Naughty Dog’s highly-anticipated game – The Last Of Us Part II – was inundated with hundreds of negative user reviews – on Metacritic – upon its release. Despite the game only officially being out for a few hours, news of the spoilers had left people displeased and those people bombarded the game’s Metacritic page with scathing reviews. It was clear that many people had barely scraped the surface of the game, yet decided to leave a score based on the full game. Metacritic have now responded with a delay on user reviews. This appropriate counteraction will now see a brief period of professional reviews coming through, and allowing users at home – that haven’t been able to get early copies – to experience the game a bit more before casting judgement.
On Superliminal’s Metacritic page, you can see that under the user review section, it instead says “Please spend some time playing the game”. This message is also accompanied by a specified time and date that signifies when user reviews can commence.
A clear delay is now in place.
It’s a very bold statement from Metacritic as The Last Of Us Part II is certainly not the first game to receive the review bombing treatment. Pokemon Sword and Shield, Death Stranding, and Call Of Duty: Modern Warfare (2019) are just a few recent examples of this practice taking place. Irrespective of the game’s content, people are using the Metacritic platform as a means to voice their discontent, rather than provide constructive criticism as intended. We recently discussed the problem with metacritic user reviews.
Will Metacritic’s delay of user reviews work? Only time will tell. It may discourage the kind of negative behavior that Metacritic has become associated with, or it may only delay the inevitable.
Check out our trophies and achievements list for Superliminal. It’s now available to buy on PS4, Xbox, Switch, and PC.
Antony
Good! Like a game / don’t like a game that is fine, but leave a FAIR review. Anyone posting a zero minutes after launch is just trolling and isn’t fair criticism.
Mister wood
Steam, despite everything, just keeps climbing higher and higher in my regards.
Only in steam can I buy a game, play for 2 hours or less, and then leave a review, negative or positive.
Review aggregators are increasingly anti consumer and pro corporation. Useless.
Antony
But Steam endures you actually OWN the game and have played it.
With API’s this would something beneficial to add to Meta/Open Critic for other platforms and reduce the sort of blatant review bombing we have seen recently.
disqus_GTFUQxdOdE
Metacritic once again proving how useless they are, bending to publishers will.
If your reviews or review averages are beholden to publisher desires, you aren’t giving us the honest take. TLOU2 sucked, the fans have spoken, once again gaming journalism proves how big of a joke it is.
disqus_ErcESj69fb
Sony is EERILY protective of TLOU2. I imagine some pretty serious cash was splashed on this one.
Antony
TLOU2 was great for many fans too, but it’s definitely not to everyone’s taste, and that is fine.
But rampant review bombing doesn’t help anyone make an informed decision and makes user scores even less relevant.
It would be great for Metacritic and OpenCritic to tie into the API’s where possible for Sony/MS to only allow reviews for people who have played the game much like Steam