Slay the Spire 2 Review: What the Steam Score Misses

This Slay the Spire 2 review starts with a number: 574,638 concurrent Steam players in the game's first week of Early Access in March 2026, one of the largest deckbuilder launches the platform has ever recorded. Four months on, its aggregate user score sits at 60.4% positive, "Mixed," across 189,643 reviews. Those are two different measurements. One counts how many people showed up. The other has been reshaped, twice, by review campaigns that had little to do with cards, combat, or bugs. What follows evaluates the game Mega Crit built, and separately, explains what actually happened to the number next to it.

Key Takeaways

• Slay the Spire 2 launched in Steam Early Access on March 5, 2026, priced at $24.99 with no discount as of this review
• Five characters at launch: Ironclad, Silent, and Defect return; Necrobinder and Regent are new
• Co-op supports up to 4 players online, each running an independent deck and resource pool on a shared map
• The launch peaked at 574,638 concurrent players, a top-tier debut by Steam roguelike standards
• Steam's user score is Mixed (60.4% positive, 189,643 reviews) after three distinct review-bomb waves, detailed below
• Developed and published solely by Mega Crit, the same two-person-turned-small-studio team behind the original

Overview

Mega Crit built the first Slay the Spire into one of the defining deckbuilder roguelikes of the last decade, and the sequel doesn't pretend otherwise. It keeps the same premise: climb a hostile tower, build a card-based deck from scratch each run, and lean on relics and potions to survive fights that get meaner with every floor. What's new is scope. Two additional characters (Necrobinder and Regent) join the returning Ironclad, Silent, and Defect, and the whole structure now supports online co-op for up to four players, a first for the series.

At $24.99, it sits in the same price bracket as most Early Access deckbuilders and roguelites on Steam, a bracket where players expect a functioning core loop on day one and content to arrive in patches rather than at 1.0. Mega Crit's own store page says as much: more cards, events, environments, and enemies are still coming, with the studio framing Early Access itself as a return to the community-driven development process that shaped the original game.

The studio hasn't changed shape much. This is still a small team shipping a direct sequel to a game with an enormous, opinionated existing playerbase. That context matters for almost everything below, including the score controversy.

Gameplay

The moment-to-moment loop hasn't drifted far from the original, and that's mostly a compliment. A run still moves through card-based combat encounters, campfire rest points, shops, and event nodes, with the deck you build from run to run determining whether floor twelve is a formality or a wall. What's changed is the density of decisions layered on top: enchant-or-transform choices at event nodes (a "Symbiote" encounter, for instance, offers a card enchant with a drawback versus a straight card transform), branching Neow-style opening bonuses, and relic synergies that reward planning two or three fights ahead rather than reacting turn to turn.

A mid-run combat encounter, card hand and HP totals visible mid-turn.

Necrobinder is the clearest evidence the sequel isn't just running old characters through a new coat of paint. Its passive, Bound Phylactery, summons a minion at the start of every turn, and its companion, Osty, functions as a persistent secondary combatant rather than a one-off relic effect. That turns deckbuilding into a two-track problem: cards that support the deck directly, and cards that keep the summon pipeline alive. Regent runs on an entirely different resource, called Stars, which changes the rhythm of a run again. Neither new class plays like a reskin of Ironclad's straightforward aggression or Silent's stacking-debuff style, which is the bar a new class in this genre actually has to clear.

Co-op is the bigger structural addition, and it holds up under scrutiny better than most bolted-on multiplayer modes in single-player-designed games. Each of up to four players keeps a fully separate deck, relic set, and gold total, but everyone shares the map and fights encounters together, with enemy difficulty scaling to the group. The design forces real coordination: whoever lands Vulnerable or Weak first changes the math for the whole team's turn, and a player who builds a deck with no synergy for their teammates' status effects is actively working against the group. It's not just the original game with a lobby screen glued on.

Ascension levels, the series' traditional difficulty-modifier system, return largely unchanged, and the character-select screen still lets a player dial that up before a run even starts.

Necrobinder's character-select screen, showing her passive summon ability and starting stats before ascension modifiers are applied.

The three review-bombing waves behind the Mixed score

A 60.4% positive rating with 189,643 reviews looks, at a glance, like a game with a genuine quality problem. It isn't one wave of dissatisfaction. It's three separate incidents, stacked, each with a different cause.

The first hit on March 19, roughly two weeks after launch, when a balance patch nerfed several "infinite" combo lines players had built runs around and reworked the Doormaker boss encounter. Mega Crit later described Doormaker as "statistically the easiest Act 3 boss" while still continuing to adjust its fight, and the studio partially walked back one of the more contested nerfs (to the Silent's Prepared card) with a public explanation: "while I still think that the Sly synergies are overall too dominant of a strategy, Prepared is so integral to the Silent's core identity that I will be looking for a different approach to bring Sly in line in the future." That's a normal, if rocky, Early Access balance dispute.

The second wave came from the game's Simplified Chinese-language reviews, roughly 77,000 of them, which cluster around "Mostly Negative" and are tied to further balance changes that landed poorly with that specific regional community. Steam separates review language filters, so this segment is visible distinctly from the aggregate and from the English-language pattern below it.

The third wave started around May 5, when players discovered a "Consultant" credit for Anita Sarkeesian in the game's credits. The backlash that followed was large enough, and coordinated enough, that Steam's own system flagged "off-topic review activity" on the store page, a label Valve applies specifically when review volume spikes are tied to something other than the product itself. The aggregate score dropped from the high 90s to 61% within two days of the discovery, and dipped into "Mostly Negative" territory at points before settling into the current Mixed range.

None of these three waves are about whether the cards are fun, whether the servers hold up, or whether the co-op mode works. Steam's aggregate doesn't separate any of that out for someone glancing at the store page. That's why the rubric below judges the game on its own, not on the number sitting next to it.

Rubric assessment

Design coherence

The sequel knows exactly what it is: more Slay the Spire, built around the same card-combat math, with enough new mechanical surface area (two classes, a resource system apiece, a co-op mode) that it doesn't read as a reskin. The event and relic design shows the same "every choice has a cost" philosophy the original was known for. Nothing about the core systems feels like it's chasing a different genre or a different audience than the first game earned.

Value per dollar

At $24.99 for an Early Access build with five characters, a working co-op mode, and a stated commitment to more content before 1.0, the price sits in line with genre peers rather than ahead of them. The caveat is real: some of what's advertised on the store page (additional environments and enemies) isn't in the build today, so buyers are paying partly for a roadmap, not only for what currently exists.

Onboarding

Series veterans will be running efficient decks within their first hour; the core interaction model hasn't changed enough to require relearning. New players face the same learning curve the original always had, which is to say a real one: relic and card synergies aren't explained up front, and the game expects failed runs to teach the lesson instead. That's consistent with the genre and the original game's own reputation, not a new problem introduced by the sequel.

Technical quality

Handling a launch-week peak of 574,638 concurrent players without a widely reported server collapse or rollback is a genuinely strong technical result for a two-person-founded studio's sequel. The balance-patch cadence has been the rougher edge: several changes since March have been partially reversed after community pushback, which speaks to responsiveness but also to a tuning process that's still finding its footing four months into Early Access.

Replayability

Five characters, each with a meaningfully different resource system, times an Ascension ladder that scales difficulty well past a first clear, gives this a long runway before repetition sets in. Co-op adds a second axis of replayability on top of that, since team composition changes which relics and status effects actually matter run to run.

Verdict

This is a review for players deciding whether to buy a specific game, not for anyone trying to settle the argument happening in its Steam reviews. On that narrower question: Slay the Spire 2 is a competent, occasionally excellent expansion of a format Mega Crit already proved works, held back mainly by Early Access balance volatility and content that's still arriving. The three review-bomb waves that dragged its aggregate score down are real events with real numbers behind them, but none of them describe a defect in the cards, the combat, or the co-op mode this review actually tested. Buy it if you want more Slay the Spire today; wait for 1.0 if patch churn is the kind of thing that bothers you more than a Mixed label on a store page.

Rating: 8.3/10

Frequently Asked Questions

Is Slay the Spire 2 worth buying right now? Yes, if you want more Slay the Spire and don't mind Early Access rough edges. The deckbuilding core is intact and the two new characters add real variety. Wait for 1.0 only if balance-patch volatility bothers you.

Why does Slay the Spire 2 have a Mixed rating on Steam? 189,643 reviews put it at 60.4% positive, Mixed, as of mid-July 2026. That number reflects three distinct review-bomb waves (a balance patch, a regional dispute, and a controversy over a credited consultant), not a steady decline in code or content quality.

What are the new characters in Slay the Spire 2? Necrobinder and Regent. Necrobinder summons undead minions through a passive called Bound Phylactery and fights alongside a companion named Osty. Regent runs on a resource called Stars. Ironclad, Silent, and Defect return from the original game.

Does Slay the Spire 2 have co-op? Yes, for up to 4 players online through Steam. Each player keeps an independent deck, relic pool, and gold while sharing the map and fighting encounters together. There's no local or split-screen option.

How much does Slay the Spire 2 cost? $24.99 on Steam for Windows, Mac, and Linux, with no discount active as of this review. That's the same Early Access price it launched at on March 5, 2026.

Is Slay the Spire 2 finished or still Early Access? Still Early Access. Mega Crit has stated more cards, events, environments, and enemies will be added and rebalanced before 1.0, and the store page does not give a 1.0 date.

How does Slay the Spire 2 compare to the original? Same ascend-the-Spire structure and card-based combat, rebuilt with two new characters, a new co-op mode, and an evolving lore system. It's a sequel that expands the format rather than replacing it.

If you're deciding which characters to start with, our Slay the Spire 2 co-op guide ranks all five and covers team pairings for 2-4 player runs. For a wider view of what else is worth playing in the genre right now, see our best roguelike games of 2026 roundup.

References

• Slay the Spire 2 on Steam (price, review totals, and platform data current as of this review)
• Mega Crit official developer site
• r/slaythespire community subreddit