UPDATE
Fans have been rallying around the game since the review bombs hit. If you support what Guerrilla Games did, be sure to make your voice heard online!
ORIGINAL STORY
There are many things in our gaming age that we should be amazed at. Thanks to PS5 and Xbox Series X, the graphics have never looked better. The Nintendo Switch has made console gaming portable in a way fans adore. The PC is still the PC and can be augmented to everyone’s needs. It’s a great time to be a gamer! Or, at least, we’d love to say that, but there are contingents of people out there who are so rigid in their beliefs that they feel it’s their “duty” to review bomb games that feature things they don’t like. The latest is Horizon Forbidden West via its Burning Shores DLC.
If you go to Metacritic, you’ll see an 8.2 score for the DLC by critics/reviewers. However, if you look at the user score, it’s much lower at 4.2. So why is there such a drop in gamers’ minds? Well, it’s not gamers in general who hate the title. Instead, it’s those who don’t like a story element of the DLC.
In the expansion, Aloy meets a new character named Sekya. At first, she’s a standard new hero for the game. But at the end of the DLC, you can choose a romance option between Aloya and Sekya, and the two women kiss as a result.
That led to numerous reviews on Metacritic slamming the game for its choice. That is not only a version of bigotry, but it’s letting personal feelings affect how you feel about a gaming title that does not affect you outside of how you play it. Sadly, review bombing is a classic technique by trolls, who slam numerous films, TV shows, and games simply because they don’t like the lead characters, especially if they’re women who aren’t eye candy, show diversity, and so on.
Thankfully, there may be a way for this to be stopped. Metacritic and its new owner in Fandom released a statement to Eurogamer talking about how Horizon Forbidden West Burning Shores got review bombed, and they’re seeking a way to fix it so this doesn’t happen again:
“Fandom is a place of belonging for all fans and we take online trust and safety very seriously across all our sites including Metacritic,” they noted in a statement.
They went on:
“Our team reviews each and every report of abuse (including but not limited to racist, sexist, homophobic, insults to other users, etc) and if violations occur, the reviews are removed. We are currently evolving our processes and tools to introduce stricter moderation in the coming months.”
Hopefully, it happens sooner rather than later so this kind of bombing doesn’t occur again.
