Helldivers 2 draws 1,667 negative Steam reviews after Easy Anti-Cheat switch

Helldivers 2 received 1,667 negative Steam reviews on October 20, up from 19 reviews the previous day, according to Valve's review histogram. The spike occurred the same day Arrowhead Game Studios swapped the GameGuard anti-cheat for Easy Anti-Cheat. This patch also included a weapon balance pass and a premium Warbond.

Helldivers 2 · official art via IGDB

The game's Steam score for the last 30 days is Mostly Negative at 36 percent of 10,113 reviews, though the all-time score remains Mostly Positive at 79 percent of 641,775 reviews. Reports say the daily negative review count has not fallen below 226 since October 21.

Arrowhead says the switch happened because the GameGuard implementation was not as effective as it could have been. The studio says Easy Anti-Cheat is an industry standard used in over 200 games. Arrowhead says some mods may no longer function or may require updates from their creators to keep working. The developer explained that it intends to block software tweaks that provide players with an unjust edge or disrupt the experience for others.

While players have reported crashes or the game failing to run, Arrowhead has acknowledged no launch failures. The studio says Steam Deck and Linux compatibility is unchanged and that there are no new hardware requirements.

Background On October 20, the patch that introduced Easy Anti-Cheat also added DirectX 12 support and weapon adjustments. Our earlier story