Over the past few years, review-bombing has become a common practice. We've seen it happen to games like Pokémon: Let's Go and Astral Chain, and most recently AI: The Somnium Files was on the receiving end. It resulted in Kotaro "Zero Escape" Uchikoshi and his assistant director Okada Akika asking fans to help restore order.
In the end, a disgruntled individual known as Krvavi Abadas took responsibility and revealed how they single-handedly review-bombed the game to "deliberately demonstrate" the broken state of Metacritic user reviews. Although, there was another motive – the ill-treatment of the idol Iris 'A-set' Sagan (see above), who is one of the game's main female characters.
Now, in a turn of events, AI: The Somnium Files – as highlighted by Twitter user FloPerfecto – has become the highest user-rated Switch game on Metacritic of all time. At the time of writing, it's got a user score of 9.0 and sits just above Astral Chain and Super Mario Odyssey. Before plummeting to 1.9, the game was sitting at 8.2. Now it's even better off than it originally was!
You can get the full rundown about why exactly the game was review-bombed in our original story.
[source twitter.com]
Comments 58
As it rightfully deserves.
This is the best UNO reverse I've ever seen
"Now, in a turn of events, AI: The Sodmnium Files – at the time of writing, and as pointed by Twitter user FloPerfecto – has become the highest user-rated Switch game on Metacritic of all-time. "
Might wanna fix that typo.
It certainly is an excellent game.
If aggregate review scores bother you, learn not to care! Ha!
That's equally stupid. The score is still skewed and not based on the game's merits.
Yeah it was some resetra creep messing with the user score.
This is why nobody trusts Metacritic or reviews in general. Crap. Like. This.
Now if we could just fix the new Pokémon games from the crybaby gamers
This is why user reviews have largely lost meaning. This stupid entitled idea that you need to rate something high or lower first because you don't think it "deserves" it's rating, or even to "correct it" after a bunch of entitled losers do it in the first place.
It destroys any since of accurate reviews from users.
I don't really like only considering the reviews from "professionals" but at least there's very little evidence of this sort of nonsense from professional outlets. You just have to worry about whether those outlets were paid off or not, or if the person they hired to do the review has some personal bias against a certain type of game...
Ultimately you should just decide for yourself what you think of a game and consider reviews only loose overviews at best.
Heh I can see a war happening over this... And today it's at 1.2. Don't buy this game it's horrible! Next day OMG it's at a solid 10. Holy Cow! This game is flying off the shelves! Next day Hmm, it's now sitting at .9. Don't touch this game! It's infected! Next day Oh boy, it's at a 9.8! Hurry and buy this masterpiece!
Lesson here: ignore ANY reviews. Either unreliable, review bombed or are paid off to make it sound good. They're not worth your time anymore.
User scores are only really helpful if you can prove you've actually bought it.
Better off reading the Amazon reviews. At least they tell you if a verified purchase.
@Agramonte Amazon already got in trouble by allowing fake reviews. The seller claims to sell it to a fake buyer and the person gives a fake review.
Amazon also allows be who have been gifted an item to review an item. So a company can give an item to someone for free and the person gives a fake review and then sells the product. There are people who actually make a living doing this for Amazon sellers.
ResetERA loses once again
@Ralizah The Sodium Files sounds like an interesting title.
For me personally the game is an 8/10. It's a great experience, bit it also has some flaws. I prefer the Zero Escape trilogy.
Good, the game is fantastic... dunno who the hell had an issue with a few sentences of dialogue that mean nothing in the grand scheme of the game.
@Rika_Yoshitake nah, the were upset with how a-set was treated. so the were just simping for an anime girl.
Against my better judgment. How was A-Set treated, why was this important and where should one know this character from?
Yeah, I wouldn't say the original guy's efforts have exactly backfired, so much as his point that a Metacritic score can be quickly skewed by people on a mission has been further proven. The new score is unlikely to have been achieved just by lots of votes from people who have actually played the game and loved it, but by people voting just to counter the other guys efforts or by a small number following his technique of using multiple accounts.
@JR150 I trust Metacritic’s Critic scores, it’s just the User ones that can be easily warped
Did it backfire though? Or was it simply, according to plan? This little play has definitely given the game a lot more show than it would have had nothing happened.
Either way, it still doesn’t seem like that good of a game.
@gaga64 I look at the critic scores and intentionally read the lowest scored ones first. That way I know they highlight some issues the other guys may have glossed over and decide if those issues would also bother me as much as well. Way too often games release in an unfinished state.
The world we live in. Fun!
The struggles of our time.
Who cares about unknown users' reviews?
There are enough well-known sites with professional reviews.
Just read those if you want to know about a game.
The people going out of their way to boost AI's score up so high just proves the review bomber's point. I don't get why people are going "lol we won" when the fact still is that it's incredibly easy to skew review scores one way or the other. All this has done is make it so that metacritic user reviews cannot be trusted at all.
That headline is a bit of a mess.
This shows why users scores are pointless
Imagine being as pathetic as this guy. Wow.
Duh, they even deleted two old negative reviews written before the bombing. Such an achievement.
It’s ironic how people prove that this dude was right.
@SmaggTheSmug snap, that’s what I tend to do too. That and mentally putting more weight behind the reviews of certain critics that I know tend to have similar tastes to me.
@Heavyarms55 big outlets getting 'paid off' is a myth. It simply does not happen
Shame that review bombing was once a legit way to complain about companies screwing costumers, the reasons for this were valid, companies deserved, but then the practice was misused and people started review bombing anything for any small and petty reasons, even reasons unrelated to the actual game.
Warcraft III: Reforged is a game that deserved the review bombing, but the practice lost its meaning over the years.
@BenAV I tried and tried but it just didn't grab me the way Zero Escape did for example. Not sure why, maybe the pace wasn't right for me on this one.
Does metacritic have any kind of moderation for user reviews
This whole story saga just highlights how useless Metacritic user scores are. It also highlights how badly the eshop needs a carefully controlled rating system, like Steam.
@ATaco @BionicDodo
Kids would be bloody geniuses if they cared about meaningful things rather than the aggregated score on some dumb gaming site lol at all of this!
People should just play games they think they would like part of the point is discovery and to have fun not work yourselves up over some random troll.
People are even implying here that metacrtic’s user review affect game sales. Yet evidently it does not Pokemon sword and shield had user score of 4-5 yet sold very well. People just like to waste their time.
GameRankings was a great review aggregator site, vastly superior to Metacritic in many ways. I visited it regularly for around 15-20 years. I was very disappointed when it was shut down just a couple of months ago. =|
As I like to quote: "The only review you can trust is your own."
Metacritic is terrible anyway.
I think I should try out this game. I did enjoy Zero Escape.
The reviews that I find helpful are the ones where the reviewer completed the game, has years of knowledge in the genre (approx. 100 games in that genre completed and at least 25 years of experience), and knows what information people want to know.
I think under 20 years of experience is still just gamer (especially when someone has only 4 hardware generations of knowledge). About 25 years and knowledge of the history of videogames, retro and classic, and you can call yourself a reviewer.
@SKTTR Lol, good one! 🤣
... that was a joke right? I think it was but these days you never know 😅
These things are as always to be taken with a pinch of salt and not taken as gospel, nor disregarded out of hand.
The thing is "avoid all reviews" as people have posted here is not helpful. You can tell a review where the person has played the game and it's not all glowing feedback or all outright criticism pretty easily, same as on Amazon or anywhere else, and weight your own expectations against that. A well written review on a 10 scale where games are scoring 4-8 can often be way more useful than a 1 or a 10 that's made to skew.
Personally when I take the time to do a user review i give it whatever score i think it deserves. If other people don't do that, it's up to you to act as your own filter.
I certainly enjoyed this game. Havent 100% it yet but I've enjoyed what I've played.
Look Date, it's your favorite thing! A porno mag
Do people actually look at the user ratings on things like metacritic? Bizarre.
Looks like more fake SJW ratings to push another immoral SJW garbage game.
I wasn't aware about it this game until this week, lol. Ordered it Wednesday evening, got it like two hours ago. Can't wait to get home and play it.
This is an example of why I stay clear of review sites. Meta Critic, Rotten Tomatoes, all potential b***s***.
Even more evidence that user reviews and scores in general are utterly useless.
At least the game got a publicity boost.
@Manah At least it’s not as bad as RT where the site will reset the user score if they don’t like it. Or are flooded with new users only rating that one movie (or movies in that one franchise) with suspiciously similar comments and not removed by RT.
i ended up reading from a different source article that contained more detail on why this person did this, apparently he was showing that metaric is in fact a broken website :/ anyone can spam review bomb anything without it being corrected until late.
Anyway the main reason why this fellow user was pissed off and did this was because he ended up getting well attached to a fictional character, and
SPOILER!!! SPOILER!!!
when he saw that you had to rip her eye out for plot purposes he got upset. Threw his rage towards the score for the game.
SPOILERS!! AGAIN!! The ending is garbage, not gonna lie, i read how it ended, it's not good at all -not worth playing unless you like the factor that your main character just google eyes over everything sexy((not being a feminist woke whatever being blunt here)) then ignores apparently his own daughter...i...not a good game for me, but if anyone finds it interesting then go right ahead but the game has flaws, it doesn't deserve an 8/10 rather a 7/10. or 6.
@Facelord You guys are a joke honestly... "propaganda", seriously?
@Facelord I loved the first 999 nonary game , so yeah, i'm disappointed too.
This game, for what it is, as a visual novel style game DESERVES a score this high. It's really good.
Sounds like reverse review-bombing...rating it all to high as a counter-measure. That's not a good thing either.
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