Overwatch 2, a popular arcade shooter, released their “Halloween Terror” event a little over a week ago. The reception for the game has been incredibly mixed since it relaunched itself as a second installment in October of 2022. Its “Halloween Terror” event was, for another year in a row, a total Halloween flop.
Boasting about a new game mode, Junkenstein’s Laboratory, the game’s developers promised unique content. While it was a little more interesting than the event they’ve been running for the last few years in a row, it still falls short of being something truly engaging.
Junkenstein’s Laboratory re-explores the idea that the damage-dealing character Junkrat is a mad scientist, however, he is not featured in the game mode outside of a couple of silly voice lines that don’t really give him much character. It’s featured on a few maps, Lijiang Tower, Illios, Oasis, Busan, and Antarctica.
The game mode consists of capturing three control points, but within each round are cards where one can pick special power-ups, or “mutations”, for their character. This is a new mechanism that has been teased by the developers for story missions that never ended up coming out, so this aspect of the game mode was quite refreshing. The power-ups were fun to mix and match, creating uniqueness to each game one decides to play. Of course, there are only a few characters to pick for each role to slim down the amount of mutations they’d have to create.
While this is a first for Overwatch 2, I would have liked it if there were more animations between rounds to show “Junkenstein” giving us, the players, potions for our characters to mutate, rather than generic cards that display what the mutations entail. It felt like a lazy execution.
Other than that, the game re-released their usual Junkenstein’s revenge story mode, where one works with three other players with a choice of about six characters to defeat Junkrat as Junkenstein, and his minions, Mercy (“The Witch”), Reaper, and Symmetra (“The Summoner”).
The goal is to protect a giant door on the map, Adlersbrunn, which is a Halloween iteration of the map Eichenwalde. The second choice is an offshoot of the first, Junkenstein’s Revenge: Wrath of the Bride. Here, Sombra plays the Bride of Junkenstein, and in order to defeat her, four players have to find an alternate route throughout the castle, gated by Moira, who plays “The Banshee”, Winston, who plays the two Gargoyles, and Echo, who plays “The Marionette”.
Finally, towards the end of the castle, the players fight and defeat the Bride. This was released in October 2022 and is entirely black and white, set up as if it were an old-timey detective/monster-fighting thriller.
While classics cemented deep within Overwatch 2, these are mainly things the player base has been given in the past. Most of the fuss has been surrounding the customization in relation to skins. This season, Widowmaker gets a “Spellbinder” mythic skin, meaning a skin that can be customized in multiple ways to each player’s liking. Then, there was a collaboration with the anime My Hero Academia. Soon, the players will get the chance to purchase Halloween-related skins, where Illari, Mercy, and Symmetra get new Halloween skins. Symmetra is a witch, and Mercy and Illari are cats.
This is a shame as a long-time player of the game. The focus is, again, centered around paid items, rather than on actual new and exciting gameplay experiences. The game begins to feel hollow when the only reason to log in every couple of months is to spend money and receive nothing from the profits. If the Overwatch 2 team spent more of their efforts prioritizing paid content, they could still profit while giving the players something to enjoy and work hard through.
