On Reviews for Overwatch 2

I don’t like Overwatch 2. I was born a Team Fortress 2 player, and Overwatch always felt like it was stepping on TF2’s toes. Back when Overwatch 1 came out, there were tons of similarities, but Overwatch 1 was tolerable as a game, even if it gave me horrible headaches. Overwatch 2 though, that came out and destroyed any respect that Overwatch 1 had earned. The sequel pissed all over players with horrendous micro-transactions, making things insanely grindy, making you work and grind or pay for new heroes and removing a whole player from your team, making it 5v5. And the only thing that was supposed to come with Overwatch 2, the whole PvE mode, never turned up. Instead we got a shitty DLC that you have to pay €15 for, that has a handful of co-op missions.

To put it bluntly, Overwatch 2 is a big pile of shit that forcibly pushes micro-transactions onto the player base, while killing off the original, meaning that anyone who bought Overwatch 1 could never play it again.

But a lot of Overwatch 2’s hate has been mostly… disconnected. On Battle.net, you only see Overwatch 2 as a game to play. You can see friends online and things like that, but anything and everything it sells are mostly done behind closed doors. There was no real way to discuss Overwatch 2 and review it in one single place. Sure, there are thousands of videos on Youtube, explaining why Overwatch 2 was bad, but Blizzard could always just ignore those videos.

Suddenly though, Blizzard decided to put Overwatch 2 on Steam. They clearly wanted to get more players into the game. However, putting a game on Steam means that you also get reviews on Steam. So, after all this time, players can publicly explain why they hate the game. As of writing, Overwatch 2 has an Overwhelmingly Negative score on the Steam store, and the reviews just keep on coming in. I’m writing this one day after Overwatch 2’s Steam debut and it’s amazing.

Honestly, it’s worth reading the reviews for yourself. There are a LOT of meme and joke reviews, but there’s also a plethora of reviews from people with years of pent up anger. Up until now, there was no place where you could publicly and openly review Overwatch 2 (or Overwatch 1 for that matter) and people are really going for it. Overwatch 2 has built up a lot of anger in its playerbase, and we are finally seeing that anger ooze out in these reviews. And the reviews cover a lot of topics. Not only are they complaining about the micro-transactions, but there’s reviews about game balance, the community itself (which isn’t particularly great in-game), the price of entry and cosmetics (which used to be obtainable quite easily), the grind for unlocking new heroes and, of course, the PvE game mode being completely given up on.

Meanwhile, our old friend Team Fortress 2 is still actually doing pretty well. Numbers are high and people have enjoyed the summer update, even if it was pretty small. In fact, many reviews for Overwatch 2 actually recommend that you try TF2. Which you should absolutely try.

I think this video sums it up best, by my old buddy Bacxaber:

But yeah, seeing these reviews for Overwatch 2? It’s quite the enjoyable experience. And the reviews are completely right. Overwatch 2 has done this damage to itself, and people are finally outing the game for being, well, awful. If any game deserves to be review-bombed, it’s Overwatch 2.

In the mean time, why not play Team Fortress 2 instead?