Slay the Spire 2 plummets to 66% positive lifetime Steam reviews as players seethe after first major update: "Preventing players from deckbuilding in a deckbuilder"

The first major update for Slay the Spire 2, which essentially collected changes from beta patches and released them into the main branch of the game, has not gone down well with many players. The patch triggered a second, more intense wave of negative Steam reviews following a previous river of red scores, leaving the game with 66% positive lifetime and 48% positive recent reviews, with fans criticizing perceived limitations on deckbuilding, the overall difficulty of the game, and one especially unforgiving boss fight.

This trend began on April 17 and is still going, with negative reviews far outnumbering positive ones. Over 21,000 negative reviews have cropped up in the past five days. Reviews written in simplified Chinese average noticeably lower than other languages ("mixed" among a spread of "mostly positive" to "overwhelmingly positive").

Many of those reviews, both the English ones I've read and some machine translated Chinese ones (obviously, just the tip of the 21,000-strong iceberg), share several complaints. The clear boogeyman is the Doormaker, an Act 3 boss which was reworked in the latest update. The Doormaker now cycles through phases that exhaust your cards (removing them from play), prevent you from drawing, or make your cards cost more mana. He's the hardest Act 3 boss by a considerable margin, and many players consider him an unacceptable, un-fun outlier.

"Doormaker needs to be reworked or removed," argues Steam user Cindecent.

"Nothing more frustrating than having a god-tier run brutally and unforgivingly obliterated by a boss that is not remotely balanced," adds Shannegh.

This line of criticism feeds into broader complaints about drafting and strategizing in Slay the Spire 2 post-patch, with many reviews arguing that recent card adjustments, enemy buffs or reworks, and blows to certain strategies have made the game overly difficult in a limiting way.

There's inevitably going to be variance in opinion based on play style, Ascension difficulty tier, and the classes in question, but there's a pretty unifying theme of cards and combos falling behind enemies. Co-op play, which dramatically ramps up enemies but doesn't do all that much for your cards, is another recurring bugbear, with several players claiming that their co-op success rate has plummeted after the patch even on lower Ascensions.

"Development philosophy needs to shift away from 'preventing players from deckbuilding in a deckbuilder,'" argues user Knusdij. "Great game on its surface, but will suffer with more changes like that of recent."

I've put 77 hours into Slay the Spire 2 so far, and almost all of that has been on the beta patch that other players are now experiencing. Having cleared Ascension 7 on all characters (A8 on three and counting), I can see where some of these reviews are coming from. The Doormaker definitely forces you to play differently and can box you into unsatisfying turns, and the game is fully capable of instantly ending an otherwise promising run with a single powerful enemy or terrible draw.

That said, I've still been able to make steady progress on all five classes for several weeks. This is not me crying "skill issue," for the record. My speculative read of this blowback is that a lot of players are upset with how the game feels and how hard it is to assemble elaborate combos, whereas many balance changes in this patch have seemingly focused on win rates and pick rates regardless of how fun they may be.

The Silent, whose central draw card Acrobatics went up in rarity in the patch (another change mentioned in several negative reviews), is probably my worst-performing class right now, and she might also be the best demonstration of the complaint that you need a lot of specific cards to get any sort of strategy online.

Like the previous, smaller spike in negative reviews, this whole incident rekindled debate over whether this actually counts as a review bomb – that is, a coordinated campaign to tank a game's review score, often but not exclusively motivated by external factors like business or policy decisions by a game's parent company. For example, Helldivers 2 players famously review bombed the game so hard that Sony walked back its unpopular account linking policy and the river of red scores was immortalized as an in-game cape.

On the one hand, this is an abrupt and out-of-band red spike for a great game, and it's largely been fueled by players from China. Casey Yano, co-founder of developer Mega Crit, commented on how Chinese players express feedback on games, concluding that "it's kind of unfortunate that they feel that the only way to be heard is through Steam reviews" given online communication restrictions in the region. (To my knowledge, Chinese Slay the Spire 2 players do have access to the in-game feedback button.)

On the other hand, these reviews immediately followed and seem largely aimed at an in-game balance patch. If, say, Arc Raiders ticked off a lot of people with an update and it prompted a bunch of negative reviews, we wouldn't call it a review bomb. We would call it a bunch of negative reviews. So we end up in this gray area where it's tough to separate an organized campaign from a genuine response due to the scale, complicated by a heavy bias toward China in that feedback which creates a language barrier. I hesitate to call this a review bomb because it risks disqualifying Chinese players for being from China, or throwing out valid feedback, but I also can't parse all 21,000 reviews one by one to check for clear outside coordination.

Slay the Spire 2 won't get an endless mode like Balatro because it limits "infinite strategies," but creator says "maybe a modder will think of a way to make it work."