Mortal Shell 2 Launch Reviews: Crashes and Difficulty

Mortal Shell 2 launched worldwide on 20 August 2026, and the first wave of Steam reviews sits at Mostly Positive rather than the higher tiers some pre-launch coverage implied. This piece is not a review — it is a read on what the reception actually says a few hours in, what the negative reviews keep repeating, whether Cold Symmetry has responded to the technical complaints, and what you actually need to know before you hit install.

Right now, in the first stretch after the worldwide unlock, the game’s Steam review score sits in the Mostly Positive band rather than Very Positive or Overwhelmingly Positive. That distinction matters because Steam’s tiers are not just a raw yes/no split — Very Positive and Overwhelmingly Positive generally require a stronger and more consistent ratio across a larger review sample, while Mostly Positive reflects a real but more mixed reaction, with a noticeably larger share of negative write-ups than the top tiers would allow. Critic scores, separately, have landed higher: Mortal Shell II currently holds an 85 on OpenCritic, rated “Mighty,” with 92% of critics recommending it, and an 84 on Metacritic for PC and 85 for PS5, and the original Mortal Shell scored 76 on OpenCritic for comparison. That gap between critic scores and the player rating is the actual story on launch day — critics who finished review builds are more positive than the wider player base is proving to be right now.

It is also worth remembering that aggregate scores can move as more reviews are added after launch, so treat any single snapshot, including this one, as a moment in time rather than a settled verdict.

Pull up the recent negative reviews and a handful of complaints repeat far more than anything else. None of these are confirmed, measured defect rates — they are what players are reporting, over and over, in their own words.

On the crash front specifically, one Steam Community thread captures the frustration bluntly: a player wrote that “the crashes are such a buzzkill and downright annoying”, while others in the same thread reported dozens of hours with zero crashes at all — the experience is genuinely uneven rather than universal. A separate review from a wider outlet described glitches as a routine occurrence, including falling through the world and crashes to the PlayStation 5 dashboard happening at a high frequency even with the day’s latest patch, and noted a repeatable glitch that would break enemy AI and leave them wandering their preset paths. A PS5 review build also reportedly ran into a case where a crash caused permanent loss of recoverable currency after a death — a bug type, not a confirmed universal outcome.

None of this is universal. Plenty of players are reporting clean runs with no crashes at all, and the discrepancy between “zero issues” and “constant crashes” in the same threads is itself part of the story — this looks like a launch with real but inconsistent stability problems rather than a uniformly broken build.

Set against the technical complaints, the praise is fairly consistent and centers on combat. The biggest change is the removal of the traditional stamina meter, so you no longer need to stop attacking or dodging simply because a bar has emptied, and fights encourage constant pressure while still punishing reckless attacks through committed animations and enemy counterattacks. Outlet coverage frames this as a genuine improvement over the first game rather than just a tweak — GameSpot highlights this change as one of the reasons combat feels substantially better than in the original. Reviews also point to the returning Shell system, which lets you inhabit different fallen warriors for different builds; if you’re deciding which one to start with, that’s covered in the site’s guide on which shell to pick first rather than something worth re-explaining here.

A Steam Deck-focused review summed up the moment-to-moment feel similarly, noting that dodging and parrying were precise, attacks landed and staggered enemies appropriately, which lines up with what the broader critic consensus is saying about the combat overhaul specifically, separate from the stability complaints.

Yes, at least on the crash front specifically. Cold Symmetry posted directly in the game’s Steam Community discussions during Advanced Access, telling players: “Hey all, for any players experiencing crashes, we’ve just pushed a hotfix to the game’s default branch.” The studio has also confirmed the game crashes for some players when they open Settings, Keyboard Bindings, and posted a fix for it, and separately shipped a hotfix covering miscellaneous crash and stability fixes, a fix for one item locking up the UI when equipped from the beacon menu, and a fix for stealing enemy weapons mid-riposte. That confirms the studio is actively patching. What has not appeared, at least not yet, is any public statement addressing the visibility of the Slayer Seal or the checkpoint/runback criticism directly — those read as design decisions the studio hasn’t commented on, rather than bugs it has acknowledged needing to fix. Don’t read the silence on those two points as an admission either way; it’s simply unaddressed so far.

Cold Symmetry has already pushed multiple hotfixes since Advanced Access opened, which tells you two things at once: the studio is responsive, and the build you’d be installing today is not the finished, settled version of the game. If you buy now, factor in a roughly 70 GB PC download (or the console equivalents below) before you even reach a menu, the likelihood of at least one more patch landing in your first week, and the real chance — based on what’s in the reviews right now — of hitting a crash or a runback grind that a later patch might soften. That’s the actual price of playing on day one instead of waiting a few weeks: not a dollar cost, but a stability and patience cost.

For anyone installing today, the reported storage figures are worth checking against your own drive before you start:

Those edition prices and the early access window come from the Standard Edition at $49.99 and the Devout Edition at $59.99, with Devout including up to 72 hours of advanced access. If you’re past the buying decision and already in the game, the site’s guides on where to go in the first hours and how Tarforge upgrades actually work cover the systems questions this piece isn’t the place for.