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TurtleBlaze’s Kunai has been review bombed, which took its Metacritic score from 8.1 to 1.7 in one fell swoop (via Gamasutra).
Developer Benjamin de Jager revealed what had happened through a post on Gamasutra. Firstly, he links to a deleted Reddit post published by a user who said they review bombed New World Interactive’s Insurgency Sandstorm. Their favourite character did not appear in the Netflix Pokémon Sun & Moon show, and so they chose to manifest their anger on the last game they played: Insurgency Sandstorm. Additionally, the user mentioned that Kunai also bore the brunt of their emotional response to a missing Pokémon character, and they explained how they dragged the scores down on their own efforts.
Metacritic doesn’t have a game ownership verification, unlike Steam, so people are able to cast judgement on a game they might not have played themselves. Moreover, multiple reviews from the same IP address are permissible, and services that create temporary email addresses are not flagged by the site’s system. The Reddit user said that they had made approximately 200 accounts to achieve their desired result. “This was no coordinated strike by a group of unhappy players wanting to make a statement of any wrongdoing on our side. KUNAI was randomly targeted by a single person claiming to be high and in a state of anger,” said de Jager.
TurtleBlaze has communicated these problems to Metacritic in the hope that this doesn’t affect any other games in the future. It seems as though things have been ironed out, because Kunai’s score is back to 7.3. Insurgency Sandstorm’s score is 4.0, however.
