After several days of attempts I was finally able to login to Overwatch 2 to see what it's all about. So far, I'm not very impressed. Launching it for the first time, you're greeted with the same opening video from the first game. If you haven't played it, it's a good introduction, but if you have you can skip it easily enough. Unfortunately, the game locks you out of all the game modes until you play through the training mission. Again, the same exact training from the first game. I've played the first game; I didn't need a repeat of everything, including the training mission which I played before.
After you get through that, the main screen opens up and you see new thing number one, one of the new playable characters on the splash screen. New thing number two is the battle pass, which if you've played Fortnite before it'll be instantly recognizable. A handful of free items and then the rest locked behind the paid pass. This is their replacement for the loot boxes of the previous game, which are wildly considered a form of gambling now. Going into the Play menu gives you the various game modes. From here you'll seen new things number three and four: matches are now 5v5 instead of 6v6 and most of the characters are locked behind challenges. Looking quickly through the challenges list, most of the characters I saw were unlocked by just playing games. Unfortunately for me, I liked to play Bastion in the last game and here it can only be unlocked by playing sixty matches first.
Once you get into an actual match it's pretty much more of the same from the previous game. That isn't necessarily a bad thing, the gameplay was fun enough before and it continues to be good here plus there are a handful of new characters to use too. On the other hand, despite the addition of some new maps and game modes it's still almost entirely the same game as before.
Overall, the game is still fun, but the new changes are mostly minor. Sure, there's some new maps, characters, and game modes, but not much else has seemed to change to make it earn the 2 in the title quite yet. Reusing the old intro video and training mission doesn't help their point either. Additionally, having to unlock most of the characters individually after having them unlocked in the previous game stings a bit. Granted, it does force you to try out other characters, but considering each team is made up of specific class roles and no character can appear twice on the same team means you may not always get to play the character you want in the first place.
Now that Overwatch is shut down, Overwatch 2 is the only way you're playing the series at all. At least it's free to play, but at the moment this feels more like Overwatch 1.5 instead of 2. More things are promised to come in the future, which is nice, but I don't consider that when I'm looking at a game initially. Getting into the game may be tricky at the moment thanks to server issues, but with it being free you don't have much to lose by trying it out.
Edit Oct 9th
It turns out that if you play Overwatch 2 on a platform where you haven't purchased the original game most of the characters are locked, but if you go to the platform where you did purchase it and then do an account merge it'll unlock the content across all platforms. Just logging into a Battle.net account isn't enough and the merge can only be done on the platform the game was originally purchased on. Currently, it does take some time for the merge to complete. When I started mine last night it said I was 650,000 in the queue.
댓글