This past Friday saw Distinct Possibility Studios’ extraction MMOFPS Reaper Actual make its stated early access release after a few delays, but it looks as if those pauses were not enough to stem a surge of negative user reviews arguing that the game is far too incomplete to buy right now.
As of this Sunday morning, Steam reviews are sitting at a bright red “negative” aggregate, with most players complaining about bugs such as one that locked them within their hideout entirely, poor server and PC performance issues like long load times and rubber banding, and limited content. And this was all occurring with an all-time high of 70 players thus far; at the time of writing, the game’s Steam population had a 24-hour peak of 13 this past Saturday.
The studio is very obviously aware of problems loading into the play space and promises a fix soon, but otherwise it published a development roadmap that promises vehicles in July, clan bases and more base locations in August, and the goal of having 500-player servers in October, though all of those additions should probably be considered fluid at the moment.
Meanwhile, DPS studio head John Smedley is calling attention to a reviewer at games website TheBigBois. According to screenshots shared by Smedley, this reviewer was granted game keys for Reaper Actual for review purposes, but he instead shared them on a forum for game cheaters. Screenshots from a series of Discord DMs further show that Zach didn’t deny the act, arguing that “cheating isn’t a bad thing.” In a PvPvE game.
“I am a very big lover of our industry. I love making games. This is the first time I have ever in 37 years had a ‘journalist’ do something like this,” Smed writes in follow-up tweets. “[T]o be clear – nothing he did was ‘illegal’ nor is it wrong to have a bad opinion about our game. But what he did is unethical and inexcusable IMO.”
Today I’m going to shed some sunlight on one of the most unethical things I’ve ever seen. I did an interview with Zach at https://t.co/jRfxxpeG3j – he asked for keys. We gave them to him – here are the keys we gave him (hey goes by Big-Z on Discord) – and also here is a… pic.twitter.com/mVEB377Vpc
— John Smedley (@j_smedley) May 30, 2026
