Overwatch 2 is released on Steam, is immediately review bombed
More than 25,000 ‘overwhelmingly negative’ user reviews have been submitted
Overwatch 2 has been released on Steam, and has immediately been met with a deluge of negative reviews.
The game launched on Steam on Thursday at 2.30pm ET / 7.30pm BST, according to SteamDB.
At the time of writing, 15 hours have passed and the Overwatch 2 Steam page now has more than 25,000 reviews, of which Steam says are “overwhelmingly negative”.
Steam’s stats say that only around 14% of the user-submitted reviews are positive, with many players taking the opportunity to criticise the game’s free-to-play structure and its ditching of the much-hyped Hero missions.
“While it retains its charming design, wonderful cast of characters and some of the best multiplayer maps I’ve ever played on, Overwatch 2 brought a few enormous fundamental downgrades that leave it critically flawed,” reads one of the reviews tagged ‘most helpful’ on Steam.
“The game is fun, I still feel the experience I love so much in there, it’s just damaged by such intrusive greed I can’t recommend it to anyone,” it says.
According to SteamDB the game has achieved a peack of 52,349 concurrent players on Steam since its launch, making it the 14th most played game on Steam at the time of writing.
Overwatch 2 is the first of “a selection” of games Blizzard Entertainment plans to release on Steam. Players still need to connect to a Battle.Net account in order to play the game, as is the case on all platforms, which Blizzard says enables features like cross-play.
Overwatch‘s latest season also started on Thursday, adding the game’s first three Story missions. However, as was announced in June, these missions can only be accessed by buying the Overwatch 2: Invasion Bundle for $15.
The announcement has upset some players, who were already left feeling disappointed last month when Blizzard announced that it would be scrapping its planned main PvE ‘Hero’ mode.
Further reading
Overwatch 2’s story missions will cost $15 to access
Hero mode was one of the main features highlighted when Blizzard officially announced Overwatch 2 back in 2019, suggesting that one of the core reasons for the sequel was the addition of story-based PvE content.
Now fans have expressed frustration that the only remaining story content will cost $15 instead of being free-to-play like the rest of the game, with executive producer Jared Neuss confirming on Twitter that this only counts for the first three missions – any new story missions added in future seasons will have separate charges.
