fine if it lines their pockets, essentially.

All of these had knock on effects on the game's ambitions as a pro esport. There was no variance in team comps and the few characters with skill expression were outgunned by boring, fire and forget cooldown rotation. It was sluggish from the word go, but it limped along through sheer force by activision until sponsorships dried up in the wake of Blizzard's notorious sexual harassment scandal and viewership hit all time lows.

So the competitive scene is in shambles and the game is a joke at high level play, which funnels sweats back into quick play and ironically makes the experience woeful for the casual player. There has to be some kind of third option to just relieve some stress and fuck around. And there is...if you don't mind playing the same shallow, reheated arcade modes that have been in rotation since 2016. Modes like low gravity and Mei's Snowball fight didn't hold anyone's attention back then and they barely do now. The odd inspired mode like limited duel can be fun for a lot longer, but the rotation means you'll have to wait until the day it's available. Even the casual modes are uneven and designed to exploit fomo.

The obvious third pillar Overwatch has been missing was planned to be an extensive single player mode built in with replayability and RPG progression, with the team able to lean into making abilities more overpowered and fun without any of that pesky obligation to balance. Not only would spending time with your favorite heroes be allowed, it'd be encouraged as you'd unlock new abilities for the time spent. Alas, after a quiet, protracted development cycle it fell through and left the lopsided experience we're left with today.

What little progression there was in Overwatch 1 was gutted out. It used to be possible to earn special skins in event challenges or by just completing enough games. You could probably make a great point about how such extrinsic motivators can directly contribute to low match quality by having people force themselves to play beyond what's satisfying to earn virtual goodies, and I'd probably agree, but the current system is far worse. A lot of the same trappings still exist, just rearranged and forcing you to drop real money on overpriced currency to participate. That cool Tracer skin is still locked behind a grind, but now the GRIND is locked behind a 10$ buy in. It cuts into the fun for the crowd who doesn't want to spend money and exploits those who can't help themselves. it's a lose, lose unless your name is Activision-Blizzard.

In 2024, after almost 8 years, it feels like Overwatch is buckling under it's own weight. I've been playing since 2016, and while I can say for a fact that parts of the game are still good, they're mostly things that came out that year. Making risky plays with Tracer's extensive movement, landing a critical dive with Winston or saving a friend at the last moment as Mercy still feel good, and syncing those risky plays up as a team to cover each other still feels like nothing else in the genre.

The problem is they're experiences that become increasingly rare, suffocating under poorly considered addition after poorly considered addition. Your old favorites feel obsolete in the face of new characters that can do their jobs in less interesting ways or deny their impact entirely with no skill required. Good times with your friends feel fleeting as the game quickly turns into a sweatfest with half the modes bent on breaking up the squad anyway. Any cool addition is underlined with increasingly growing price tags.

It seems like it wont be much longer before the dam busts. A pivotal leadership change from microsoft could stem some of the damage, but from where I'm standing it feels like too little, too late. I loved you, Overwatch, but I can't stand by what you've become. Blizzard needs to stop and decide once and for all what they really want from this thing. Until it does, I'm taking an extended sabbatical.