Slay The Spire 2 review bombed over balance changes

Slay the Spire 2 is easily one of the biggest success stories of the year, launching to a whopping 574,638 players, easily surpassing recent releases like Marathon. Even at the time of writing, Slay the Spire 2 is the fourth most played game on Steam at the moment, and all this despite the game being in Early Access. Safe to say, the game is already an incredible success.

That being said, it seems that developer MegaCrit has run into a bit of trouble recently when it comes to balance. Not only are some characters considered quite overpowered, as established by some long-time veterans of the series, but some cards are also considered a little too powerful, and MegaCrit would need to make some careful balance adjustments to make things a little more fair.

Now that these balance tweaks are here, it's safe to say that anyone enjoying their broken builds right now is pretty fuming, as evidenced by a brutal review bombing that took place earlier today.

Slay The Spire 2's short Nerfs have caused an almighty review bomb

A player using the best Necrobinder build and cards in Slay the Spire 2.

Check out the Steam reviews for Slay the Spire 2, and you'll see that since launch, the game has received around 100 negative reviews a day, which is pretty common for such a popular game. You will then see an incredibly drastic increase, with the game receiving a whopping 8,500 negative reviews at the time of writing, with that number still rising by the minute.

From a quick look at these negative reviews, we can see exactly what the problem that the players have is, and that is the geek of various powerful cards that were used to create infinite loops. There seems to be a consensus that something needed to be done, as the high difficulty gameplay was becoming samey and repetitive, but the direction MegaCrit has gone is not to everyone's taste.

Art of The Regent looking at a planet on a screen in Slay the Spire 2.

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MegaCrit has essentially been accused of nerfing the game's infinite loops and powerful cards, but doing little to actually boost other cards and make them more viable. En av dessa negativa recensioner av en användare som heter Leo Dilu förklarar att användare “tvingas till cykling och oändligt baserade byggen” på grund av hur svårt spelet kan vara, och att nerfing av dessa byggen utan att tillhandahålla någon form av alternativ skadar spelet ytterligare.

“Please stop trying to balance a single player game by geeking out on viable options,” reads another review by a Steam user named Ghost14. “Some styles of play are overused not because they are overpowered, but because other options are underpowered.” They then compare the game's current review bombing to the infamous Helldivers 2 review bombing, which happened as a result of developer Arrowhead Studios nerfing the flamethrower, one of the game's better weapons.

Thankfully, Slay the Spire 2 is still in early access, which means MegaCrit is still tinkering and tweaking with the game's balance to ensure everything is in top shape before its full release. Unfortunately for MegaCrit, the game is already played by over 400,000 people a day, meaning any goof-ups will be magnified just because of the player base. It's a bit of an exaggeration to review bomb on such a scale, but you can't really argue that this is the only way fans can make their voices known en masse.