The long wait for Overwatch 2 has come to an end. We were allowed to test the hero shooter extensively in advance.
If someone had told me a few years ago that I would be able to test Overwatch 2 at some point, I probably wouldn”t have been able to stop cheering and looking forward to it. Today, things are different. Not because my basic enthusiasm for Overwatch has changed, but because evaluating Overwatch 2 is damn difficult.
Overwatch 2 will not be released in its entirety. The big co-op mode, in which you fight against AI opponents and not against real people, will not be released until 2023. Instead, there will only be the usual multiplayer mode as you know it from Overwatch 1 – but with some changes and as a Free2Play model.
In the last few days, I was able to play this multiplayer mode, including new heroes, maps and Battlepass, in order to draw a first conclusion for you. As usual, we will only give a final rating after we have been able to test the release under live conditions.
Table of Contents
Does Overwatch 2 work for newcomers?
Before we go into detail and compare Overwatch 2 to its predecessor, let”s briefly talk about how well Overwatch 2 works for new players, because thanks to the Free2Play model, there should now be plenty of hero shooter new blood waiting in the wings.
The good news is that Overwatch 2 is easy to understand but difficult to master. The basics are quickly grasped and, unlike Counter-Strike or similar shooters, you don”t have to learn scatter patterns or master difficult manoeuvres on the first go. Thanks to the large hero pool and the many modes, there is a suitable character for everyone.
The situation is likely to be different in the rated game. Those who have already played Overwatch 1 can shine with a knowledge advantage compared to newcomers, because Overwatch 2 is similar, if not identical, to its predecessor in many aspects. Here you will have to compete as a newcomer with opponents who have hundreds of hours of experience ahead of you.
New maps and mode, old gameplay
If you”ve already played Overwatch 1, you”ll feel right at home in Overwatch 2, because most of the modes and maps have been carried over directly from the predecessor and have been spruced up a bit. For example, you will find more details on the old maps, but these have no influence on your gaming experience.
The six new maps fit sensibly and organically into the pool and are just as detailed and beautifully designed as their predecessors. They also offer you enough variety in terms of gameplay. While you fight your way through narrow urban canyons in Midtown, the Circuit Royal in Monte Carlo is designed much more openly, so that the adjacent shops offer you enough cover and flanking options to surprise your opponents.
We”ve taken a walk around the Circuit Royal so you can get an idea of the new map:
Three of the six new maps are designed exclusively for the new Push Mode. In this mode, you fight with your opponents for control of a robot that pushes barricades into the enemy base. If your team is at the robot, it pushes your barrier into the enemy base; if your enemies take control, it turns around and pushes the enemy barricade into your base. The winner is the team whose barrier has been pushed further into the opponents” base.
The push mode is quite fun, but when playing it feels very much like a hybrid of the already familiar modes of payload escort and territory conquest. It doesn”t really feel innovative because you are still only fighting for one object. An opportunity has been missed here to break out of the old rut and play with several objectives at the same time.
Make five out of six
The decision to continue to focus on just one objective may also be due to the new team constellation. While in Overwatch 1 you still worked together with five other players, in Overwatch two the team size has been reduced so that now only ten players enter the match instead of twelve. In the fixed role mode, this means that there is only one tank instead of two.
What sounds like a detail change at first has huge effects on the entire game. Instead of shooting at the shields of two tanks for three days, the matches are now much faster and more hectic. Positions have to be changed constantly and tried and tested strategies have to be rethought. The healer”s life in particular is now harder than ever, as you”re even more easily targeted by the enemy damage dealers while your tank desperately tries to form a front line and protect your butt at the same time.
The removal of a team member makes Overwatch much more dynamic, but according to our impressions of the game so far, it also makes it more frustrating, because the balancing is currently still a problem. Healers fall too quickly, while the tanks show great differences in stamina. If Blizzard continues to work on this in the future and fixes the problems, the smaller teams could finally bring the breath of fresh air that Overwatch desperately needed.
New heroes, new tricks, new problems
The balancing problems are also related to the new heroes and the reworks of the existing ones, because here the developers have screwed and changed a lot.
The former damage dealer Doomfist is now a tank, Orisa forfeits her shield against a spear, Bastion can move in his tank form and Cassidy now throws sticky bombs instead of stun grenades. Many of these abilities and changes still feel a little bumpy. For example, Doomfist currently seems far too strong, while Cassidy”s grenade does hardly any noticeable damage.
The three new heroes Sojourn, Junkerqueen and Kiriko are better thought out. All three need some practice, but they add new abilities and tactical manoeuvres to the hero pool. With Kiriko, for example, I can hide behind walls and thus heal my team members unnoticed, while with Sojourn I slither across the map like my cats across our parquet floor at play and deliver a difficult target.
Shop instead of lootboxes
But the most controversially discussed innovation in Overwatch 2 is certainly the monetisation model. Since you can play Overwatch 2 for free, as mentioned at the beginning, there is a shop, a Battle Pass and various currencies in the game. The loot boxes known from the predecessor, on the other hand, have been removed.
The shop itself is relatively simple: In addition to the overview page with various bundle options, the shop is divided into seasonal and e-sport offers. A just for you
page is to follow (according to the developers).
The Overwatch League offers already existed in the predecessor. Here you can buy skins in the colours of the major e-sports teams or individual special skins. You pay in so-called League Tokens. A special skin costs the equivalent of 15 euros or 300 tokens. Skins in the respective team colours cost the equivalent of 7.50 euros or 150 tokens.
You can also get the tokens if you have connected your Battle.net account to Twitch and watch the official e-sports matches there. You earn five tokens per hour. That means you have to watch 30 hours of Overwatch League to get a skin in team colours and 60 hours for the special skins. That”s not cheap.
You can find all kinds of cosmetic items in the seasonal shop. Here you pay with Overwatch coins, whereby 100 coins roughly correspond to one euro of real money. You can also collect small amounts of coins by completing weekly challenges. Currently, that”s about 60 coins per week. We can”t buy individual skins at the moment, but only as a bundle with some extras like sprays, highlight intros etc. The prices for these bundles range between 1,500 coins (about 15 euros) for epic skins and 2,000 coins (about 20 euros) for legendary skins.
Although the shop is currently limited purely to cosmetic items, and comparable Free2Play shops like League of Legends are similarly hefty, a sour taste nevertheless remains. Those who played regularly in Overwatch 1 were rewarded much more. Blizzard”s own Hearthstone is also far more generous when it comes to rewards for challenges, although the collectible card game is not only about cosmetic items.
On the positive side, Overwatch 2 does away with the gambling factor of its predecessor, because you no longer draw loot boxes, but can buy the bundle that interests you the most.
The good news is: If you don”t give a damn about the look of your heroes, you will basically have the same gaming experience in Overwatch 2 as those who spend money. With one important exception, which we will now address.
Bellyache of the Battle Pass
Similar to the shop, the seasonal Battle Pass also focuses on cosmetic items. This is divided into two levels: A free Battle Pass and its paid premium model, which you can buy for the equivalent of 10 euros.
In the free model, you unlock a cosmetic reward every five levels and the new heroine Kiriko at level 55. Owners of the premium variant will receive a cosmetic reward every level, a 20 percent experience booster for the entire season and unlock the new heroine immediately.
There are a total of 80 Battle Pass levels that you can level up. Each level requires 10,000 experience points. On average, you will receive around 1,000 experience points per match. You will receive bonus points by completing daily quests.
To play through the entire Battle Pass, you need 800,000 experience points. We cannot yet estimate how quickly these can be earned, as not all challenges (such as the hero challenges) have been unlocked yet. But we can already say one thing: If you want to unlock the new heroine at level 55 in the free pass, you will have to play quite a lot.
If you miss out on new heroes or don”t manage to unlock them in the Battle Pass, you can unlock them in later seasons through challenges or in the shop.
And this is exactly where the sticking point lies: while new heroes have always been available to everyone up to now, an artificial barrier is now being created that could become even more exciting, especially in Ranked mode. If, for example, a new hero or heroine is particularly strong, those who immediately unlock this heroine with real money would have a tangible advantage.
This is an often-criticised aspect of the competitor League of Legends, for example: new champions tend to be particularly strong shortly after release, so that an incentive is created to buy this champion with real money rather than waiting. There is a danger that this will also happen with Overwatch 2.
Overwatch 2 is not a sequel
Measured by what Overwatch 2 offers and what changes it brings in comparison to its predecessor, it is simply not possible to speak of a sequel in good conscience, which makes the evaluation of the successor really difficult. Neither graphically nor in the gameplay are there any major changes that would justify the title Overwatch 2. Important features such as the long-awaited co-op mode are simply missing.
However, this does not mean that Overwatch 2 is a bad game – on the contrary. The hero shooter still plays wonderfully smoothly and is incredibly fun after the first match. If enough fresh content is added at regular intervals thanks to the Seasons, Overwatch 2 could become what Overwatch 1 always wanted to be – but that could have been achieved in principle with updates to the first part as well.
Editor”s Verdict
For me,
Overwatch is the perfect mixture of relaxed after-work play and the urge to try your luck in Ranked again. The varied hero pool including equally varied abilities, the beautifully designed maps and the background stories of the individual characters show how much potential there is in the hero shooter. I am all the more sad that the co-op mode, which is supposed to finally drive the story forward, will not be released until 2023.
To be honest, I still think that Overwatch 2 could have been a big update to its predecessor and the campaign would have been more customer-friendly as paid DLC. But maybe Overwatch needed this kickstart in the form of a second part to get back on its feet. The planned updates and seasons at least sound quite promising. But Overwatch 2 has yet to prove that it really learns from the mistakes of its predecessor in the long term.
