But in online play - specifically, PvP - this isn’t how it works. Unless you’ve got a full six-stack made up of you and your friends, chances are people won’t care much about cooperating. And so, that entire aspect of Overwatch that I love - knowing my main inside out and fulfilling my role in tandem with the characters I’m surrounded by - dissipates into thin

Fortunately, the hero gallery is still a breeze to navigate and has been updated with new portraits for each character. Actual models are used this time around instead of stylised drawings, and I’m still not entirely sure which of them I prefer. I’m sure they’ll grow on me.

Overwatch wasn’t a failure. The servers didn’t need to go down. Blizzard has the cash available. If they can pay their nightmare marshmallow CEO millions in salary, stocks, and employee hush money , they can keep servers up. There’s no reason to insta-kill the original outside of shaking down fans.

Overwatch is my favourite multiplayer shooter of all time, right up there with Halo 3. It’s also my favourite objective-based team game, which is why I have around 1,000 hours played in the first place. I used to regularly compete on teams with an average rank of high Diamond/low Masters, so I know what I’m doing. The thing is, Overwatch doesn’t reward you for that, which means every single game quickly becomes a massive pain in the a

Even when (mostly) paying people back for their purchases on Stadia, Google is still showing it barely cares about its users. Not every game will allow saves to transfer. Hell, some games specifically designed for Stadia are now in limbo. Quick reminder - the people on the ground making these games are often creative folks who just want to bring something nice to the world. I’m not criticizing the engineers who made Stadia work or the artists and designers who make Overwatch look and play brilliantly. They deserve praise and probably better pay. Which, again, is funny considering these are all greedy companies sucking in dollar bills.

So many people are focusing on what the story might be, or how a campaign might look based on the tidbits of lore we’ve garnered from short films and comics. I’d like to learn more about Reinhardt, sure, but that’s not what Overwatch 2 needs to be. It needs a refined combat loop that offers you the same thrills of Competitive play, but in co-op

What Overwatch really needed was the same thing that every live-service Clash Game Mode needs: content. While development of Overwatch 2 caused a lengthy drought in the original, Overwatch wasn’t exactly on par with the rest of the live service game market either. A new hero every few months and a rehashed holiday event just weren’t cutting it. There’s a lot of people moaning about the new seasonal model in Overwatch 2, but if they were being honest, most of them would admit Overwatch wasn’t holding their attention. The luster fell off Overwatch after a couple of years, and the quarterly cadence of a new hero or map was not going to keep Overwatch al

I love this screen. It’s slick, colourful, and showcases how good I am at certain characters. I will say that I am not a Lucio main by choice, but largely because my team would be ruined without me healing their asses on a constant basis. All the usual customisation options for analysing your stats can be found here alongside statistics and challenges. It’s a shame that a lot of tasks have carried over from the first game instead of starting afresh, meaning your main source of progression this time around is the battle pass and not much else. Speaking of!

There’s no reason to sunset Overwatch before Overwatch 2. I get if we’re eight years down the line and Blizzard is like, "Hey, folks. Had a good run. But nobody’s using these servers and we need them for all the HR reports Bobby Kotick has buried ." But by killing Overwatch, Blizzard is saying, "We already got your money, so you’ll play the new game or nothing at all."

If you’re not intimately familiar with Overwatch, it might be hard to tell Overwatch 2 is even a different game. It has a few new characters and some new maps, a new game mode called Push, plus some subtle character redesigns, but it's largely the same game it's always been. But if you’ve been an active Overwatch player, a lot of the subtle changes have actually made a pretty big differe

Overwatch 2 is a strange game to review. It’s a free-to-play live-service experience that depends on a consistent audience to find games and progress through its battle pass. As you might have already guessed, there were only so many games journalists in the world to populate its servers as we rocketed towards the embargo. Thus I am left in a bit of a pickle.

The whole premise of Overwatch 2 is to offer a campaign. It’s not going to reinvent multiplayer, which is already a successful esport and will likely stay the exact same aside from the kind of regular updates we get now. All I want is for Overwatch 2’s campaign to be a blown-up version of Archives, though, as opposed to something that is emphatically single-player or something that incentivizes over-competing. I want it to give you plenty of opportunities to pull off a sick Barrage, but I don’t want Valkyrie or Coalescence to become pointless vs bots with stupid AI. I want there to be actual reasons for choosing to play as Winston instead of Hanzo, or Lucio instead of Tracer. I want maps that allow for the kind of absurd synergy you see in Assault on Volskaya, as opposed to just arbitrary ult-spamming in the middle of a wave-based minig