WARDOGS Steam Reviews Flip to ‘Very Positive’ as Player Count Tops 365,000

WARDOGS has gone from a review-bombed mess to one of Steam’s best-reviewed shooters in under two days. Bulkhead’s 100-player tactical FPS, published by Team17, opened Early Access on September 10 and immediately drew a “Mixed” rating as furious players hammered the store page over multi-hour login queues and mid-match disconnects. That success came back to bite Bulkhead, with the game debuting to an overall ‘Mixed’ review score as players reported waiting several hours to get into a match and even crashing after finally loading into a game. However, now that the dust has settled, Wardogs boasts a more respectable ‘Very Positive’ score, with players praising the “good old fashioned FPS goodness” on offer.

From Mixed to Very Positive in under 48 hours

The official Steam listing now backs that up. As of this week, WARDOGS sits at “Very Positive (26,132) – 84% of the 26,132 user reviews for this game are positive.” That’s a proper swing. Days earlier, the game’s own launch coverage put it at only “57 percent of reviews being positive” as players piled on over queue times, connection errors and crashes.

Some players are still arguing over whether the recovery is real progress or just early critics getting drowned out by newer, happier buyers who finally got a match:

The queues that sparked the backlash

The complaints weren’t baseless. Launch day put some players behind queues of well over 300,000 people, and countless players reported that after waiting 40 minutes to several hours to get into a match, Wardogs would crash and force them to complete the process all over again to access the game. Bulkhead responded with what it called Launch Stability Hotfix #1, forcing a client restart and letting players back in through what the studio described as controlled batches while it worked with Valve on raising its server rate limit.

It worked, at least on the night. The official X account of Wardogs showed that everyone logged into the game was finally playing, with zero players showing as queued. Bulkhead also confirmed the game had sold 1.25 million copies inside its first 24 hours on Steam, a number that puts the queue chaos into a different light. That’s not a small studio struggling for attention. That’s a small studio drowning in it.

Concurrent peaks chasing Counter-Strike 2

The player numbers back up the demand. SteamDB’s player statistics show Wardogs reached a peak of 337,157 concurrent players during its Early Access launch, up from 245,118 during its beta. That’s a substantial audience for a new FPS, and it didn’t stop there. Two days after launching into early access, the game only continued to set new records, reaching an all-time peak of 365,111 players, briefly ranking among the most-played paid titles on the whole platform.

Consoles are coming, just not soon. Bulkhead has confirmed, per a Polygon report, that the multiplayer first-person shooter will launch on PS5 and Xbox Series X|S in 2028. Anyone hoping for a couch version of this year’s biggest FPS surprise has a long wait, and Bulkhead hasn’t attached a firm date within that year.

Bulkhead’s own bar is lower than the headlines

Here’s the thing worth remembering before you get swept up in the concurrent-player charts: Bulkhead never asked for this scale. Wardogs early access opened after a closed beta that peaked at 245,118 concurrent Steam players, nearly 50 times the 5,000-player floor CEO Joe Brammer named as the studio’s sustainable target. A game built for a few thousand daily players got hit by hundreds of thousands on day one, and the queues were the predictable result.

Our view: a launch-week review bomb over server load is one of the least useful signals in gaming, and this is a case study in why. The actual game, a $39.99 three-team shooter built around a starting cash economy and no microtransactions during Early Access, was never the problem. The login screen was. Once Bulkhead cleared that bottleneck, the score corrected itself almost as fast as it fell.

What actually matters now isn’t the launch-week peak. It’s whether WARDOGS can hold anything close to a stable population once the novelty wears off, given Bulkhead itself only ever asked for a few thousand daily players to call the project a success.