Overwatch 2's brilliant new roguelike-inspired mode lets you mod abilities, create builds, and cry over the cut campaign's potential

Halloween is nearly upon us, which means only one thing to cursed people like me: a new Overwatch 2 Halloween event. But this year's spooky mode isn't another dull co-op shooting gallery - it's a brilliant roguelike-inspired clash that has me once again yearning 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 5v5 limited-time mode has a slimmed-down roster of 12 playable heroes duking it out on normal Overwatch maps, but the twist here is that you can 'mutate' abilities in between each round, which creates some wicked chaos and the best addition to the shooter in years. 

My first pick was support hero Zenyatta, who normally has one healing orb that can latch onto an ally as long as they're in range and one Discord Orb that latches onto an enemy and increases how much damage they take. His randomized but increasingly powerful Mutations began with basic stat buffs - the route I expected a mode like this to take - but I was soon floored at how deep this all goes. Ability mods can stack and if you're smart enough about it, you can plan entirely different builds to take advantage of each toolset. My Zenyatta eventually had two healing orbs, plus one for himself, that would both passively heal and dramatically increase movement speed for whoever it was hooked onto, meaning half my team was flying about the map like a Tracer hopped up on coffee.

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The rest of the skill mods are great fun as well. Ashe's dynamite grenade can explode into three smaller dynamite sticks. Soldier 76's Healing Field can go mobile and follow him around the map. Moira's ultimate ability - a beam that heals allies and hurts enemies - can also turn her into a flying menace. But even when Junkenstein's Laboratory is only dishing out stat boosts, it's doing so in a way where Mutations have this cascading effect and you can create a pretty harmonious build around them.

Again, it's great fun. Though, it did also have the unintended, spooky side effect of reminding me of Overwatch 2's cancelled co-op campaign. To avoid things getting stale after hundreds of PvE missions, Blizzard Entertainment's planned Hero Mode was going to have skill trees for every character with 'Talents' that included moderate stat boosts, whole new abilities, or fun remixes of their existing moves... which sounds 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 campaign stuff they worked on over the four years would make its way into Overwatch 2 via non-canonical modes or other PvE content. So, I wouldn't be surprised at all if the above Mutations were in fact Talents in an alternate universe, as painful as it is to remember what could've been. Still, the new Overwatch 2 mode is well worth a look whether you're a lapsed player or someone that can't quite quit it.

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