Players mostly hate Gray Zone Warfare—except for those that hate Tarkov more

New extraction shooter Gray Zone Warfare has only been out on Steam Early Access for a few hours, but it’s already getting slammed with poor reviews for its performance issues.

The game currently sits at “Mostly Negative” on Steam, with the large majority of the negative reviews targeting the game’s bad performance and optimization, along with crashes and other common early access issues. However, many of the positive reviews don’t have much else to say besides blasting Escape From Tarkov and its controversial “pay-to-win” $250 Unheard Edition, and not much to say about the game itself.

The current top “most helpful reviews” for GZW say “At least it doesn’t cost 250 dollars” and “PvE mode that doesn’t cost £250 to play.” Thankfully, not all reviews are memes, with some offering sound advice and feedback.

“Good spin on the extract shooter with big potential,” one reviewer said. “Sadly can’t recommend at the moment with the performance issues and server issues. Looking forward to future updates and patches.”

As GZW is an early access game, issues like this are expected, if not guaranteed throughout the first days, weeks, and even months of its release.

“We aim to create a game of our dreams and to achieve this goal, we need your help,” one of the game’s developers at MADFINGER Games said on its Discord server. “We are not delusional and we expect to run into more than a few bugs once Gray Zone Warfare reaches you all.”

Performance issues aside, the game does seem to have a decent playerbase throughout its first hours. At time of writing, almost 45,000 players were exploring Lamang Island whether in PvE or PvPvE environments.

After a few updates for optimization and server capacity issues, GZW should continue to gain traction on Steam as another option for fans of realistic military shooters.