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CRITIC SCORE DISTRIBUTION | ||
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Positive:
48
Mixed:
23
Negative:
4
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Critic Reviews
The GuardianJun 27, 2025
Season 3 Review:
If you can get on board with the new contestant twist – and that is a big if – then the final two episodes have a nicely grand and operatic feel to them, and ultimately, Squid Game does its job. But it leaves the impression, too, that it has become a more traditional action-thriller than it once was.
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Dec 30, 2024
Season 2 Review:
Although we see a ton of the Front Man this season, his plans or motivation remain frustratingly opaque. It’s hard to love a show so claustrophobically submerged in trauma. Even star Lee Jung-Jae recently said of returning to his role as Gi-hun, “it was almost like I was being pulled back to hell.” This season of Squid Game doesn’t really get us anywhere new— which may just be the point.
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Dec 26, 2024
Season 2 Review:
The new episodes are still well-crafted in many ways, even if they’ve succumbed to streaming bloat, with them essentially functioning as half a season, whose story will be completed sometime next year. But they never argue forcefully enough for their need to exist, unless you understand that Hwang deserves some compensation for the suffering he went through last time, and for all the money that he made for Netflix without previously getting to share in nearly enough of it.
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Radio TimesDec 25, 2024
Season 2 Review:
I was more than ready to give Squid Game season 2 an enthusiastic four-star recommendation based on the early episodes, but a loss of momentum towards the end and a strong sense of incompleteness has brought that down a notch...Nevertheless, I do believe that fans of the original series should go a few rounds with this follow-up and I remain optimistic that Hwang's brutal saga can stick the landing when its concluding episodes drop next year.
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SlashfilmDec 25, 2024
Season 2 Review:
Ultimately, Squid Game season 2 ends up feeling like it's trying to do one thing, and one thing only: get you excited for "Squid Game" season 3. And I guess on that front, it's successful — I want to see how this story ends. But I can't shake the feeling that too much of season 2 feels like it's spinning its wheels. Sure, it's entertaining and highly-watchable — don't be surprised if you binge through the entire thing in a day or two. But whereas season 1 felt like earth-shaking entertainment that came out of seemingly nowhere, season 2 is both too familiar and too inconclusive for its own good.
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The GuardianDec 25, 2024
Season 2 Review:
For all of its unevenness, particularly as it is warming up to the proper action, there is one big twist that really works, though whether it is distinct enough from what happens in the first series is unclear. And when you think you know where it is going, it turns away from its trajectory, upping the ante and finding its feet. What a shame it takes so long to get there though. Series three has some cleaning up to do.
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SlashfilmJun 27, 2025
Season 3 Review:
There's plenty of impressive production design coupled with some thrilling moments in these final episodes, and the last scene of the finale is bound to get lots of people talking (I know I almost let out a yell at the screen). But as "Squid Game" season 3 ticked off its final hours I could feel my interest slipping — and it certainly didn't help that those uber-wealthy masked VIPs return to spout more horrendous dialogue.
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Jun 27, 2025
Season 3 Review:
Squid Game might have obscured that hopefulness with how it fetishizes bloodlust, and how it normalized the accompanying gore so that we, too, craved more than what we needed. But if the series has a legacy, it’s in choosing not to finish Gi-hun’s statement in the series finale about what he thinks “humans are.” This time, Squid Game wants us to make up our own minds.
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ColliderDec 30, 2024
Season 2 Review:
The show still feels like it's constantly wagging its finger about morality and money in the arena, rather than actually building on the most interesting plots. Squid Game can't shake the desire to reiterate the same exhausting lessons about greed and human nature, and that does more to weigh down the narrative than lift it up.
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Dec 30, 2024
Season 2 Review:
As with most sequels, it is — almost by definition — less essential than the original, whose conceits and M.C. Escher by way of Fisher-Price settings it repeats. .... Thematically, it’s pretty straightforward, even conventional: kindness is better than selfishness, community trumps isolation, however much the deck is stacked against it or how depressing the outcome can be.
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Dec 25, 2024
Season 2 Review:
It's a huge shame, and it's unclear what went wrong and who's to blame. Did Hwang really want to continue the story, or did the success of Season 1 force the show to last longer than it should have? Will it all make more sense when Season 3, due in 2025, is released? Or will we find ourselves as trapped in a doomed "Game" as Gi-hun is?
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RogerEbert.comJun 30, 2025
Season 3 Review:
“Squid Game” suffers mightily in its pacing during this second half. The nihilism of its remaining characters also carries quite the strain. .... Netflix, in its zeal for more content for the trough, went back to the well for an extensive, overlong repetition of the beats of the first show, just more and tougher and nastier.
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The Observer (UK)Dec 30, 2024
Oct 8, 2021
Season 1 Review:
Murder is fetishized as a way to raise the stakes in a hazily political conversation without proposing a solution. ... To be clear, there is an obvious difference between spectatorship of real-world and fictional violence, even before Hwang’s script dramatically draws it out. But it might be easier to see that distinction if the pile of bodies had been slaughtered in service of an idea more interesting than that inequality is bad.
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