Overwatch 2 is released on Steam, is immediately review bombed

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

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Overwatch 2’s story missions will cost $15 to access

The news follows the decision to scrap the game's much-hyped Hero missions

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.