After the release of the action-adventure-stealth games, Assassin’s Creed: Origins, on October 27th, the public was allowed to post their personal reviews on Metacritic, the popular media-rating website. There, users can register an account to give a piece of media a score ranging from 0 to 10, and the average score is taken from all scores to display on a piece of media’s page right next to the average given from professional industry reviewers. Since the release of Assassin’s Creed: Origin’s, false positive reviews have been posted for the title on its Metacritic page.
On the positive review section for the game, many odd reviews give the title 9s and 10s, and say “great game and amazing ac game, great comeback for assassins creed series, best ac game since assassins creed black flag in 2013. modern day is great too,” and “ways better than assassins creed unity and assassins creed syndicate, it is more mature and bayek is interseting character, and de historical characters are handeld well.” Most of these peculiar reviews have been posted by new accounts with this as the only game reviewed. These accounts can also be spotted by their usersnames which range from a random keyboard smash, to a random number pad smash, to a mixture of both.
Marc Doyle, the boss over at Metacritic, states that this is not their first rodeo with this type of behavior.
It’s not a frequent occurrence – maybe 2 – 3 games a year, and yes, we’ve been aware of this case, and we’ve been moderating those reviews (and suspending those accounts – most off of which had one single review in their history). The people doing it appear to be changing it up with the chunk of text they keep replicating, but our moderators are working overtime to combat it.
Most users and companies, however, value the average review score on Metacritic over the user score because of trolls and false review incidents such as this one. Despite this, user scores are still used as a way for regular consumers to voice their honest opinions to others interested in the game. It is currently unknown who is responsible for these fake reviews, or why Assassin’s Creed: Origins was chosen to have its user score inflated.