Not long ago I watched my Warzone Legacy, a two-minute-long compilation of my best stats from the first game, which included my K/D ratio and hours played and the like. It was undoubtedly produced by AI to feed the social media machine, yet the cold, hard numbers transported me back to the warm embrace of Verdansk, a battle royale map my mates and escaped to almost every evening as the pandemic raged. The silly 120 second video shot me right in the feelings.
My history with the first game means that I enter Warzone 2 with an embarrassing tangle of emotional baggage and personal investment. It has a lot to live up to. And for the most part, it has been a joy to drop in again. Launch woes aside, the sequel iterates on the first in a way that feels like it'll last in the long run and confirms that there's still no battle royale that does it quite like Warzone.