STS2 Review Bombing Explained: Two Waves, One Pattern

STS2 launched on March 5, 2026 to 574,000 peak concurrent players and a 97% Overwhelmingly Positive rating. For two weeks, everything was fine. Then v0.100.0 shipped on March 20 — and within 48 hours, approximately 13,000 negative reviews poured in.

The patch was a sweeping balance pass targeting infinite combo strategies across all five characters. Loops that let skilled players extend their turns indefinitely were reworked or capped. Mega Crit has said the feedback volume "was much more extreme than any previous types of negative feedback" and caught them off guard. The reviews were overwhelmingly in Simplified Chinese — players who use Steam reviews as a feedback channel because Discord and Twitter are blocked by the Great Firewall.

The rating recovered through late March and early April. Then v0.103.2 merged to main on April 17 — the first major main-branch update since launch. The centerpiece was a complete Doormaker boss rework: now attacks for 20(23) and applies "whenever you play a card, lose 1 energy." The new version punishes combo-heavy decks particularly hard and arrived with almost no run-up time for the community to prepare.

Within two days, roughly 8,000 more Simplified Chinese negative reviews accumulated. Coverage from Kotaku noted the rating dropped to "Mostly Negative" in the 30-day rolling window at 39% recommend. A separate community story ran in parallel: the Skulking Colony elite had also received buffs that a segment of players considered overdone — contributing extra friction even as Doormaker dominated the conversation.

The picture is more nuanced than any single headline. Total reviews are approximately 160,000. Of those, roughly 83,000 in non-Chinese languages are Very Positive to Overwhelmingly Positive. The roughly 75,000 Simplified Chinese reviews are Mostly Negative. Traditional Chinese reviews sit at Mixed. Every other language group is net positive.

Daily active players have remained above 280,000 throughout both waves — which is a strong signal that the game's actual playerbase is still engaged, regardless of review sentiment. The split tells you more about how different player communities express disagreement than it does about the game's underlying quality.

The studio has not reverted the core changes — infinite loops and the Doormaker mechanics are staying. Instead, the response has been transparency and tuning: the v0.104.0 beta acknowledged the base difficulty is too hard and committed to softening lower Ascensions gradually. On Doormaker specifically, the team published win-rate data showing he is not actually outlying versus other Act 3 bosses, and pledged continued monitoring.

Whether this satisfies the players who left negative reviews is an open question. For the much larger group of players who are still playing every day, the practical impact is that the game is being tuned actively in response to data, and lower-Ascension players should expect a more forgiving experience over the next few patches.