It happens almost every time a major game is released. The critic reviews come out and then players get their hands on it to see what all the hype is about. And at that point, it doesn’t really matter anymore. Sites like Metacritic are sure to see a wave of people coming to leave negative reviews of the game whether they played it or not. And Starfield is no exception as it’s currently being review bombed just a day after its full release.
As of publishing, Starfield sits with a 5.9 Xbox Series X user score and a 5.4 PC user score on Metacritic. At one point, however, those numbers were in the low fours when sitting down to begin writing.
You have some reviews read, “Two worst graphics that I have ever seen” with a 0/10. Another zero score doesn’t even hide its intention, “This is for review bombing for the Horizon games, also y’all would have made a lot more money if y’all released on PlayStation.”
In an effort to combat the negative review bombing, other users are leaving 10/10 ratings without any sort of relevant comment.
“PlayStation fanboys botting the reviews to lower the score,” one 10/10 rating reads. “Amazing game! Love it!”
READ MORE: Fools Want PlayStation Writers And Developers to Lose Their Jobs For Enjoying Starfield
While there’s no way to prove the motivation behind all of the reviews being left on Metacritic and other platforms, it’s clear that some people just have nothing better to do.
Now, I’m not going to sit here and say that user reviews shouldn’t be allowed. In fact, I find myself trusting in-depth, thought-out user reviews more often than not. There’s something about reading a review from a regular player with 30/40/50 hours that helps with a decision process when debating on a purchase. But there’s absolutely nothing helpful about the people who just want to ruin the experience for others solely because a game either isn’t on the platform they want or because it doesn’t do that one niche thing you had hoped.
It’s clear there has to be a better way to weed out the clearly fake reviews than there is. Otherwise, it’s going to continue being a mess of a system for years to come.
If you are looking for more reliable user reviews, the current best options are the Steam and Xbox storefronts themselves. Whether positive or negative, they have been more thorough than those on Metacritic.
What do you think should be done about user review scores for major games, and games like Starfield being review bombed? Is this just a problem that the industry has to live with?
Game is trash. Cry harder xbots
Lol lets see, a game running on a outdated engine.has outdated visuals and outdated tech isn’t getting the reception you expected and you say its review bombing ? DEAL WITH IT.
How freaking childish to say we should exclude anyone who doesn’t give the game a perfect score, what utter gibberish. Let alone playing right into the hands of the Right Wing totalitarians who would gleefully hold up your article as an example of cancel culture. And who could blame them, you’re doing the exact same thing.
The game is fundamentally trash, it’s not optimised, destroying PCs and is a blatant fraud by the publisher. You are literally doing a No True Scotsman fallacy, and it’s such a glaring example of late stage Capitalism that says everything is a dichotomy, and the other side is the devil incarnate. It destroys truth and it destroys democracy, because no one has to listen to anything they don’t want to anymore.
The fact is the game is dull, many of us predicted this would happen, so when a company uses access to game reviews, and withhold game footage until after the purchase is made, is just dirty, especially from a company owned by a Trillion dollar Tech Monolith. 8 years and 400 million dollars for a Fallout 4 Expansion pack
Disgusting. And if you took the time to read through the reviews they’re all saying the same thing, the game has no soul, no ambition, no longer inspires the imagination. There’s no grand events, no scale, no realism. As one review said, it was like being at a baby shower that never ends.
You don’t sell Paddington the Bear to Gamers, they don’t care, this is what happens when old people try to control everything, they lose touch, and become irrelevant
Oh, and btw, I note your issue with the first review was “Two Graphics” assuming it was meant to be “The Graphics” and you were drawing attention to the spelling error. But then you made one of your own with “Throughout” instead of “Thorough”. Such is the circle of life.
As for the pronoun “debacle”, sure seems like a convenient smokescreen for this whole bait and switch, such a convenient way to divert the conversation with a red herring. So very convenient…
grow up
An entitled gamer whining and crying in the comment section? Never seen that one before.
This review bombing crap is beyond old at this point. If games are always so horrible, maybe make your own? Oh wait… that’s extremely difficult and conflicts with having no life in your parents basement.
Lol you’re dumb and tried using big words to compensate far that
Lol you’re dumb and tried using big words to compensate for that
I agree with you but seriously, did someone hurt you? I do not like the game either, but people like you just make us look bad. The kind of approach to criticism you displayed here just makes those of us legitimately criticizing the game look like ranting children. It is possible to dislike something in a civil manner, without doing a disservice to your own argument. Do better.
Couldn’t agree more. It seems any kind of critique these days, warranted or not, is review bombing, because there can be no flaws in a $200M+ game made by the company whose games these “journalists” love like their firstborn child, unconditionally. Because, there will be no early access for you if you say one bad word, and getting that early access is the bread and butter of online content creators, who cares about integrity.
Always with the right wing/left wing BS with you idiots… dumbass.
Was this written by a 12 year old? Starfield is a long way off, if ever, from being a good game.
These AuthorGPT instances are doing a really good job at being vague and blatant as Starfield.
Neckbeard with glasses and a beret lol.
The game is bad. Go into a dark area, try to light it up with your cutter. Nothing happens.
Fake Han Solo just gives me his ship?
Why the callback to Oblivions adoring fan? Just annoying.
From the start of the game, the writers word puked me with future speak that didn’t make any sense.
The interface is for consoles, not PC. Modders will have to fix it, thanks again Bethesda.
Holds my hand while I am playing, and even though I turn off the hand holding, it still insists on locking pinkys at least.
Some of the textures and meshes are very nice, some are very bad.
The NPCs look lifeless.
I can really keep going. Not going to spend 50 hours deciding if I like a game or not.
It’s like children are writing alot of these articles now.
Why is it never “review bombing” anytime it’s mostly positive reviews for a product?
So much crying from this journo. Cope
It’s not a 0/10 game and it’s not a 10/10 game it’s a 7 at most but I would personally say less. What’s annoying is all the overly positive reviews, even though the graphics suck, there are a shed load of loading screens and time (even with SSD), the games buggy, the menu system is pretty poor, the encumbrance system is poor, facial animations are bad and the in game maps no existent making finding your way around hard. I could take every aspect of the game and name a different game that does it better.
These are all genuine weaknesses that make the game poorer and leave room for improvement. I’m a pc player so I don’t give a .. about playstation vs xbox. BUT there clearly are also xbox fanboys overselling the quality of this supposedly next gen game as well as ps fanboys raging.
I also feel like some of the crtic reviews are overly biased, which makes you wonder if some of them are on the take. You can say I’m wrong but no matter how fun this game is (and it definatly has its moments) it can not be a 10/10 if there is room for improvement. Can anyone, hand on their heart honestly say this game has no room for improvement.
If your argument is … yeh but mods… its still not a 10 out of 10 game in release state. Real gamers need to come together and stop supporting games that are not quite up to par because all the time we accept it and let them get away with making sub-quality (especially with so called next gen technology) we will never get anything better.
Your whole job as a reviewer is to be honest about the game as a whole because all the time you defend something with so many imperfections, you are what is making the gaming industry such a toxic waste of talent and we wont ever see better. We have reach an avenue where indie games are almost as good as or better than multimillion pound AAA titles, it’s insane.
We have reached the point where user reviews need to be curated like most forum posts are for offensive content. Those that are clear bombing or padding need to be deleted.
Awful editorialization, doesn’t make me want to continue reading the site. The game is a 5.5/10 on a true 1-10 scale and the only reason I’m tolerating it is because Bethesda’s engine provides an experience you can’t get elsewhere.
No one needs to be tone policing reviews. If it’s off-topic political whining sure but pretending as if these Starfield user reviews by PAID VERIFIED USERS are invalid for arbitrary reasons is just weird fanboy BS.
Wow. You are literally saying we need to censor people with views that are strong or offensive to you. You are literally the lefty type of person big jim is on about.
At the end of the day big jim passion is only matching that of the corrupt guy who wrote the article. We can all have opinions, it fine mate. Have some resilience in life if he upset your snowflake soul.
The game is utter ribbish. It belongs in the past about 15 years ago. And i do feel very robbed of £60. So i have the right to uttly shit on this game for in my view being a big pile of over sold crap made by todd and microsofts marketing team.
The game IS amazing. It still blows me away how immersive the random encounters are. Like leaving a planet to find a school ship full of kids. Who are all yelling questions at you while their teacher is trying to explain they need ship parts. Or flying past a lonely hauler singing a ballad over the radio. I guess if you fast travel too much and don’t go off the main quest, you can miss the real treasure in this game. It really shows how much Bethesda did to make the world feel alive and full of real people. The writing is outstanding. The voice actors are truly incredible. I hardly touched the main quest line yet. The side content is worth the 70 bucks.
I understand some people expected something else. Some people care more about graphics, or dislike the load screens and the menus. Some say its not RPG enough. But i dont see anything here to get angry about. Resources are finite, and I love that Bethesda prioritised engaging content and exploration and engagement with the world, over making the game look marginally better – or getting rid of load screens in a game that literally remembers where you left every single lootable item across a huge universe. I personally appreciate that data that vast needs to be compartmentalised.
Bethesda clearly put a lot of heart into this game. They worked incredibly hard. Personally I got more than I expected for the price. I’m going to love this game forever!
With nothing better to do….? Play the game and feel the boredom.
To be honest, the negative reviews feels way more adequate reaction for the current Starfield, while its 5+ score is obviously overbloated with paid positive reviews that look really alien there, most of those cannot be added by normies who really played such a dead junk with 10+ hours playtime. This THING might get 5+ score or more somewhere in the near year or two, when its garbage optimization would be fixed, some decent story DLCs would be added for FREE, and more so when good user mods would give some soul to this dead project.. bu
t defenitely not now.
Still, Starfield`s problems would most likely stay there due to very outdated game engine which simply cannot be used for seamless map generation that was supposed to be seen in such a cosmoproject, making loadscreens the MAIN game process here. And its not like other game elements were decent even for a game from a decade ago, more so for such a costy “AAA”-game.
I agree with Big Jim and Trex! Starfield is unfortunately not what we all believed or expected it to be. Its a shame, because some elements of the game, you can tell have been a labour of love, the weapons with sharp detailed textures are really good, as are a few other areas in the game, but that’s about it, the rest of the game feels like a mish mash of half baked ideas that have been thrown together by a team of amateurs, and they ultimately fail to coalesce into something even remotely like what Bethesda promised.
Many glaring graphical issues relating to HDR, gamma and brightness, have already been fixed by the modding community. As have many other issues, But that still leaves the question, why should these issues not have been fixed before release by the Multi million dollar super team at Bethesda?
I could go on with the negatives, but i wont. I came here to comment, after reading the Title of this post ”STARFIELD IS GETTING REVIEW BOMBED BY PEOPLE WITH NOTHING BETTER TO DO” What an arrogant and disingenuous thing to say, and a somewhat bombastic and presumptuous claim to make.
Most negative reviews i have seen at Metacritic are very serious and go into great details of what they do not like. They are not spiteful or motivated by people with nothing better to do! These people have spent good money on something they feel let down by and mis-sold!
We already live in a very biased,censored, controlled world, with corrupt politicians and corrupt fake news media outlets, do we really need biased gaming sites with people trying to belittle and wash over the seriousness of hundreds of negative reviews? Review bombing happens for a reason Mike! Not because they have nothing better to do!
I am thoroughly enjoying this game. It has been a while since I’ve played a game that had made me want to keep playing like this. I think the graphics look great, the systems are good and I have yet to experience anything i don’t like about the game. To me it’s a 9 or 10 as it stands for sure. If you don’t like it, then move along and play something you do like. There’s no need to cry online and demand other people dislike something just because you do, move along.
You can’t completely ignore the fact the game deserves it.The realistic score is somewhere in the range of 5-7. It’s a pretty average game that’s 10 years too late. So I wouldn’t call it review bombing when the score is accurate. Steams score is tanking hard and will likely even out around 70% (It already is there unfiltered). So again, pretty accurate that’s its ratings is around a 6 overall. In my opinion after playing it, it’s a 5. It’s not bad, but far from good. Modders will likely save it to a degree.