Eevee

The latest entries into the Pokémon franchise, Pokémon: Let's Go, Pikachu! and Let's Go, Eevee!, made their way to Nintendo Switch at the end of last week, generating a lot of praise from critics (ourselves included) and performing relatively well in terms of early sales. As you may be aware, however, many fans have been left disappointed by the premise of the new titles, and this has unfortunately led to many 'review-bombing' the games on popular websites.

'Review-bombing' refers to the act of multiple users spamming user review portions of websites with ridiculously negative reviews, dragging a game's (or other product's) average score down as far as possible. A quick look on the Metacritic page for the Pikachu version of the game shows that the majority of users are leaving negative scores, with 294 bad as opposed to 264 positive reviews being left on the site at the time of writing.

Of course, some of these user reviews will be valid - at least to some extent - although with many zero-score reviews appearing on the day of the game's release (which just so happens to be when Metacritic first starts to allow review scores to be submitted), it's clear to see that fans of the series are using the feature as an opportunity to vent their frustrations, rather than actually test the game for themselves. Users have used phrases such as "a sad excuse for a title", "lazy cash grab", "trash for Pokémon", and "offensive" to describe the games so far.

This mindset appears to have spread to retailers, too, with the user review portion of Amazon Japan taking a particular beating. Presumably after realising what was going on, Amazon has actually now taken away the current star counts for user reviews - you can still leave a full review and star rating (and these can be seen individually) but the overall count has been entirely removed.

Do you think this practice is a perfectly acceptable way for fans to show their feelings, or do you think the attitude being shown is a little immature? Whatever your viewpoint on the matter, feel free to to share your thoughts with us in the comments below.

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