Overwatch (2023)

First Impressions / Background: I’ve been playing Overwatch since Season 9 of OW1, covering every role — DPS, Tank, and Support — and usually sitting high Diamond to low Master. Back then, Overwatch 1 felt like a true classic. Sure, I admit I look at it with rose-tinted glasses, but the community, progression, and excitement were unmatched. With Overwatch 2, things feel more modern and polished, yet somehow less meaningful.

Heroes / Gameplay: The roster remains iconic. My favorites are Cassidy (formerly McCree), Genji, and Ana. Every hero has distinct abilities and gimmicks that make the game endlessly replayable. Gameplay-wise, OW2 still runs smoothly and the new perk system — bringing back old OW1 abilities — adds some spice. But the competitive experience has changed. Communication is practically dead; even strong players can’t solo carry anymore, not even my friend who’s a Top 500 DPS with insane aim and gamesense.

Maps / Modes: Map design is where my frustration really kicks in. I can’t stand Push maps (robot escort) or those three-point capture maps. They feel chaotic, ADHD-level busy, with endless high grounds and choke points that just aren’t fun. It’s actually a highlight when classic maps like King’s Row, Route 66, or Lijiang Tower appear. Even maps I once disliked, like Blizzard World, now feel refreshing compared to the new pool. On the positive side, the ban system and the ability to vote for maps are solid additions that help balance things out a bit.

Progression / Monetization: Here’s where OW2 really stumbles. In OW1, you got free loot boxes every level, which made even casual play rewarding. Skins weren’t locked behind microtransactions; they were fun to grind. In OW2, it’s all monetization — flashy skins, battle passes, and not much else. The promised story mode never materialized, leaving only cosmetics instead of meaningful new content. It feels like a missed opportunity for expanding the heroes and lore.

Competitive Scene / Relevance: Once upon a time, I followed every Seoul Dynasty match and pro play was a big deal. Now, pro play feels almost irrelevant. The game has drifted from being an esport phenomenon into a live-service grind with little direction. OW2 isn’t a bad game — but it lacks purpose.

Conclusion / Personal Take: Overwatch 2 is fun enough that I still log in every other day with a friend, and it continues to deliver those intense, rage-inducing, and laugh-out-loud moments. But compared to what it once was, it feels aimless. A modernized version of a classic, but one that sacrificed its heart for microtransactions and poorly designed maps. I still love it, but I can’t help thinking how much better it could have been if Blizzard had chosen a different path.

Playtime: 2,5 hours

Review

I played this for a bit. It's fun. Character unlocks don't seem to take too long. Nice variety of skills and such. Team balance is an issue, but with matches being fairly short at least it won't hurt too long. I lost interest after a few days, but that's more because i've already played so many PVP shooters so much (DoD, UrT, TF2, BF3/4, etc). Also, i kinda miss vehicles. OW2 has tanks but it's not the same. :-P

I've been playing Overwatch 2 since launch, and played the original Overwatch for about five years, so I am not at all a casual player. I have put hundreds of hours into this game, and am masters rank on support. For the sake of keeping the review short, I am just going to say what I love most about the game, and what I dislike the most.

What I love most about this game is the heroes. There is a great variety of characters to play and unlike Apex Legends or Valorant, they are all completely different (rather than having just one or two different abilities but the same guns). There is someone for everybody's playstyle, including non-aim-intensive heroes for those who do not typically play shooters. The mechanics of certain heroes is hard to find in any other game, making you come back to the game again and again. While I realise that there is a joke (especially on the negative reviews bombing the game on steam) that the characters are pornographic, there are also some characters (Zarya) that have different body types than would typically be seen in this type of game. The result of these things for me is that I find the heroes in the game to be more enjoyable to play than in any other hero shooters i've encountered.

While there are many many issues with the game (the monetisation, developers lying to the community, unbalanced heroes at times) the one that ruins this game the most on PC is the toxicity. For some reason, this game is incredibly toxic. The average Overwatch player seems to be constantly tilted, and feels the need to find someone on the team to blame for everything. As a support player, I tend to be able to avoid being blamed for a loss, but it becomes very exhausting and aggravating when every game is just the tank blaming the DPS rather than focusing on the game. Even in quick play (the non-competitive mode), where people should be able to try out new heroes or practice heroes they are not great on yet, someone will type in chat to call someone else 'trash'. In a good game where there is harmony in the team, someone will still feel the need to say 'support diff' or 'dps diff' when we win, to rub it in the other teams face, I guess. The answer may be to just get out of chat and voice chat, but then you risk missing important calls that could help the team, so its a double-edged sword.

I have the game on both PC and console, and honestly while playing with a keyboard allows you more control, if you want to avoid toxicity I would recommend playing the console version, as nobody uses voice chat and there is no text chat.

It's hard to review a game like this with continuous updates, events, and content released over time since it's never a static experience. I'll try to ignore to some degree more recent updates and talk more about the game in general, but some of the content releases are essential to the game itself, making that unavoidable to an extent. The main reason I don't want to focus too much on the most recent updates is for all I know, a year from now, they'll be doing content releases totally different, for better or for worse, and while every review is of course a snapshot of your impression at the time of writing, I'd like to focus on the game itself rather than just the latest updates that may not be representative of the game's past and future. But there will inevitably be some of that too.

For context, while I didn't play it quite as much as some people, I definitely had a pretty big Overwatch phase, mainly around 2016-2017 or so when I played a ton. I've picked it up for a bit a few times since then, but never very dedicated or for very long until Overwatch 2. I played Overwatch 1 almost entirely on console, though I did try it on PC as well, whereas with Overwatch 2 I've played exclusively on PC. I think some of my impressions have a bit more to do with the shift to PC than the updates to the game, but it's hard to parse out which differences are attributable to which shift. As a brief aside, I think PC is the more definitive way to play the game, but does have a steeper learning curve and I certainly have enjoyed both.

Overall, I think Overwatch 2 is just as good, if not better than its "predecessor." And...okay yeah, I'm already doing mocking scare quotes, so I might as well get it out of the way now and say it's honestly pretty stupid to even call it a sequel rather than just a fairly significant update moving toward a shift in content release structure. One of the updates was graphical and while not a tremendous step up graphically, there are people who are unable to run Overwatch 2 and were able to run Overwatch just fine. Making a mandatory graphics update like that to Overwatch would've likely pissed a lot of people off...even if I'm not sure the sequel model pissed them off less, especially since they shut down the Overwatch servers and it basically became that mandatory update in effect. Anyway, I'll still discuss the game as a sequel herein, since that's what it's called, and it's simpler that way, but I just wanted to acknowledge that I definitely agree that the characterization is pretty silly in itself.

So okay, where was I? Controversy aside, I think Overwatch 2 is really fun. It took everything good about Overwatch and improved on it in some ways, but in most ways it just feels different, fresher even. For a game that's been out for years and been generally positively reviewed, I think "different" is a worthy aim over trying to create something entirely new. Some of the changes I think have pros and cons. For instance, I think on balance I like 5v5 a good deal better for a few reasons, but I fully understand any disagreement and think there are certainly tradeoffs that come with it. I'm ambivalent on the new Push maps as well. Neither shift feels like I'm playing an entirely new game really—the characters and mechanics still feel very much like the first game—but it's a noticeable difference.

One thing I haven't liked so much is that I've felt weirdly overwhelmed, though this probably has more to do with getting more into it for the first time in like 5 years or so than any real difference to the game. I mained Pharah in Overwatch 1, but I was happy to play pretty much whoever and generally filled (which before role queue meant I was basically never Pharah in comp since we already had 3-4 people scrambling for DPS). I still liked that a lot though. I got to be quite good at Pharah but got to play a decent variety, generally just maining each character for a few hours to learn them before slipping them into my pick rotation, which eventually included just about every character in the initial roster. For whatever reason, in Overwatch 2 I've felt much less comfortable experimenting. I think this may in part be because I'm playing on PC and also in part because people have generally just gotten better at the game, but I consistently feel like I have to play my ass off to measure up to my team. I haven't had much toxicity aimed at me, but as a perfectionist, I still hate feeling like the weakest person on the team (and frankly tend to give myself shit if I'm not the top 1 or 2) and learning new chars, even in quickplay, takes some stumbling through. So that learning curve for adding heroes to my lineup has been pretty gradual. Even though the characters are mostly the same roster as the first game, there have been so many changes and it's been so many years since I was more competent, I'm barely even any good at Pharah anymore (at least by my standards) and feel like my skills with the bulk of characters are either too rusty to count, or irrelevant due to changes in the game/meta, and require relearning.

That said, every hero I've learned in Overwatch 2 has been a ton of fun. My most comfortable is definitely Kiriko who I love playing as given she's quite strong, versatile, and has a very high skill ceiling that requires a lot of situational awareness and game sense, which is right up my try-hard alley. As one of the new heroes and one they like to plaster over their marketing, I think she was a great addition to the game.

The different roles feel rather distinct in Overwatch 2, perhaps more so than in the original game. Tank can be super fun when you're on a roll, but it is easily my worst role, in part because of how much pressure I feel being the only tank and honestly not fully understanding what I should be doing in all cases. While it does feel super cool to be so beefy and powerful, you really have to know what you're doing and while they weren't quite toxic, the only times I've had ire directed at me in voice chat from my team was in a game I rolled tank and wasn't handling it well. I've seen a lot of complaints about playing support, but that's where I've had the most fun so far. I feel like it's only become a more versatile role that isn't just a healbot anymore and I frankly don't get a lot of the complaints I've read (though I'm also pretty casual when it comes to Ranked, so maybe it's more frustrating in higher ranks). DPS I think is pretty fun too but there are so many chars and I've only practiced a few of them in Overwatch 2 so I have less experience there.

As far as touching briefly on the release structure, I do appreciate the regular planned releases and knowing when a new hero or map is in the pipeline and that they're significantly more regular than in Overwatch 1. The new heroes have additionally been really cool and have changed the game in interesting ways. I haven't played this season but at the time of this writing, Lifeweaver recently came out and looks like a character that shakes things up a lot. The pricing structure is more the concern and while there's been talk of fixing things...Blizzard has been even crummier than usual with its most recent announcements, so I'm not holding my breath.

D'aww, who says Overwatch is all toxic? :)

Still, Overwatch 2 is a game I just pick up from time to time, not one I'm devoted to ranking up in nonstop. It's still super fun to play with your friends on voice chat, whether you're in try-hard mode or just messing around shooting the shit while playing. Despite being a game with a lot of strategy and technique, I find it surprisingly quite playable on autopilot while chatting. For that mentality, I think it's an excellent game. It's definitely got some flaws, some they're "working on" like the awful, AWFUL matchmaking, but the rest of the issues aren't too bad in my eyes. I think as a casual experience it's quite good and I definitely got pretty hooked back in Seasons 2 and 3, pulling my first "stay up till 5am gaming even though I really shouldn't" in years.

So while I avoided talking about the more recent updates to the game over time, as I prefaced, I think ultimately they're a lot to do with my 4 star rating instead of 5 stars, primarily in how they're rolled out and monetized rather than the content itself, which is usually quite good. The gameplay is awesome and I think it's a wonderful social game to play with friends. But it is so repeatedly made clear that the Overwatch team is floundering, can't make up their minds, and is really dropping the ball on the implementation. I close with the above image because I loved this emote that was added for the 2023 Valentine's Day event. But as cute as it is, you literally couldn't earn it during the entire event. There wasn't even clear criteria for how you earn it as you only even knew it existed from the advertisements showing it. The team recognized on day 2 or 3 of the event that there was a glitch that left it out of the game and they were "working on it." ...So the multi-week event goes on and of course they never put it in during the event in any of the patches. It was weeks later that, if you happened to have achieved the invisible requirements anyway during the event, it was added to your gallery (without notification of course). If you didn't, too bad. Fumbles like this seem emblematic of the team's recent work even aside from the shitty policies I haven't bothered to cover. Sure, maybe—hopefully—a year from now this will be a moot point because they've gotten their shit together. But with the shoddy implementation of so many good ideas—and I really think that other than the monetization, they've had good ideas—I can't really justify 5 stars, as much as I would like to.

Anyway, I'm sure they'll get their shit together, right? Right?!

Overwatch 2's PvE Hero Mode Is Being Scrapped

And there it is. I had given up on this a long time ago, but it's still disappointing to hear the news. Reading this interview, it seems the entire Overwatch 2 development process was severely mismanaged. I find it really suspect that they cite talent trees as an example of why the game was too complex to make... Really? We're talking about a PvE experience here, not something that has to be incessantly balanced. WIthout a substantive PvE experience (I'm just assuming these new "Story Missions" will have no kind of progression or anything to make you want to play it more than once), and with Ranked feeling as bad as it currently does, I can say I've lost all interest in Overwatch. Very sad.

The first Overwatch was my game of the year for 2016. Back then, I was still living in ignorant bliss before Blizzard got outed as a toxic dumpster fire of a company, and still under the illusion that their world-class developers could always pull through in the end.

Overwatch 2, which in reality is a major update for Overwatch designed to turn it into a monetized nightmare, is still addictive and fun despite Blizzard's best efforts to suck the soul out of the game. Most of this is due to the game mechanics, maps and characters that have been carried over from the original Overwatch, with some smart tweaks to the game (Such as slashing a player from each team) that make it feel tighter and more fast paced than ever. The new tug-of-war mode, "Push," is quite fun, and the trio of new characters feel right at home here.

But let's not forget that this is an update that has been in the works for at least 2 years. While a handful of new characters and maps is great, the bulk of the work here went into the implementation of the horrid Battle Pass and Store. These are strangely unrewarding and a price-gouging purgatory, respectively. For the low price of $20 USD, or a short 8-month challenge grind, you can now get a single legendary skin that you could easily earn through gameplay just a few months ago! Give me a break. I never thought I'd say this, but it makes me miss the days of loot boxes.

Blizzard has seen it apt to sacrifice many of the game's great and unique mechanics at the altar of this monetization system--mechanics that made Overwatch such a breath of fresh air in the shooter genre in the first place. Here's just a short list of things that were inexplicably removed from the game:

• Your account level. If you want ANY sense of progression on your account, better get to grinding that Battle Pass!
• Players will no longer be "on fire" to indicate to other players that they are playing well. Though it seems they forgot to remove the voice lines for this.
• Match Cards which displayed accomplishments at the end of a match and allowed players to recognize each others' skill through voting.
• Competitive rank adjustment at the end of each match. You now have to WIN 7 matches for your rank to adjust, meaning you can spend significant amounts of time with NO sense of reward or feedback from the game, making things feel pointless.
• The entire Assault game mode and its respective maps (Hanamura, Temple of Anubis, Volskaya Industries, Paris, Horizon Lunar Colony). It may not have been a favorite of the competitive community, but it gave the game a greater sense of variety.
• While map pools make sense for the competitive mode, there's no reason for there to be missing maps in Quickplay. As it stands, Overwatch 2 removed more maps than it added.
• The indicators showing other players' ranks or if they are in a group.
• Any kind of reward for participating in the Arcade modes.

In conclusion, Overwatch 2 takes a game people already loved, and strips it for parts which can be nickle and dimed. I wouldn't have played as much of this season as I did if it weren't for wanting to play with friends, but it was pretty disheartening to see how the game has fallen backwards. I am open to revising my opinion once the fabled co-op mode that was promised for Overwatch 2 comes out, but at this rate, there's no reason for me to believe that won't end up being a soulless slog too.

It's Overwatch 1, but a massive balance patch, UI overhaul (for the worst, I miss medals though this one is fine) and is 'free to play' but pay to enjoy. The Battle Pass being how we will unlock heroes SUCKS. I had OW so I'm fine for now, but that is a time sink to just be able to try the new things?

The coins are the biggest offender however. To get currency for new skins, emotes, sprays you have to get the new special coins, but these you can only get from doing weekly missions. A legendary is 1900 coins, and assuming you complete every weekly mission (even with somewhat dedicated playing that could be challenging) you get 60. There is just no shot you can buy a skin F2P that you want, if it's not on the battlepass (assuming it's one of the free ones). WHY THE FUCK DO YOU GET LESS FOR PLAYING MORE?!?!! Like don't get me wrong, as a casual player who just hops on w mates once a week or so I'm fine to get 30 for doing a little bit of work, but those missions are big, and doing all 11? A tall task. And your reward for completion is an extra 10 coins, it really feels like a spit on the face of those who really want to try and afford the things they want.

The battlepass is egregious. Apex Legends and Yu-gi-oh Master Duel have imo the best battlepass systems I've seen. You are rewarded for your time but not mandated. To fix OW2's I would 1) add currency to the pass 2) do that thing where there's 2 tiers, a f2p one and a premium pass that has better (or if you have to put blanks in the f2p one) more rewards, and most importantly if you finish the battlepass you should get equal or profit for the currency it costs to buy it. This model clearly isn't hurting YGO:MD or Apex, and rewards players for committing their time to this game over others.

I understand removing lootboxes came at a cost, but having no reliable way to get cosmetics (bc the battlepass doesn't reward people remotely close to lootboxes in 1) really takes the joy out. Also why aren't there levels anymore? I don't care if I can see it in my profile, what does removing level change? Why wouldnt giving coins for leveling work? You clearly want to be stingy but even 10/level is better than nothing. The game's current model also means there is 0 incentive to continue playing when you do finish the battlepass: You don't enough coins to be worth still playing for those, and there are no other rewards, so why bother? This game really feels like its hurried, not thought-out in the slightest. Almost like they're compensating for shitty workplace scandals...strange, bad workplace make bad game?

They're so desperate for porn of those new characters to boost their game as well, it's not even close to subtle. Sure it'll work but I can see the classic characters keeping more appeal (Despite them thighs of Soujorn, D.Va was the one trending the most as soon as it was cracked.)

I don't have much positive to say, I'm looking forward to the Campaign, the gameplay is fine but it's not changed, really, so what is worth saying?

Picked up both Splatoon 3 and Overwatch 2 recently as I was looking for a good multiplayer shooter. Both are extremely similar to their previous iterations and extremely well made but seem to be banking on bringing in new and old players to revive interest in their games.

Despite its horrible launch problems I am enjoying Overwatch 2 much more than Splatoon 3. From my experience Splatoon 3 seems to be much more about killing the other team members than the primary objective of painting the map, which means unless you can get the kills you are not going to make a difference. Meanwhile in Overwatch I found healers to be immensely impactful and enjoyable to play regardless of whether your team was doing well or not.

Overwatch’s launch problems really irked me but it seems to be getting smoothed out and I will definitely keep playing.