Actually, Slay the Spire 2 had an outstanding launch on Steam, but suddenly the rating on the platform is plunging massively. Taking a closer look at the situation, it becomes clear that most of the negative voices are coming from one country.
What kind of game is this? Slay the Spire 2 is a roguelike deck builder, so you build a deck of cards to battle your way through enemies. As the number in the name indicates, this is the sequel to the first game from 2019.
Slay the Spire 2 just launched in Early Access on Steam on March 5, 2026, and is already enjoying one of the best indie launches of all time. According to Alinea Insight, Slay the Spire 2 has earned more money in less than a month than Hades 2 and Hollow Knight: Silksong have since their release.
This success was also visible in its Steam reviews, at least initially. However, the game has lost a huge amount of favor – at least on first glance. The reason for this are over 10,000 negative reviews that were written on March 20, 2026 alone. The next day, on March 21, there were again over 2,500 negative reviews.
A beta change is causing trouble
Why all the bad reviews? The main point of criticism is a nerf that hasn’t even made it into the actual game yet. It currently only exists on a separate beta branch, where the developers are testing some balance changes. Among these is a massive nerf for a specific card.
The card affected by the nerf is called “Prepared” and belongs to “Silent”, one of the playable characters. She’s the woman with the animal skull on her head, whom you also see here in the title image. This card currently allows you to discard a card from your hand for free and draw a replacement.
In the current beta version 0.100.0, the card, which is called “Prepare” there, costs one energy. It also no longer allows you to swap one card for another, but instead two cards for two energy for the next round – a drastic change that many players are unhappy about.
However, Slay the Spire 2 lets its players provide feedback directly via the game, and there is also an official Discord server for such feedback – so why flood the Steam reviews with it? It’s worth taking a look at where these negative reviews are coming from.
The vast majority of the recent negative reviews were written in simplified Chinese – so they most likely come from China. You can see this at a glance when filtering the reviews by language. The Chinese reviews are only “Mixed” (59 %), while the English ones are “Overwhelmingly Positive” (95 %).
Chinese players flood the reviews
Why just players from China? This could be related to the many restrictions in China. Players there have few options available to give their feedback to the developers:
- In the Chinese version of Steam, community features are blocked, including discussion forums intended for feedback and discussions about the game
- Discord is also not accessible in China unless you’re using a VPN – so this option is off the table for many.
So there is only the feedback feature in the game itself. However, players’ criticism there could go unnoticed due to the language barrier between the players and the small indie studio (which consists of only 10 developers) – at least that could be a related concern.
The Steam reviews thus seem to be the most effective way for these players to make their criticism visible across borders. After all, such a drastic change in the rating stands out – even if that is not the actual function of reviews.
Fans of Crimson Desert are now realising as well that reviews on Steam seldomly show a comprehensive picture of a game. Their game does not receive the positive reception that it deserves, at least in their eyes. One possible reason: you have to stick with it until it really becomes fun. Nearly 240,000 players try out Crimson Desert at launch, many stumble over Cliff’s legs and the technology
