Shadowverse: Worlds Beyond, a successor to Cygames’ strategy card game Shadowverse, has already reached the milestone of a million downloads three days following its release on June 17, as well as first place on Apple and Steam store sales rankings. However, looking at reviews on Steam, Apple and Google Play stores, it appears that the game is being review-bombed by players – likely due to its monetization model.
Over on Steam, Worlds Beyond is “Mostly Negative” with only around 20% of its 9000+ reviews being positive. Reviews on Apple and Google Play stores are not as harsh as on Steam, but the game’s rating does not go over 3.0 stars on either platform, with reviews being almost completely polarized between 1-star and 5-star reviews.
Most negative reviews cite an overall stronger presence of pay-to-win elements and a poorly balanced in-game economy, stating that the prices of packs have significantly risen while the amount of free-to-play rewards have dropped compared to the game’s predecessor. Players are also unhappy that it takes much longer to build viable decks without making purchases. Furthermore, Steam users noted that you now have to own at least three cards of the same set (which includes legendary cards) to be able to liquefy them. However, as obtaining cards has already become a bit more difficult with the price inflation, it is understandable why players might be frustrated with the updated mechanic.
Despite players’ dissatisfaction with the aggressive monetization model, data on Steam charts suggests that there’s still many players actively playing the game, with an all-time peak of over 100k players in the past 3 days and over 44k concurrent players at the time of writing. So, while there still seem to be many players actively enjoying Worlds Beyond, they’re probably hoping that review-bombing the game on launch could push Cygames to make some improvements to the in-game economy.
