Mecha Break Is Garnering Tons of Players on Steam, but With a ‘Mostly Negative’ User Review Rating — Here’s Why

Mecha Break recently launched into a new round of open beta play on Steam, and quickly dethroned some titans in the process. Even though it’s just a glimpse of the final experience, Mecha Break’s demo is bumping elbows with the likes of Marvel Rivals, Grand Theft Auto V, Apex Legends, and Naraka Bladepoint. So why’s it got such a bad rating on Steam?

The open beta launch pulled in over 300,000 players on Steam, deseating Marvel Rivals and hitting a top-four place in the most played games on Valve’s platform. Even right now, at the time of writing this, Amazing Seasun Games’ mecha battler has the fourth-highest concurrent players per SteamDB, though it falls behind Rivals’ 24-hour peak.

Popularity doesn’t naturally incur positivity; Apex Legends has a ‘Mixed’ overall rating on Steam, as does Delta Force, and both have substantially more recent players than many other games on the PC platform. Yet Mecha Break’s demo is sitting at ‘Mostly Negative’ right now, with over 6,500 reviews.

Taking a look through the reviews, there are a few discernible complaints. The most easily addressed are the server issues. With hundreds of thousands of players flocking to the open beta, which apparently overwhelmed the servers. Amazing Seasun responded, saying the studio has addressed the problem and is issuing several batches of “Ultimate Maintenance Boxes” to players as compensation.

Those boxes are a constant, and longer-term, point of concern among players though. Individual mechs are unlocked through the store or battle pass, as well as cosmetic purchases. There’s also a loot box mechanic for mods, which come with mild upsides and downsides, that has players worried about long-term balance and time investment.

It seems that while many aspects of Mecha Break can be unlocked for free, it will take at least some time to do so. “Outside of missions, the match to match reward of currency is very low. In order to unlock the entire roster you’ll likely have to play hundreds of games to get there,” one reviewer said.

Another repeat critique across several reviews is the anti-cheat measures. Mecha Break uses the kernel level anti-cheat Anti-Cheat Expert, or ACE. These often allow for greater access to users’ machines, in exchange for monitoring for more extensive cheating options. Usually, players aren’t too happy about anti-cheats like this. The anti-cheat is also apprently causing problems for Linux desktop users, per GamingOnLinux.

Tack on some extra customization woes, like spending currency to re-customize your in-game pilot, and the negative reviews paint a fairly stark picture of frustration over currencies and grinding for unlocks. Mecha Break is set to be a free-to-play game, so some of those do end up coming with the territory. And interestingly, there does seem to be a counter-movement of positive reviews, though it’s still lagging behind the negative ones by raw numbers.

At the very least, while there are some gameplay concerns, those sentiments seem to be broadly positive compared to the out-of-combat critiques. Most of the positive reviews and even many of the negative reviews praise the actual mecha battles, as well as the pilot and mecha customization options, which include a bunch of cosmetics and paints to create, say, your very own Evangelion Unit-02 or Gundam Heavyarms.

We’ll see if Amazing Seasun works to address the negative responses leading into the full release sometime later this year.

Eric is a freelance writer for IGN.