Slay the Spire 2 Reviews & Reception — Why 'Mixed' While Massively Played

Slay the Spire 2 has the strangest reception profile of any big 2026 release: "Mixed" on Steam while sitting on a 574,638 all-time peak concurrent player count. Both facts are real, and the gap between them is the story of two review-bomb waves hitting one of the most-played games of the year.

The Numbers (SteamCharts, pulled September 2026)

Metric	Value
All-time peak concurrent players	574,638
24-hour peak (at pull time)	92,961
Playing an hour before pull	72,754

Those are blockbuster numbers for an indie deckbuilder in Early Access — this is not a game the playerbase abandoned.

What Happened to the Rating

The rating slid from Overwhelmingly Positive territory into Mixed during spring 2026, driven by two organized review-bomb waves (as covered by Bellular News, May 2026: the game "has been review bombed twice on Steam"). At one point in that window, more than half of all reviews were in Chinese — tens of thousands of them.

A bilingual analysis of the top-30 most-helpful negative reviews found the same complaints recurring:

• Nerfs to "infinite" combo decks — high-Ascension players had cleared A9–A10 with reliable infinite-turn lines, and beta patches gutted that path right as difficulty tuning tightened.
• The Act 3 Doormaker boss fight — the single most-mentioned fight in negative reviews.
• Overtuned enemy stats at high Ascension, which felt un-winnable once the infinite escape hatches closed.
• The Acrobatics card nerf and small-deck strategies weakened as collateral damage.
• Card-removal shop prices, elite difficulty — and, unusually, developer communication itself ("arrogance" was a recurring word, aimed at co-creator Anthony Giovannetti).

In short: a hardcore slice of the playerbase lost its favorite win condition, difficulty spiked at the same time, and Steam reviews became the megaphone for players who felt they had no other channel to the devs.

Where It Stands Now

Mega Crit has kept shipping — beta patches roughly every two weeks, with visible balance swings each time (Juggernaut and Sic 'Em buffed, Reflect trimmed, enemy tuning like the Aeonglass rework — see the Patch Notes page). The complaint set in new reviews has been shifting from "the game is broken" toward "the direction of specific patches," which is a normal Early Access argument to have.

Should That "Mixed" Stop You From Buying?

Depends on what you want:

• If you loved the first game's deckbuilding, the sequel's new content — five characters, 4-player co-op, enchantments, Doom/Stars/Forge mechanics — is already deeper than most full releases, at $24.99.
• If you specifically loved breaking the game with infinite combos at Ascension 20, know that's the exact playstyle the patches have been squeezing; check the current Patch Notes before buying on that basis.
• If you're waiting for 1.0, there's no announced date yet — see Release Date & Platforms.

Player-count figures are snapshots from SteamCharts at material collection time (September 2026); the review summary reflects the situation as of the same date and both will drift.