Following the latest round of abusive and malicious review bombing that targeted Horizon: Forbidden West and its Burning Shores DLC, Metacritic’s parent company, Fandom, has pledged to fight back against those using its platforms to spread hatred and write up ‘disrespectful reviews.’
It has stated quite clearly that it’s going to be ‘evolving’ its processes and tools, improving moderation across the board in a bid to tackle review bombing, a concept that has worsened dramatically in recent years.
Review Bombing Has Blown Up
For years, disgruntled gamers have taken to the airwaves to voice their opinions about video games that, for some reason or another, they weren’t happy with. However, for a while now, the act of airing these grievances has taken place in the form of review bombing, which is where a user will deliberately score a game as low as possible on any given platform, forcing down its overall rating, and often leaving an abusive or disrespectful comment.
That’s what’s been happening in the last few days with Horizon: Forbidden West and its Burning Shores DLC.
Spoiler Ahead for Burning Shores.
Towards the end of Burning Shores, Aloy (the protagonist) is presented with the option to share a kiss with another woman, and that’s the sole reason why many gamers have taken to platforms like Metacritic to launch a tirade, review bombing the game.
It was a similar scenario with The Last of Us II, which was review bombed for similar circumstances. It was just days ago that the Resident Evil 4 remake was review bombed – again for being too ‘woke’, according to those bombing it. Not only that, but Ada Wong’s voice actor, Lilly Gao, came under intense scrutiny and harassment for her replacement of the character’s original VA.
Fallout 76 (2018) was review bombed, Metro Exodus (2019) was review bombed, Mass Effect 3 (2012) was review bombed – even Skyrim was review bombed once upon a time. Well, it seems like enough is enough, and Fandom (through Metacritic) is finally doing something about it – at least, attempting to.
It was said that:
Fandom is a place of belonging for all fans and we take online trust and safety very seriously across all our sites including Metacritic. Metacritic is aware of the abusive and disrespectful reviews of Horizon Forbidden West Burning Shores and we have a moderation system in place to track violations of our terms of use.
Following that, the team explained that they were working to introduce ‘stricter moderation’ in the coming months – so, there’s a project in the works.
Thanks to Eurogamer for publishing Fandom’s original comments on the matter.
For more Insider Gaming news, check out our coverage of the news that Dead Island 2 reached 1 million sales in just three days.
Yawn. Using “review bombing” as an excuse has blown up. Both to cover for bad games and for what passes as gaming “journalism”.