Some people coming back to Overwatch following the launch of Overwatch 2 might find themselves reminiscing about the good old days right about now, looking back on how great it was before Brigitte's inclusion sent the game's balance into disarray. Those returning from a long hiatus might at least see characters like Baptiste and Sigma as new additions, even though they've both been included for years, and given how much the game has changed since Brigitte's release, Overwatch 2 might feel like a substantial sequel to them.
  
However, when it comes to those who have stuck with the game for the past six years, their outlook on Overwatch 2 is likely to be significantly different, as it almost feels like just another beta test. It's made me wonder - how far can a game you really enjoy go in the wrong direction before it's simply not worth your time? At what point would you be better off getting your entertainment from somewhere else entirely? So much of Overwatch 2 is broken, incomplete, or just outright missing that it's very much a rushed and unnecessary sequel.

It's problematic and confusing even when it comes to its name and what actually constitutes a sequel. No title that I can recall has been so polarizing in its categorization as a sequel as Overwatch 2. Many games throughout history have essentially been edits of the original, like Sonic 2, Tekken 2, or Jak 3, to name a few; it's naturally very common to build the sequel on top of what came before. However, even with those titles, much of the content was replaced or added upon, including characters, stages, maps, etc. Green Hill Zone isn't in Sonic 2. The Marine Stadium isn't in Tekken 2, even if the theme is. Haven City does exist in Jak 3, but it boasts very significant changes, as parts of the city feature areas overrun by Metal Heads. 
 
It's important to bring these examples up, as Overwatch 2 is perhaps the only game in recent memory where the player base has pushed back against it even being called a sequel. Not only are all of the old arenas from Overwatch simply carried over into Overwatch 2, but a large portion of characters have also been pasted over without any significant changes. Worse still, some content is simply missing. One of the original ideas for Overwatch 2 was for it to be its own separate 'Player Vs. Environment' (PvE) experience. This, however, is still in active development, meaning that Overwatch 2 is currently best described as an update of the original experience.
 
One thing that is finished and operating as it should be for Overwatch 2 is the in-game shop. We've seen this before: release the game in whatever state it's in, that's fine, just as long as the shop is up and running. People will surely be in a mad dash to buy all of their favorite items before the shop refreshes in a few days' time. Those of you who remember the Credits from the original game probably also remember that new skins were 3,000 Credits, before being reduced to 1,000 Credits a year later. So, if you were patient, you could get a somewhat decent deal. Credits were also given out very generously; I had over 100,000 for a very long time in Overwatch, so there was no issue collecting skins at all. Perhaps two or three days of grinding for Credits was all it took, and that's if you were unlucky enough to not find the item you wanted in a loot box. 

As great as this was, perhaps it was too good, as the development of new content for Overwatch couldn't continue at the same pace once the sequel went into development. Something obviously had to change. Loot boxes also needed to go, because they were increasingly becoming outlawed. Aware that things on this front would become much worse in Overwatch 2, during the final days of Overwatch I went through the Hero Gallery one last time and bought every skin from every character that I thought looked nice, spending around 60,000 of my banked Credits.
 
With the launch of the sequel, those original credits are now called Legacy Credits and can be used in the hero gallery to buy non-seasonal items. So for example, Halloween-themed items cannot be purchased with Legacy Credits, even if they were released four years ago. Overwatch 2 introduces a new currency: Overwatch Coins, which you can either purchase using real-world money (approximately 500 for $5.00, with bonus coins awarded if you use the $20.00+ options) or earned at a rate of up to 60 per week by completing weekly tasks.
 
How much are the skins? They're 1,900 Overwatch Coins on average. Yes, skins that have been in the game for years at this point now cost almost $20.00. Honestly, it's really disappointing to see all the content in this game severely marked up. Absolutely everything is significantly more expensive than it should be. Even items you can spend Legacy Credits on are now more expensive on average. Voice lines, for example, have gone up from 75 to 100 Credits. So in general you'll need to spend more Credits to get the same items.
 
The madness doesn't end there, either. Overwatch League Tokens (yes, yet another currency) have also gone up in cost. What was once $4.99 in Overwatch for 100 League Tokens, is now $5.99. Overwatch League Premium Skins were 200 Tokens, and Team Home and Away skins were 100 Tokens. If you were expecting those prices to stay the same, let me remind you of the theme we have going on for Overwatch 2: everything costs more than it should. Premium skins now cost 300 League Tokens and Team skins are now 150. So, not only are League Tokens more expensive but so are the skins as well. I've spent around $500 on Overwatch throughout the years, but only $16.18 cents on Overwatch 2 so far, because its pricing structure is so predatory and such poor value for money.  I'm not totally against spending money, but the items have to at least be of a fair price.
 
In spite of all of this, there is some good news. If you go to your Battle.net account overview, you'll notice an option to link your console, YouTube, and Twitch accounts. This is how you get credited for Twitch and YouTube drops. For each hour of Overwatch League watched, you receive free League Tokens, awarded separately to each connected account. What this means is that if you've collected 800 free tokens on PC, you'll also have a separate stash of 800 on your Xbox Live Account (if you have it linked). Better yet, it doesn't matter whether you own the game or not on those other platforms yet. 

While I understand that the shop is how Blizzard plans to monetize development for Overwatch 2, what I don't understand is why the pricing of items is so high, to the point that they'll only appeal to a few consumers. It's insulting to be asked $19 for a skin that can only be used on one specific character, when you're queued for one specific role, in a first-person game where everyone else will see your skin more than you will.
 
But how's the gameplay, once you've settled on your skin (or not)? Frankly, it's very similar to the original Overwatch, except that there's now one less player on each team, which gives me some hope that character balance will reach a healthy spot at some point in the future. But the immediate impact of this change is that there's a lot more space to move around in. Tanks have all had considerable buffs to match the player count reduction (with the exception of Doomfist) and are enjoyable to use overall. Indeed, almost all of the characters are entertaining to play. The issue is that they vary in how effective they are and, even if they're fun to play, they may not necessarily be fun to play against (Orisa is a tedious bullet-sponge raid boss).
 
In terms of new content, there are three new characters: Junker Queen, Sojourn, and Kiriko.  Although I personally didn't feel at home with any of their play styles, they're nonetheless fairly well-balanced, so your teammates are unlikely to object if you decide to pick one of them, although Sojourn very much requires high levels of accuracy if you're going to use her effectively. 
 
Technically a handful of older characters have also been reworked so that they have new abilities and play styles: Orisa, Bastion, and Doomfist are in this category and meet the standard of being functionally new.  The standout of these is Orisa, whose new gameplay style is significantly more enjoyable than it used to be (standing behind a shield and slowly inching forward). She now has a javelin that can be used to negate projectiles, much like D.Va or Sigma, and which can also be thrown at enemies of course. The biggest thing holding her back is that she's a bit of bullet sponge that doesn't deal enough damage.

 
The other major new component of Overwatch 2 is Push mode. The objective here is to take control of a robot and have it push your team's barricade towards your enemy's spawning area, which means it's played exclusively on new maps designed specifically for it. Push mode is fun at first, largely because it's new and feels like a breath of fresh air. Over time, however, I came to feel like there was something missing from it, perhaps because players were still learning how to play the mode properly (many don't seem to understand that even if you have control of the robot and win the fight, you still have to regroup with your team or you'll be outnumbered by the enemy in the next fight).
  
Another thing that's new is the ping system, giving you the ability to call out enemy positions and payload, among other things. It's useful and works most of the time, but you're able to spam it to ping enemies through walls. There have been many times I've tried pinging the payload and instead pinged an enemy, sometimes even through two walls.
  
One of the most under-appreciated additions to Overwatch 2 is the reworked sound design. Most of the new weapon sounds are better (although a few actually sound worse, like Solider 76's pulse rifle), but the main improvement is that guns firing out in the open, or in a corridor, sound noticeably different and give a much better sense of where the shots are coming from. 

Overall, though, there's just not enough new content here. There are some balance changes, so for example Over-health has been changed to be identical across the board; Wrecking Ball gave no ultimate charge for attacking him while using his adaptive shields, which is no longer the case, but this and other similar changes are minor at best and most players are unlikely to notice or care about such small tweaks.
 
Also an insignificant upgrade: the graphics. Supposedly Overwatch 2 looks better than the original - and you might notice water leaking from pipes, or other little touches - but honestly, it pretty much looks the same. Despite playing Overwatch for six years I hardly notice anything different at all apart from the time of day, and even that delivers inconsistent results (Lijiang Tower looks great no matter the time of day, but King's Row looks awful with its sunset painting everything in view a harsh orange tint).
  
I realize that there's only so much that can be done to improve or change the visuals while keeping character progression intact. For it to truly look like a sequel, many of the game's assets would have to be remade, which would likely also mean all the skins being reworked as well. It's nice that the community's progression and purchases were respected, but this has clearly come at a great cost.
 
All things considered, as someone who was looking forward to this release since the day Jeff Kaplan announced it on stage in 2019, what we have here isn't even Overwatch 2. Overwatch 2 is supposed to be the PvE experience, with the PvP mode from the original being updated to match the new release. What we instead got was the PvP part first, updated to feature the worst battle pass in all of gaming, by a wide margin:

• The content you could have owned previously for free now costs 1,900 Overwatch Coins.
• The Season 1 battle pass itself is 'Cyberpunk' themed, yet most of the themed items are available outside of the pass for 1,900 or 2,200 Overwatch Coins.
• Completing all the required challenges will earn you, at most, 60 Overwatch Coins per week.
• The main portion of the battle pass itself is only 80 levels, yet costs 1,000 Overwatch Coins.
• Comparing what you get in the Fortnite Crew for $12, it would cost you almost five times the amount of money to get the equivalent content in Overwatch 2.

There's also a lot of content missing. If you're into competitive Overwatch, Push, Escort, and Hybrid game types are all present, but Assault has been removed, although that's mostly because players didn't particularly like that mode. Beyond that, Torbjorn was recently taken out of the game due to his “overload” ability having a double-stacking bug. Bastion also had a bug with his ult that was so game-breaking that he was temporarily deleted from the game, before being added back in last week. And just this week Mei was deleted and is not scheduled to return until November 15th. Surely by then, more bugs will cause yet another character to be temporarily removed for two weeks.
  
The maps Numbani and Junkertown were also strangely absent from the game. There's a map pool system, similar to the one that was implemented several years ago, and everyone hated it at the time because you'd get the same map three or four times in a row and it left the game feeling stripped of content. So why is this being done again? Is it perhaps to mask the removal of maps with bugs?
  
All of the above put together, it's made the last few weeks feel like a third beta test for Overwatch 2, disguised as a launch of a full game. 
  
There's little here that will bring you in if you didn't like Overwatch before, other than the fact that it's free. Even if you enjoy competitive games, it's designed in a way that you can go a full week or longer without being updated on your placements. With the game frequently freezing on the versus screen - several weeks after the release - I often won't have any idea where I'm placed until I either win 7 games or lose 20. And there's no easy way to keep track of these; Overwatch 2 inconveniently hides that information from you, as well as your exact placement within your rank, because your SR is now hidden. All you can see now is your rank, with each tier being split into five numbered sub-classes. If you place in Bronze 5, for example, you have no idea if the seven wins will be enough to get you to Bronze 4, or if you will remain in Bronze 5. There's no reason to not update someone on their standing after each and every game. 

Overwatch 2 is, for better or (mostly) worse, a live-service game. It's an incomplete, sloppy, buggy mess, with an unjustifiably expensive shop crammed full of useless trinkets. It isn't the sequel fans of the original deserved to have; in fact, it's not even aimed at those players, rather it seems Blizzard's priority is simply to milk money from the series' whales. Literally every week since its launch a character or map has been removed from the game because of a bug of some sort, and the major content that was due to support Overwatch 2's status as a sequel is still in development. Overwatch 2 sought to fix the deficiencies of the original game, and prior to release it really seemed like it might do that, but not only has it failed to do so, in many ways it's made the game worse. As it stands, the cons significantly outweigh the good; you're better off finding something else to play.