Overwatch 2’s brilliant new roguelike-inspired mode lets you modify abilities, create buildings, and cry over the potential of the cut campaign

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Halloween is almost here, which means only one thing for cursed folk like me: a new Overwatch 2 Halloween event. But this year’s spooky mode isn’t another boring co-op shooting gallery – it’s a brilliant roguelike-inspired showdown that It makes me once again long for the now-dead Overwatch campaign.

Overwatch 2: Season 13 went live last night, bringing with it an arcade game mode called Junkenstein’s Laboratory. The limited-time 5v5 mode has a reduced roster of 12 playable heroes competing on regular Overwatch maps, but the difference here is that you can ‘mutate’ abilities between each round, which creates wicked chaos and the best addition to the shooter in years.

My first choice was the support hero Zenyatta, who typically has a healing orb that can latch onto an ally while they’re in range and an Orb of Discord that latch onto an enemy and increase the amount of damage they take. Its random but increasingly powerful mutations started with base stat buffs – the path I expected a mode like this to take – but I was soon surprised by the depth of it all. Ability mods can be stacked, and if you’re smart enough, you can plan entirely different builds to take advantage of each set of tools. My Zenyatta eventually had two healing orbs, plus one for himself, that would passively heal and drastically increase the movement speed of whoever was trapped, meaning half my team was flying around the map like a Tracer drinking coffee.

The rest of the skill mods are also a lot of fun. Ashe’s dynamite grenade can explode into three smaller sticks of dynamite. Soldier 76’s Healing Field can become mobile and follow him around the map. Moira’s ultimate ability – a beam that heals allies and harms enemies – can also turn her into a flying threat. But even when Junkenstein’s Lab is just handing out stat boosts, it does so in a way that the mutations have this cascading effect and you can create a pretty harmonious build around them.

Again, it’s a lot of fun. However, it also had the creepy and unintended side effect of reminding me of Overwatch 2’s canceled co-op campaign. To keep things from getting stale after hundreds of PvE missions, Blizzard Entertainment’s planned Hero Mode would have skill trees for each character with ‘Talents’, which included moderate stat boosts, entirely new abilities, or fun remixes of your existing moves… which feels a lot like a much expanded version of the Mutations I played with last night.

At the time of the campaign’s cancellation, game director Aaron Keller said that some of the things from the campaign they had worked on over four years would make their way to Overwatch 2 through non-canon modes or other PvE content. So I wouldn’t be surprised if the Mutations above were in fact Talents in an alternate universe, as painful as it is to remember what could have been. Still, the new Overwatch 2 mode is worth a look, whether you’re an inactive player or someone who just can’t seem to quit.

Overwatch 2 is reportedly going the way of Call of Duty with an upcoming mobile version.