"Review bombing as a concept wasn't a thing": Helldivers 2 boss says Arrowhead's debut hit Magicka was actually just buggy and unoptimized, though it was later review bombed by Helldivers mad at Sony

Three wizards in colorful robes, surrounded by monsters, in the box art for Magicka.

Long before it was known as the house of Helldivers 2, developer Arrowhead Game Studios had to its name a lovely little wizard action game called Magicka, one of the bigger surprise hits of the 2010s. For players, Magicka was a treat, but for computers, it was poison, frequently crashing and generally running like a bag of hammers going up a down escalator even on the best hardware available. In recent and amusing comments, Helldivers 2 creative lead and Arrowhead veteran Johan Pilestedt owns up to the game's reputation and connects it to Arrowhead's more recent stumbles.

Wading into a Reddit discussion of where Helldivers 2 should go from here, Pilestedt points out that Magicka wasn't review bombed at release because "Review bombing as a concept wasn't a thing". And it's true the practice of sticking it to developers and publishers by hitting them in the user review score over – to distill a wide and gray discussion of review bombing criteria – non-gameplay problems has been deployed far more often in the past decade or so.