After years in development and months of delays, Naughty Dog's The Last of Us Part II has been officially released for the PS4. Despite being praised by fans and reviewers alike, it seems that the game has been getting review bombed over on Metacritic for its alleged political and social-driven themes.
As of the time of the writing, The Last of Us Part II has a user-review score of 3.3 with over eight thousand negative reviews. Taking a look at the reviews, nearly everyone is saying the exact same thing. "R.I.P Naughty Dog Last Of Us is my favourite game of all time but second part disappoint me. In short this game is propaganda," one reviewer wrote after giving the game a zero.
A similar score, which also gave a zero, stated "Instead of engaging in a game, the developers got involved in politics!" These "politics" seem to refer to The Last of Us Part II's LGBT characters and how these characters are treated throughout the game. Some people are not too happy with that focus.
Interestingly enough, however, there seems to be another reason as to why The Last of Us Part II is getting so many negative reviews on the website. Before the game released, a massive leak surfaced online that revealed nearly everything about the game including the ending. Those who found out about the leak were furious, up to the point until they waited for the game to come out so that they could purposely trash it on Metacritic. That certainly seems to be the case since the negative reviews state how the game is a "copy and paste" of the first game, how there are "too many cinematics" and the game feels more like a movie, how the writing is "atrocious," how the developers made the decision to kill certain characters, and so on.
Review bombing is something Metacritic is too familiar with. After all, whenever a video game that has some sort of controversy tied to it releases, a lot of people flock over to the website and post negative reviews about it to take it down a peg. Of course, this is not meant to say that every single negative review about The Last of Us Part II is fabricated and hate-driven. On the contrary, there may be a handful of reviews that are completely legitimate and argue logical cases, but for the most part, the negative reviews are trashing the game for the wrong reasons. Nonetheless, it's a matter of time until Metacritic acts and deletes the majority of the hateful reviews.
Source: SegmentNext