Mecha BREAK breaks through review bombs, soars to international greatness in Steam’s top 10

Mecha BREAK, the PVP mecha action title which recently got a free-to-play demo, has broken through a massive wave of negative review bombs and become one of Steam’s most-played titles. The game aims to launch later this year and plays as if Armored Core 6 was a multiplayer shooter.

The demo for Mecha BREAK came out on Feb. 20 and attracted a ton of players internationally. Developed by Chinese studio Amazing Seasun Games, it builds on the foundations laid by the Armored Core franchise and other mecha series, granting players controls of massive combat mechs that would put Pacific Rim to shame and pitting them against each other in colossal maps or versus AI-controlled enemies in narrative missions. While the demo performed quite well worldwide, peaking at over 300,000 players and becoming Steam’s sixth most-played game during peak hours (thanks, SteamDB), its Chinese fan base embarked on a review-bombing campaign, causing it to receive a “Mostly Negative” label.

In non-Chinese speaking regions, Mecha BREAK has a “Mostly Positive” rating on Steam, with 74 percent of users willing to recommend the game. The precise reason for this review bombing campaign is unclear, though many of the reviews cite either grindy gameplay, the game’s unskippable tutorial, or forced PVP elements as their primary issues. Allegedly, since so many players tried to log in on the demo’s launch day, the Chinese servers buckled and were unavailable for the majority of players in the region. Those overseas had no such problems, nor did content creators, which apparently incited the negative response.

Either way, Mecha BREAK is still seeing hundreds of thousands of players and is likely to become a successful game internationally once it launches later in 2025, even if its domestic audience doesn’t appreciate it all too much.