At its core,Shadowverse: Worlds Beyondis a very decent deckbuilder and a great addition to the Shadowverse series. There’s just one small problem: it’s also one of the worst-reviewed Steam games of 2025. At the time of writing, it has over30,000Mostly Negative reviews, and pretty much all of them are to do with the shocking microtransactions.
One Steam review features the term “credit-card jitsu”, which perfectly summarizes the reaction to how much it costs to build even a starting deck in the game. And yet, despite all that well-directed rage, there are still 130,000 concurrent players checking out its latest card set.
Infinity Evolved Needs An Infinity Wallet
The latest Shadowverse set,Infinity Evolved, arrives almost a month after the game’s release. This has given folks enough time toput together their decks(with legendaries packed via free events and rewards), and even as a free-to-play player, you’ve probably got a decent start on the game if you’ve played enough hours.
Unfortunately, a new set means new legendaries and decks to craft. The Steam reviews paint amiserable picture: players who really enjoy the game and its deck-building mechanics are put out because of how much it costs to play with some of the new cards.
They ruined the f2p economy, the monetization is aggressively catered to whales. While it is in this state, I cannot recommend the game.
Steam reviewer ‘gooska.’
The Reviews Are Wrecking The Game For Its Unfriendly Microtransactions
The reviews highlight one major problem: even on the off-chance that you do magically pack the exact legendary you need for a fancy new deck, the rest of the cards are going to cost you - probably everything.
You’ll need to farm endless events, participate in the now-nerfed weekend tournaments (these have been reduced from four rounds to three, directly nerfing the amount of rewards you can receive), and play almost non-stop to build out your decks.
Players are understandably miserable, with plenty of reviews stating that they enjoy the game, but can’t stand the constant randomness of rewards, grindy events, and “unfun” gambling. This is probably one of the most hilariously unbalanced review scores compared to players I’ve ever seen.
It’s been a wild year for Cygames so far, hitting unfathomable peaks withUmamusumeand unbelievable lows with Shadowverse: Worlds Beyond. All things considered, the Umamusumeold-school gacha system looks downright friendlycompared to Shadowverse…and that’s saying something.
