July was a tough month for Apex Legends.

We reported last week that players were resorting to review bombing to vent their frustration with Apex Legends' new monetization scheme. Today, that bombing campaign continues unabated, with the free-to-play shooter recording nearly 30,000 negative Steam reviews in the last week alone.

Apex Legends' recent Steam review rating is currently an unpleasant “overwhelmingly negative” one. While the overall rating remains a respectable “Mostly Positive,” only 15% of reviews in the past 30 days have been favorable. Nor has the review bombardment slowed down much: as of this writing, players have left more than 4,400 negative reviews in the past 24 hours.

Not surprisingly, the most common complaint in the wave of negative reviews relates to changes in the battle path. One reviewer asks, “Did Titanfall 2 have to die to make this battle pass money?” He asked. Another says, “I've been playing since the first season and have never missed a beat,” but after 2,650 hours of play, “this may be the end of this journey.”

The success of similar recent review bombing campaigns demonstrates how obliterating a game's Steam rating can be a surprisingly powerful leverage for players. the PC community for Helldivers is also trying to avoid Sony's planned mandatory PSN account review to escape Sony's planned PSN account mandate, and fans of “TF2” used the power of public sentiment to pressure Valve into banning the anti-bot. Of course, like the complaints about the difficulty of Shadow of the Erdtree, they didn't seem to accomplish much more than publicly acknowledging that many people don't collect scadtree pieces.

Still, as I read the backlash, I can't help but wonder how many times EA intends to shoot itself directly in the foot with this particular gun. Perhaps someone in the boardroom missed the public embarrassment of the microtransactions in Battlefront 2.