{"id":99772,"date":"2019-09-06T14:45:00","date_gmt":"2019-09-06T14:45:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.nintendolife.com\/news\/2019\/09\/metacritic_takes_action_against_disgruntled_gamers_who_review-bombed_astral_chain"},"modified":"2019-09-06T14:45:00","modified_gmt":"2019-09-06T14:45:00","slug":"metacritic-takes-action-against-disgruntled-gamers-who-review-bombed-astral-chain","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/sickgaming.net\/blog\/2019\/09\/06\/metacritic-takes-action-against-disgruntled-gamers-who-review-bombed-astral-chain\/","title":{"rendered":"Metacritic Takes Action Against Disgruntled Gamers Who Review-Bombed Astral Chain"},"content":{"rendered":"
<\/a><\/div>\n
\"Astral<\/a><\/figure>\n

Update (Fri 6th Sep, 2019 15:45 BST):<\/strong> It would appear that Metacritic has taken action against review-bombers and has nuked a whole bunch of negative reviews. As a result, Astral Chain<\/a><\/strong> now stands at a 9.0 rating<\/a> (thanks to Quarth<\/a> for the heads-up).<\/p>\n

\"Screenshot<\/a><\/figure>\n

While it’s good to see that little issue solved, the negative reviews don’t seem to have made much of a difference anyway. Astral Chain is PlatinumGames’ first UK number one<\/a> and has also sold well in Japan<\/a>, inspiring the developer to issue a public ‘thank you’ message<\/a> to those who bought it.<\/p>\n

\n

Original Story (Mon 2nd Sep, 2019 12:30 BST):<\/strong> Astral Chain launched last week to widespread critical acclaim<\/a>; PlatinumGames’ latest packs in impressive visuals, tight combat and a generous dose of detective work to deliver one of 2019’s stand-out Switch releases. We gave it a solid 9\/10<\/a>, stating that it “could well be PlatinumGames’ most accomplished game yet”.<\/p>\n

However, it would seem that even when you produce a title of this high quality, you can’t be assured to please everyone<\/em>. In another example of what is becoming a depressingly regular practice, angry gamers have taken to review aggregate site Metacritic<\/a> to “review-bomb” the game \u2013 the practice of multiple users spamming user review sites with a high volume of negative ratings in order to pull down the game’s user score as low as possible.<\/p>\n

While some of these disgruntled scores may well be based on genuine complaints, several sites \u2013 including GoNintendo<\/a>, ComicBook.com<\/a> and Game Rant<\/a> \u2013 feel that many of the ‘zero’ scores are simply down to the fact that the game is a Switch exclusive, and nothing more. You’d certainly have a hard time arguing that Astral Chain is a ‘0\/10’ game, irrespective of your complaints against it.<\/p>\n

This isn’t the first time that gamers have used this approach; Fire Emblem: Three Houses<\/a><\/strong> has also been review-bombed recently<\/a> and sits at a user score of 6.5, and back in 2018 Pok\u00e9mon: Let’s Go<\/a><\/strong> became the target of seemingly frustrated fans<\/a> who tried to pull down its score on both Metacritic and Amazon.<\/p>\n

Whatever the true story behind this, the ratio between good (1,297) and bad (794) reviews does seem rather odd considering that the game currently sits at a critic’s rating of 87 after polling 58 reviews. Still, it doesn’t seem to have harmed Astral Chain’s commercial performance \u2013 it shot to number one in the UK all-formats chart this week.<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Update (Fri 6th Sep, 2019 15:45 BST): It would appear that Metacritic has taken action against review-bombers and has nuked a whole bunch of negative reviews. As a result, Astral Chain now stands at a 9.0 rating (thanks to Quarth for the heads-up). While it’s good to see that little issue solved, the negative reviews […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[27],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-99772","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-nintendo-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/sickgaming.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/99772","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/sickgaming.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/sickgaming.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sickgaming.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sickgaming.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=99772"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/sickgaming.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/99772\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/sickgaming.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=99772"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sickgaming.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=99772"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sickgaming.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=99772"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}