Topic: Masses of obviously fake 10/10 Balan Wonderworld reviews on Metacritic...

https://www.metacritic.com/game/switch/balan-wonderworld/user...

Click at the link and see for yourself. What's going on here?

I know people have different opinions, but come on! They're all written by people with no other reviews, repeat similar wording and look like they're either written by people who English isn't their first language or they've run them through Google Translate. Call me a conspiracy theorist but could Square Enix or Arzest be doing this or paid someone to? Pretty low if so. These don't look like normal reviews at all...

They also seem to be downvoting any negative reviews (which are basically all zeros!) and upvoting these weird ones so they get pushed to the top. Very dodgy.

These cannot be legit:

In fairness there's alot of average people who only know English but have trouble writing something that makes sense.

"Surely your eyes will grow wide, like mouth of yawning beluga whale when play revolutionary Balan Wonderworld game. You give money-payment to Mr Naka now. 10/10"

Never trusted the user review side of Metacritic to begin with, too much review-boosting and review-bombing to consider it a serious aggregate of any game. It sucks for casuals who depend on reviews to gauge whether or not any particular game will be the one of the few they purchase every year. But if you're a core gamer, I'd like to think our kind are a little more dialed in to the gaming discussion online and are aware of this boosting nonsense.

Its a balan wonderworld cult.

I know people complain about the Switch eShop a lot, but this stuff makes me kind of glad we don't have proper reviews on it.

@Clyde_Radcliffe If the reviews were tied into people who have actually bought the game/played it for a minimum amount of time it would solve that problem on the eshop. I think the Wii U/3DS did it like that.

Ah, that's not a bad idea although it could still be gamed with the super cheap shovelware potentially, but the minimum amount of time sounds good. I didn't know Nintendo did that.

People with serious interest in video games will observe that they have very instinctual prowess when it comes to looking at games to get. Hence we don't need user reviews as much, it's just a place for overpassionate zealots to engage in proxy wars.

I've never seen a big AAA studio resort to these tactics though. Usually smaller publishers pushing cheap shovelware games. It's quite sad if that's what's happening.

Between the lack of critic reviews at launch and the fake user reviews, there seems to be a lot of dodgy stuff going on to try to cover up how much of a disaster this game is. Pretty poor form by the parties involved.

@Clyde_Radcliffe There's literally companies you can hire to make bulk fake reviews...

https://amztigers.com/

I've seen enough. I'm buying it. Sounds awesome.

@Clyde_Radcliffe I do wonder why Square's doing it, if they are at all. Their reputation is very strong in the RPG sector so it's not like they're trying to make a name for themselves.

Banal Blunderworld

Heh. Heh heh heh.

It's probably fairly unlikely that Squenix or Banal Company or Arzest is behind the metacritic reviews, it seems a remarkably low-tier and unprofessional thing for a company that size to engage in, for very little gain. It's probably some corner of the Sonic / Yuji Naka fanbase "standing up" for the game. Internet's a weird place.

I doubt that it's square paying people off to leave good reviews. It's probably just someone who's a huge fanboy of this game, and wants everyone to buy it thinking it's good.

Seizure inducing boss battles?

More like "this game is life changing 10/10."

Maybe they wrote the reviews after the seizures.

Explains a lot.

@Eel emphasis on "Life changing".

Really though, it's a shame that this game just ended up being so bad. I really wish they had pushed it back a year or two, and let it actually become a finished and polished product. Used the demo as an opportunity for feedback, like with Octopath or Bravely Default II.

Obviously as @Clyde_Radcliffe spotted this it's their duty to correct it and must spend the rest of the week making fake accounts to leave thousands of bad reviews to contra the fake good ones ;p