Crimson Desert pulled 44,833 reviews this week. That's nearly 60% of all reviews tracked across 798 games. Whatever else happened ing gaming this week, Crimson Desert was the story.

The 67% overall positive score flatters it. Players from Europe are broadly happy, but Chinese and Korean reviewers are significantly more negative, calling out boss design, lack of onboarding, and quest logic in ways that go beyond the universal complaints about controls and UI. These aren't the same criticisms wearing different language clothes, they're a different set of problems, suggesting the game lands differently depending on what players expect from the genre.

The forum data is the other thing worth sitting with. Nearly 8,000 unique posters generated over 1,300 threads, and the developer replied to none of them. Zero across all sections. Of the forum users who went on to review the game, 31% went negative. There's no way to know how much of that was shaped by unaddressed frustration, but the contrast with this week's other games is hard to ignore.

Then over the weekend players began finding undisclosed AI-generated art scattered through the game . Pearl Abyss issued an apology and committed to an audit. Given that they couldn't find time to reply to a single forum thread while nearly 8,000 players were talking about their game, it's reasonable to wonder how thorough that audit will be.

The Seven Deadly Sins: Origin sits at 52.8% positive from 8,062 reviews, which puts it in "Mixed" territory on Steam. For a game launching on the back of a popular anime IP, that's a difficult place to be.

The regional spread is interesting. Spanish speakers are the most positive at 68%, French and Brazilian Portuguese cluster around 54-57%, while Russian reviewers land at 44% and Chinese at 26%. That's a significant range for a game where the IP should theoretically carry goodwill across markets. Russian players specifically call out connection issues requiring a VPN, which may be inflating the negatives there rather than reflecting pure game quality.
The complaints themselves are consistent across languages: bugs, poor optimization, and a gacha system players describe as predatory. The Genshin Impact comparison comes up repeatedly (over 5% of all reviews) and not favourably. When players are framing your game as a worse version of a five-year-old competitor, the originality problem is real.

The forum picture is stark. The one logged team reply across 603 threads wasn't the developer, it was a Valve employee closing a thread of players upset that a character had been given shorts instead of visible underwear. The developer still said nothing, which given the nature of that particular thread, is hard to blame them for.

Forum-to-review conversion flips negative at 58%, the inverse of what you'd hope for. Players who engaged enough to post came away more likely to leave a bad review than a good one, and there was nobody there to change that trajectory.

Death Stranding 2: On the Beach is the outlier of the week. 96.1% positive from 6,433 reviews, and the sentiment holds across every language. Chinese reviewers, who dragged Crimson Desert and Seven Deadly Sins down significantly, sit at 96.2% here.

The praise lands in familiar Kojima territory: visuals, storytelling, optimization. The optimization point is worth underlining given the week's context. Multiple games this week are getting hammered for poor PC performance, and DS2 players are specifically calling out how well it runs. That contrast will not be lost on players choosing where to spend their money during the Spring Sale.
The complaints that exist are mostly technical: crashes, frame rate drops on lower-end hardware, disappearing dialogue text. Real issues, but they're not shifting the needle. The developer replied to 17 threads, which is modest but represents actual presence, and 94.7% of forum users who reviewed the game went positive.
One of the week's most upvoted reviews is a Chinese player describing how Death Stranding helped them grieve their father's sudden death . That's the kind of connection most games never build, but with Death Stranding 2 it even shows up in the numbers.

The Cube, Save Us sits at 29% positive from 1,704 reviews. That's a rough launch by any measure, but the breakdown reveals something more specific than a game people didn't like.

Chinese reviewers land at 18% positive, Korean at 53%. That's the widest regional gap in this week's data, and the Chinese feedback is pointed: server crashes, cheaters everywhere, and a report button that's greyed out. The cheating problem isn't just about gameplay friction. Players feel the developer isn't giving them the tools to do anything about it.

The forum data confirms that dynamic. Zero team replies across 333 threads. Of the players who posted in forums and then reviewed, 71% went negative. That's the worst forum-to-review conversion this week by a significant margin. The forums became a place to vent with no one listening, and the reviews reflect it.
The game is free to play, which explains some of the review volume, and a handful of players acknowledge the concept has potential. The extraction shooter format with a shrinking cube mechanic is genuinely novel. But novelty doesn't survive server instability, pay-to-win complaints, and an unchecked cheating problem for long.

Dragonkin: The Banished sits at 76% positive from 1,589 reviews, which is a solid score for an ARPG in early access. The top upvoted review opens with "the biggest problem this game has is that no one seems to know it exists" - which is both a marketing problem and a genuine endorsement from someone who clearly wanted more people to find it.

Chinese and Korean reviewers are notably cooler, at 49% and 40% respectively, while French and German players sit above 83%. The gap is worth watching as the game develops, though the sample sizes in those markets are still small.
The forum story is the one to lead with here. The developer replied to 33% of all threads, the highest response rate of any game this week. One of the two most active posters in the entire forum is a developer. That presence shows up in the conversion data: 75% of forum users who reviewed went positive, which tracks closely with the overall score and suggests the community is reasonably healthy.

The English sentiment points to a game with a strong core, specifically the Ancestral Grid skill system, that still needs work on optimization, bugs, and enemy variety. Those are solvable problems. The developer being visibly present in the community is probably the best indicator that they're being worked on.