Big Walk Wiki
The Scores
| Steam | 91.6% positive — Very Positive | 7,934 reviews |
| Metacritic | 92 out of 100 | Critic reviews |
What the Negative Reviews Are About
We read the negative English reviews on Steam and counted how many raise each subject. A review can raise more than one, so these do not add up to 100%. Nothing anybody wrote is reproduced here — this is a count of subjects, not a collection of quotes.
| Subject | Share of negative reviews raising it |
|---|---|
| Voice chat and microphones | 46% |
| Needing friends to play with | 36% |
| Price against length | 19% |
| Repetition or not enough to do | 17% |
| Performance | 12% |
| Connecting and lobbies | 12% |
| Bugs | 3% |
| Motion sickness | 1% |
The Two Big Ones
Voice chat and microphones comes up in 46% of negative reviews and needing friends to play with in 36%, out of 475 read. They are very different kinds of problem: one was a fault that has been fixed, the other is the game working as intended. Both are worth knowing before you buy.
Voice chat: mostly a bug, and mostly fixed
Big Walk launched with a fault that left players on quiet microphone setups nearly inaudible even at close range. It is the single most-cited subject in negative reviews, and House House patched it in version 1.4.8 on August 7, three days after release.
Because Steam stamps every review with a date, it is possible to check whether the patch actually changed how people write about it:
Of the 282 negative reviews written before the patch, 33% mention voices being too quiet. Of the 118 written after it, 14% do — the share fell by 19 percentage points across a patch that shipped three days into the game's life.
Read that carefully. This is a sample of English negative reviews ordered by recency, not the whole set, and a five-day window is short. Reviews are also dated when they were written, not when the writer hit the problem, and console players received 1.4.8 later than Steam players did, so some post-patch complaints come from people who did not have the patch yet. It is a strong signal, not proof.
What the patch did not change is the distance falloff: voices still fade as people walk away from each other, deliberately. Some of the remaining complaints are about that rather than about the bug, and no update is going to alter it — that is the game. The voice chat guide separates the two, and the patch notes cover what 1.4.8 changed.
Needing friends: a design decision, not a shortfall
The second most-cited subject is not a fault at all. Big Walk has no matchmaking, and House House has been explicit that this is deliberate: it is a long-form game meant to be played by the same group across several sessions, and they do not think throwing strangers together improves that.
So a substantial share of the negative reviews are, in effect, correct reports from people the game was never built for. If you do not have two or more friends who will commit to a run, this will disappoint you, and no patch is coming to fix it. That is the single most useful thing on this page for deciding whether to buy.
Worth knowing: a session is not locked to your own friends list. Anyone with the join code can enter, so a group assembled from a community works fine — the online guide covers join codes and session passwords.
What Is Barely Mentioned
Bugs appear in 3% of negative reviews. Motion sickness appear in 1% of negative reviews.
The scarcity of bug complaints is the more interesting of the two. For a co-op game in launch week, with twelve-player sessions and crossplay across three platforms, a near-absence of "it is broken" reviews is unusual. The problems people had were with one audio system and with the shape of the game, not with stability.
Critics
Big Walk holds a Metacritic score of 92 out of 100 for the PC version.
House House pointed at two reviews in particular in their launch announcement — Rebekah Valentine's at Kotaku and Chris Schilling's at Eurogamer. Both are linked from the announcement itself if you want to read the coverage the developers were happiest with.
How We Counted
Steam publishes review text and dates through a public endpoint. Once a day this site pulls the most recent English negative reviews, matches each against a fixed list of subjects, and counts how many reviews raise each one. The counting rules are the same every day, so the numbers on this page move only when the reviews move.
Limits worth stating plainly: only English reviews are counted, the sample is recency-ordered rather than random, a keyword can be matched in a sentence that means the opposite, and a review that raises three subjects is counted in all three. The point is the relative size of the piles, not a precise figure.
Frequently Asked Questions
Is Big Walk worth buying?
If you have friends to play it with, the review data says yes with unusual consistency — and the complaints that remain are mostly about one patched audio bug. If you would be buying it hoping to find people to play with, the second most common complaint on this page is exactly that situation, and it does not have a fix.
What is Big Walk's Metacritic score?
92 out of 100 for the PC version.
Are the bad reviews about the voice chat bug?
Many of them are, and it has been patched. Some are about the intended distance falloff, which is not a bug and will not be patched. The voice chat guide explains which is which, and how to tell them apart in your own session.
Can I play Big Walk without friends?
Not really, and this is the honest answer rather than the hopeful one. There is no matchmaking and no single-player mode. You can join a stranger's session with a join code if someone shares one, but the game is built around a group that keeps coming back.
Do you quote people's reviews on this page?
No. We count how often subjects come up and report the counts. The reviews belong to the people who wrote them.
Decided to buy? The price and platforms guide covers where it is cheapest, and the beginner guide is the first-session checklist.