OVERWATCH 2

Blizzard's new entry doesn't quite earn sequel status

- Tyler Colp

NEED TO KNOW

RELEASE TBC

DEVELOPER Blizzard Entertainment

PUBLISHER In-house

LINK bit.ly/3vQZKd2

The toughest battle I fought while playing Overwatch 2 was trying to figure out why it’s a sequel. Blizzard’s follow-up to its 2016 team-based hero shooter doesn’t make substantial enough changes to the game that you can still play today. It’s too familiar, and that only heightens the current game’s issues.

If you, like me, have played Overwatch since its inception, you can track the progress of the game by memory alone. What started as an ambitious, goofy shooter for people who don’t play traditional FPS games like Call of Duty and Battlefield has slowly turned into a game that keeps dialling up its lethality to mirror its competitors. So much has changed since 2016, and a lot of it comes from how Overwatch skewered the idea of what FPS games could be. Valorant and Apex Legends wouldn’t exist if Overwatch hadn’t roused the shooter audience with a colourful cast of characters with unique abilities and weapons.

Overwatch 2 chooses to ignore the revolutionary spirit of its predecessor and looks to other games to try to revitalise where it left off. Needless to say, I disagree with Morgan (see p12) on how much Blizzard is actually shaking up here – for me, this is a game that mistakes imitation with innovation. Overwatch used to be the most diverse game, the FPS for all different types of players, the example that everyone followed. Now, it’s a game stuck trying to please its most hardcore players and hoping new ones will simply follow along.