Two video games have recently faced review bombing on Steam, with Highguard receiving negative reviews and Starsand Island seeing an influx of suspicious positive ones. Developers and former staff attribute these actions to influencing player perceptions. The incidents highlight vulnerabilities in user review systems for games.
Video games appear particularly susceptible to review manipulation compared to other media, as seen in recent cases involving two titles on Steam.
Highguard, developed by Wildlight Entertainment, launched as a free-to-play game for PC and consoles on January 26. It debuted strongly with nearly 100,000 concurrent players on Steam but quickly lost up to 95% of its audience due to mixed reviews and gameplay issues. By this week, concurrent players had fallen below 5,000.
The game's troubles trace back to a trailer revealed at December's Game Awards, which drew criticism. Josh Sobel, a former tech artist and rigger laid off from the studio, commented on X, as reported by IGN: "The trailer came out, and it was all downhill from there… We were turned into a joke from minute one, largely due to false assumptions about a million-dollar ad placement, which even prominent journalists soon began to state as fact. Within minutes, it was decided: this game was dead on arrival, and creators now had free ragebait content for a month. Every one of our videos on social media got downvoted to hell… At launch, we received over 14k review bombs from users with less than an hour of playtime. Many didn’t even finish the required tutorial."
Sobel suggested that gamer culture contributed to the game's decline, though he acknowledged other factors. He has since deleted his account.
In contrast, Starsand Island, an anime-inspired life simulation from Chinese developer Seed Sparkle Lab, entered early access on Steam last week and is also available on Xbox Game Pass. The studio raised concerns in a Steam page update about a surge of overly positive reviews, many posted after minimal playtime and at similar times, indicating possible bot or AI involvement. Some accounts purchased the game solely to review and then refunded it.
The developers described this as "some kind of overpraise as an attack" and suspected intentional interference. They noted that creating an indie game is "not easy" and urged those responsible to "please stop," emphasizing their focus on improving the product.
