After years of bizarre setbacks and shaky promises, The Day Before launches to 'overwhelmingly negative' Steam reviews: "The day before I refund"

The Day Before was recently Steam's most wishlisted game, but on the day of its long-awaited and oft-delayed Early Access launch, it's marred by an 'Overwhelmingly Negative' Steam rating and countless reviews citing poor performance and missing features.

In hindsight, "missing features" might be an understatement. A good share of reviews appear to be from players surprised to find that they don't consider The Day Before an open-world MMO at all, even though it's advertised as just that.

In addition to more detailed reviews breaking down specific issues with the game - "terrible combat," "frequent crashes," "no reason to even progress" - there are loads of more pithy comments summing up various reactions.

"Turns out it is a real game. Kind of wish it wasn't."

"The Day Before Refund."

"This 'open world' is smaller than a New York apartment but with more rats."

And so on. As it stands, there are 4,876 negative reviews and just 773 are positive - that's 13%. I'm not great at math, but I'm pretty sure if The Day Before was rated on a 10-point scale, it would be 1.3/10. Or using GamesRadar+'s review system, .65/5. Yikes.

As recently as this week, the self-styled survival MMO was Steam's second-most wishlisted game, despite being temporarily removed from the platform due to a copyright dispute at the start of 2023. It was originally supposed to launch in June 2022, but after switching to Unreal Engine 5, it was pushed to March 2023, and then to November, and finally, December. The game also raised some eye brows when it put out a call for volunteers to take on key development roles, including translation and community management.

To be fair, this is only an Early Access launch, so a good deal of bugs is expected and I certainly won't rule out a Day Before redemption arc, but for now, things are looking pretty grim.

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