A year after Horizon Forbidden West released, the Burning Shores DLC released on April 19th, expanding on Aloy’s story into post-apocalyptic Los Angeles, and getting fans back into Horizon’s gorgeous world. While the Burning Shores was positively received, as players started to finish the DLC’s main campaign, some fans were upset by the penultimate direction of Aloy’s story and have taken it out by review-bombing the game.
***Spoilers ahead***
With the Burning Shores DLC, Aloy ventures into apocalyptic Los Angeles to face a new threat, there she encounters Seyka, a new character who aids in Aloy’s journey throughout the DLC campaign. Through some of the missions, hints of romantic feelings sprout between the two characters, it comes as a surprise to fans as Aloy has largely never had a romantic interest towards anyone in both Zero Dawn and Forbidden West. Towards the very end of the DLC, a cutscene plays out between Aloy and Seyka, where Seyka confesses her feelings for Aloy and wanting to be with her. The player is then given the option to choose what Aloy can say next, though choosing the romantic option lets the two kiss, thus solidifying a new companion for Aloy in the game’s third installment.
While Aloy having a romantic interest and girlfriend is welcoming news to fans excited to see the positive end to the DLC, some fans, and more primarily individuals who just want to take their bigoted anger out, have decided to review bomb the DLC on Metacritic. At one point, viewing Burning Shore’s review on Metacritic showed a critic’s review rating in the high 80s, while the user review score was a blaring red near 2.3. A lot of the comments were merely homophobic and veered into blaming Sony for “catering” to an “agenda.”
Review bombing of games, specifically when LGBTQ characters or storylines are introduced, isn’t new, and unfortunately has gotten predominant in recent years. Occasionally review bombings of games happen when developers introduced or announce something fans simply aren’t too content with. However, the more notable and disturbing of review bombings happen when homophobia, transphobia, sexism, racism or any other form of bigotry is targeted. Game developers, game publishers, voice actors, have all been the targets of review bombing in recent years, leading some to outright leave social media.
With the Metacritic user review bombing, Metacritic is attempting to delete some of them, and at one point the review score went up to a 4. Though the game is still receiving bigoted reviews, lowering the score back down. Metacritic also prevents users from reviewing a game for a short time after it’s released to curb any mass spam of vitriolic reviews, though it largely doesn’t do much longterm.
For those who go to Metacritic seeking to learn if a game is worthy of its time, both the critic’s score and user review score are crucial to the site and readers. Moreover, user reviews are direct from everyday players, and most often in any game you go to on Metacritic, there may be a noticeable difference between the critics score and users score. If the two scores are so far apart in review— say the critics score is a solid 8 but the users review is at a 5— isn’t directly indicative of review bombing. Critics score games differently amongst their respective sites and what they focus in on, whereas users might simply state that a game has a same formula as its predecessor and thus score it low.
In the case of Burning Shores however, it’s largely bigoted reviews, and those unaware of this may go to Metacritic seeing the positive critics score, and the abysmal user’s score and be flummoxed by the disparity.