Overwatch

The most-upvoted negative review of Overwatch has 21,456 votes. It opens like this:

EDIT (October 15th, 2024): A lot has changed in this year since Overwatch officially launched on Steam, some of my original negative points on this game now no longer apply. As people still regularly see this review and give awards, I believe it necessary to update this and paint a picture more accurate to today's experience.

The author, who has 589 hours in the game, left the original text underneath and added a correction on top. The thumbs-down still counts. It will count forever.

That is the problem with this store page in one artefact, and it's worth spelling out, because this morning I reviewed DRAGON BALL: Sparking! ZERO — a game whose 86.7% badge is far kinder than its current reception. Overwatch is the same distortion running the other way.

What the 31.2% is made of

Two things, mostly.

The August 2023 launch. Twenty-nine of the hundred most-helpful English negatives were written in a single quarter — the quarter Overwatch arrived on Steam. Then 8, then 6, 3, 6, 14 through 2024, and single digits through most of 2025 and 2026. The year totals fall cleanly: 37, 29, 21, 13.

The Simplified Chinese corpus. This is the bigger factor and it's invisible unless you split by language. Simplified Chinese accounts for 145,374 reviews — over a third of the total — at 7.7% positive. Blizzard's games went offline in mainland China after the NetEase publishing agreement lapsed, and stayed unavailable for more than a year. English sits at 40.4%. Korean is 48.6%, Brazilian Portuguese 60.3%, Spanish 59.7%, French 56.1%. The "Mostly Negative" badge is a weighted average in which one country's publishing dispute carries a third of the vote.

Split by language before you quote a badge. I've now found a 33-point English-to-Chinese gap here, 41 points on Delta Force, and 41 on Apex — it is never a small effect.

The part I'm not going to dismiss

It would be easy to write "review-bombing" and move on. I don't think that's honest, so here is the case for the bombing, which the corpus makes clearly.

Overwatch 2 was justified to its existing, paying audience by a PvE campaign with hero talent trees and a story mode. That campaign was cancelled. Meanwhile the original Overwatch — a game people had bought — was shut down and replaced with a free-to-play version built around a battle pass. PvE appears in 35 of the hundred negatives, "greed" in 23, and Blizzard by name in 48, more than any gameplay term.

The complaints are frequently from serious players: the median playtime across those hundred negatives is 100.8 hours, with a maximum of 2,691. An 11,586-vote review reads, in full: "They should make a sequel that includes the whole PvE experience we were promised with skill trees and call it Overwatch 2." That's not noise. That's a customer describing a product that was sold and not delivered.

There is also plain coordination in the data — several of the highest-voted negatives come from accounts with 0.1 hours played, and one 5,000-vote review is a verbatim copy of another with 7,969. Both things are true at once: an organised campaign, over a real grievance.

What playing it today is actually like

Good, and the numbers agree more than the badge suggests. 51 of the last 100 English reviews are positive, from players with an 82.5-hour median. The most-upvoted recent positive, from a 1,897-hour player, is explicitly about this: "I am actually kind of sad that this game has gotten so intensely review bombed and it might scare new players away."

Fifty-one percent is not vindication. It's a coin flip, and the current complaints are legitimate: matchmaking, an escape ability on seemingly every new hero, seasons where skins are the headline, and being penalised for disconnects caused by server problems. One 747-hour player's summary — "gameplay just feels poke heavy instead of risky playmaking" — is a specific, informed criticism of where the balance has drifted.

But the fundamentals are as strong as they've ever been. No shooter reads better in a chaotic fight than Overwatch; every ultimate is announced, every silhouette is distinct, every ability has a sound you learn. Blizzard are visibly working: Reign of Talon seasons through 2026, a new hero in June, loot boxes reintroduced as an earnable, a 10th-anniversary event in May, and a live esports circuit.

That anniversary is telling, incidentally. It counts from May 2016 — a launch this store page never sold. Blizzard have dropped the "2" from the branding entirely and now treat it as one continuous ten-year game.

The money

Free to play, and then: the Season 3 Ultimate Battle Pass Bundle is NZ$70.99. Per season. There are several seasons a year. A starter pack is NZ$17.99 and older bundles sit around NZ$26.99.

You can ignore all of it and play the whole game, which is why the value score here is an 8. But a seasonal cosmetic bundle costing more than most full-price releases is why the monetisation score is a 3, and it's the thing 46 of a hundred negatives are circling when they talk about skins.

The verdict

Overwatch earns a 7. As a piece of design it's a 9 — the game that created a genre and still executes it better than most of its imitators, now free.

It loses ground for a cancelled campaign that its own audience had already paid toward, a predecessor deleted to make room for it, a shop that prices a season's cosmetics above a full game, and a current player base only half of whom would recommend it. That's a real set of problems, not a misunderstanding.

But 31.2% is not a description of this game. It's a description of August 2023 and a publishing dispute in China, permanently averaged into a badge. Like Rainbow Six Siege and Counter-Strike 2, the number on the store page and the game behind it have come apart — and here the gap runs twenty points in the player's favour.

It's free. Read the last hundred reviews, not the badge, and decide from there.