8 Reasons You Should Reinstall Overwatch 2

Is your hard drive taken up by too many games? Hey, join the club! This can be a real problem if you have too many shooters installed on your hard drive because they take up so much space. Eventually, you have to make some hard decisions about which games to keep and which to delete. Once Marvel Rivals came out, many players deleted Overwatch 2 because the games are so similar. Recently, though, I reinstalled it, and I’m having more fun with this hero shooter than ever before.

Why should you reinstall and dive back into this venerable FPS? Well, if you’re someone who ditched this game long ago like I did, here’s why I think a return to Overwatch 2 is well worth it.

1) More Content Than Ever

I feel like a shill just typing this out, but one of the main reasons you should reinstall Overwatch 2 is that there’s more content now than ever before. Depending on when you checked out of the game, you may (like me) be pleasantly surprised to discover a bevy of new heroes and skins. Skins are also easier to achieve thanks to the triumphant return of the loot box (more on that later).

Additionally, there’s an ambitious game mode called Stadium that legitimately transforms gameplay. Your team is trying to win in a “best of seven” showdown, and you earn coins that help you upgrade your character. These upgrades change up individual character gameplay in exciting ways (are you ready for Mercy as the ultimate DPS threat?), and you may find yourself wishing some of them would carry over to regular multiplayer. While this may not fully make up for that robust PvE content the game never really got, Stadium alone is a great reason to return to this game.

2) The Return of 6v6

Many Overwatch players uninstalled the second game right away for a simple reason: Overwatch 2 changed the original game’s 6v6 gameplay in favor of 5v5 matches. On paper, this was meant to encourage faster and more aggressive gameplay, reducing each team to a single tank. In reality, though, it completely threw off the vibe of the game we knew and loved, and the fact that Marvel Rivals offered classic 6v6 multiplayer is one of the primary reasons Overwatch players decided to switch to the new hotness.

When I reinstalled Overwatch 2, I was pleasantly surprised to discover that the game has reinstated 6v6 multiplayer. Considering that you can still play 5v5, this addition offers the best of both worlds: the players who dug the new format can still join five-man teams, and those who prefer the style of the first Overwatch can dive right back into six-man madness. These days, I stick to 6v6 almost exclusively, though I’m enough of a filthy casual to stay out of the competitive modes altogether.

3) Perks Give You Options

When I first started playing Overwatch 2 again, I was confused when the game asked me to pick a Perk for my characters. “What the heck are Perks?” I asked myself, in between rounds of being the world’s worst D.Va player. The answer was refreshingly simple: these are tweaks you can make mid-game to change how your character plays.

The first Perks offered to you will be relatively minor, like offering an enhanced Boost for D.Va. Later, you are offered more dramatic boosts that allow for some game-winning changes, like Torbjorn being able to stick his turrets to ceilings and walls. Your mileage may vary, but I was impressed at how these Perks consistently hit the sweet spot, letting me customize my character on the fly without completely changing what I loved about who I was playing.

4) Hero Bans Equal Hero Balance

I mentioned earlier that I don’t play much competitive Overwatch 2. Thus, I don’t have much experience with the relatively new Hero Bans system. However, some of my buddies enjoy competitive and they can’t stop talking about this feature. In short, each player gets to vote on heroes they would like to see banned from the match. Heroes with enough votes get the ban hammer, and gameplay proceeds without them.

Admittedly, this feature can be a double-edged sword. Nobody likes it when their favorite heroes keep getting banned. At the same time, though, this allows players to create more balanced matches by banning heroes they consider broken. It also allows Blizzard to collect data on who is getting banned the most, helping them further tweak characters down the road. This, too, creates a more balanced game, which is good news for anyone who ditched Overwatch 2 because they thought a few characters were completely broken. 

5) Overwatch 2 Favors Aggressive Gameplay

I already admitted that I’m a filthy casual gamer, so here’s another embarrassing admission: I’m one of those sloppy and aggressive players. It’s one of the reasons I love to play D.Va: I don’t want to be a patient tank who safely escorts my players to victory. Instead, I prefer to boost in and cause as much damage and chaos as humanly possible. And that’s why I ended up loving Blizzard’s controversial decision to make all heroes passively heal themselves during gameplay.

The healing is relatively minor, so you still need healers like Mercy to keep you and your team alive when things get hairy. But I have found that the passive healing encourages the kind of aggressive gameplay I prefer because as long as you can survive a scrape, your health immediately starts going back up. In my always humble opinion, this successfully does for the game what the switch to 5v5 was supposed to do: encourage fast, frenetic, and fun matches rather than having everyone turtling behind a tank.

6) The Return of the Loot Box

I’m an old-school gamer, and one of the things I take a weird pride in is never paying extra for things like Battle Passes or skins. Sure, I’ll pay for a robust DLC that adds actual gameplay value, but I’m loath to pay extra for a simple cosmetic benefit. That’s why I loved the first Overwatch: instead of paying for Loot Boxes, I could earn them through gameplay, allowing me to amass a cool collection of cosmetics for free. And like many veteran players, I was dismayed when Overwatch 2 did away with the free Loot Boxes, permanently hiding awesome new skins away from cheap players like myself.

That’s why I was particularly excited to see that Blizzard quietly brought back free Loot Boxes in Overwatch 2. You can earn regular boxes through gameplay and one epic Loot Box through the free Battle Pass. As an added bonus, you can count on getting good stuff, with at least one Rare item in each regular box and a guaranteed Epic item within five boxes. There’s also a guaranteed legendary item within 20 boxes.

Sure, it takes a lot of gameplay to earn that many boxes. But as long as you’re constantly playing for fun (like me), this new system provides a steady trickle of fun new skins and other items, all without you having to pay a single penny.

7) Map Voting Is Weirdly Exciting

When I returned to Overwatch 2, I found another pleasant surprise: map voting. You are no longer at the mercy of whatever map the game provides; instead, you are offered three different maps, and all players can vote on which one they’d like to play on. But you don’t simply get the map with the most votes; instead, the game cycles through every vote from left to right (a bit like a horizontal wheel), and you play whatever it lands on.

This can lead to some annoyance at times, like when it lands on the map that only one player voted for. After playing with this new system, though, I found myself weirdly excited by the whole map selection process. Maybe it’s because I grew up watching a lot of The Price Is Right, but I’m always eager to see where this virtual wheel lands. And let’s be honest: sometimes I enjoy it when it lands on a map that I’m the only one who voted for!

8) More Personality Than Any Other Hero Shooter

The final reason to reinstall Overwatch 2 is completely subjective, but here goes: it still has more personality than other hero shooters, including Marvel Rivals. Now, I’m a huge fan of the house that Stan Lee built, and I play Marvel Snap every time I pick up my phone. But if I’m being brutally honest, most of Marvel Rivals’ “personality” is inherited from other media. The Rocket Raccoon of the game (my main) doesn’t have much personality outside of a fun design and voice lines, but most players glom onto him mostly because they loved his portrayal in the Guardians of the Galaxy movies.

Blizzard, however, deserves props for building up an entirely exciting universe all on their own. They didn’t have hundreds of comic issues to draw on or a blockbuster cinematic universe to engage the Overwatch fandom. Instead, they built all of these characters from the ground up, and they are all quite fun. Speaking for my fanboy self, their evolution over time makes me feel like I really know characters that I love to play, including D.Va, Mei, and Ashe. And that makes playing them in a game feel more viscerally fun than just playing, say, Captain America, just because I enjoyed Chris Evans’ MCU portrayal. 

Personality alone doesn’t make a great game. But all of Overwatch 2’s personality, on top of its versatile gameplay modes, free skins, and cool additions like Perks, has made it my go-to hero shooter. Reinstall it, and you might just feel the same way!