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Slay the Spire 2 has been subject to a number of negative review waves since its launch, and they're now accumulated in the roguelike sequel having almost 14 times as many negative Steam reviews as its predecessor in just two months.
As highlighted by The Gamer, Slay the Spire 2 has a "Mostly Negative" recent rating on Steam at the time of writing, with a total of 79,824 bad reviews logged since its launch. The positive reviews still outweigh them for the time being, with 109,074 giving it a big thumbs up, but it's obviously an enormous amount of negativity that the first game hasn't seen in the nine years since its early-access launch in late 2017.
To put it into perspective, there are currently just 5,769 negative reviews for Slay the Spire 1 compared to 208,918 positive ones, and – as it happens – a not insignificant chunk of those have been posted recently as a direct result of the latest review bombing on the second game.
But what exactly happened? After all, at launch, Slay the Spire 2 dominated Steam, racking up over 574,000 concurrent players, giving it the platform's 20th highest peak of all time. The first wave of negative reviews arrived following the arrival of an opt-in balance patch, which – obviously – didn't go down very well. Players flooded the Steam reviews with pleas for Mega Crit to revert the divisive changes, which did end up happening.
That's not where things ended, though. After Slay the Spire 2's first major update last month, there was another, bigger wave of negative reviews, full of complaints about the Doormaker boss who's since been removed from the game entirely. Throughout all this, it should be noted that a significant number of negative reviews have been from players in China, and there's a reason for this. Mega Crit co-founder Casey Yano previously spoke out to say "it's kind of unfortunate that they feel that the only way to be heard is through Steam reviews," and that it prompted the devs to consider "how can we improve a communication channel between the developers and players in China who have a very restricted communication channel compared to the other players" worldwide.
However, the latest surge of negative reviews isn't the result of any changes to Slay the Spire 2, but a name in the credits. Specifically, Anita Sarkeesian – the founder of Feminist Frequency and feminist media critic behind the Tropes vs Women in Video Games YouTube series (which examined the representation of women in games) – is listed as one of the game's consultants. Sarkeesian was a target of harassment during 2014's misogynistic Gamergate campaign, and looking through Slay the Spire 2's recent reviews now, you can see a lot of the same language as players complain about the so-called "woke."
To be clear, Sarkeesian being a consultant on the game isn't new – this was the case even when the roguelike was overflowing with Overwhelmingly Positive reviews full of folks enjoying it. What's more, it's not clear what influence she's had on the game, aside from her name being one of many listed, so people aren't even complaining about anything specific, but more of the idea of left-wing ideologies being part of their games.
Whether Mega Crit acknowledges this publicly remains to be seen, but Steam has already identified this latest wave of negativity as "off-topic review activity," so the platform seems well aware that this backlash is a classic review bomb that doesn't have anything productive to say about the game itself.
