Barotrauma

Ask Barotrauma's own reviewers what actually kills a run, and the alien leviathans circling your submarine are rarely the answer. Read enough of them and a much more consistent villain emerges: the crew.

A simulation few games attempt

Barotrauma's core appeal is real systemic depth. Every wire in the submarine can be rewired correctly or incorrectly, every reactor requires active management to avoid meltdown, every hull breach floods a specific compartment with real consequences for anyone inside it, and every character can specialise as a doctor, engineer, captain or mechanic with genuinely different responsibilities. Reviewers describe genuinely absurd, specific stories that only this kind of simulation produces — one player recounts playing a doctor character attempting to save patients who turn out to be a smuggling cover, only to be poisoned by a crewmate mid-shift. Another describes the optional traitor mode escalating a routine dive into a slow-burn thriller with a crewmate they'd been chatting amiably with moments before. These aren't scripted moments; they emerge from the simulation itself, and it's genuinely rare for a game to produce them this reliably.

The community problem, reported with unusual consistency

Here's what stands out reading the negative-review corpus: the complaints aren't scattered across many different issues. They cluster hard around one thing, described in strikingly similar language across years. "The community is awful," reads one review bluntly. "Full of literal man children who are determined to make the game as unfun as possible... you can't kick or ban them in-game either." Another, from a player with 820 hours, calls it "the worst community I've ever seen in 20 years of multiplayer gaming." A third, at 226 hours, states that in their experience "not a single person who plays this game is not a troll." This is a genuinely severe, repeated characterization from players who otherwise praise the game's systems in the same reviews — the complaint is squarely about who they're forced to play with on public servers, not about anything Barotrauma's developers built.

Even the fans admit the technical debt

Separately, and worth reporting on its own terms: some of the most detailed negative reviews come from players with extraordinary investment in the game, writing with real reluctance. One reviewer with 1,264 hours opens by noting they'd never expected to write a negative review, doing so on the game's own anniversary, before describing performance built on what they call "seven year old code" supporting "constant updates and patchwork," with bugs numerous and varied enough, in their words, "that one could mistake them for actual gameplay." This isn't a drive-by technical complaint — it's a long-term fan's considered assessment that the simulation's ambition has outpaced its underlying stability even after a full 1.0 release.

Reading the completion data

The achievement curve shows a game with a genuinely accessible entry point and a very long tail. Basic milestones — repairing a device, discovering the game's early biomes — sit at 86.3% and 69.2%, meaning most players engage meaningfully with core systems. The rarest achievements, tied to elaborate late-campaign and hidden content, fall to a fraction of a percent, consistent with a sandbox whose full depth is reserved for a committed minority.

7.5 out of 10. Barotrauma delivers a simulation depth and emergent storytelling that genuinely has no close competitor, and the devotion in its positive reviews — including from players with thousands of hours — is well earned. It's held below the top tier by two specific, honestly reported problems: a public multiplayer community that a striking number of reviewers describe in unusually severe terms, and a persistent technical fragility that even the game's most loyal fans openly acknowledge. Play it with people you trust, expect some jank, and the simulation underneath both problems remains genuinely worth experiencing.