Don’t Be So Rash
Review bombing has become an all too common practice when new AAA games come out. It is used to express dissatisfaction of a user, which is part of the function of a review, but review bombing often has little to do with the quality of the game. For example, when Metro Exodus and Borderlands 3 were announced to be debuting on the Epic Games Store, Steam users retaliated by flooding previous entries of the series with negative reviews, despite the consensus that they are very good games. Steam has implemented anti-review bombing measures and now Metacritic has made their own changes.
Recently, games like The Last of Us Part 2 and Valorant have been hit with user review bombs on Metacritic, despite the critic scores being very high. Metacritic is not simply shutting down user reviews, but they will be implementing a waiting period between a game’s release and when users can post a review. Metacritic recently told Kotaku, “We recently implemented the 36-hour waiting period for all user reviews in our games section to ensure our gamers have time to play these games before writing their reviews.”
Sorry, gamers. Looks like you’re going to actually have to really play the game and think about it before reviewing it. Maybe this 36 hour waiting period will deter users who are posting negative reviews in the heat of the moment. If you feel that strongly about something, those feelings will still be there in a day or two. However, in cases like Borderlands 3 and Metro Exodus, where users were review bombing games that were many years old, this would not stop anything.
Do you think this is a change for the better on Metacritic? Let us know in the comments below.