There's a bit of a negative and positive review bombing situation taking place on Metacritic surrounding Death Stranding.

Death Stranding has landed and players are getting their hands inky as they trawl through the post-apocalyptic coasts, carrying stacks of cargo as they balance poor little Monster Energy chugging Sam Porter. It’s a game that saw the review embargo lifted last week on November 1, drawing in a Metacritic scoring of 83 from the critics at the time of writing this. However, things seem to have taken a different turn on the user side of things.

User reviews on the PS4 version of Death Stranding are coming in mixed overall, but the reality is, positive and negative review bombing is taking place. At the time of writing, there are 1,037 positive user reviews and 749 negative user reviews. But what’s going on?

According to most of the negative reviews, it seems as if people are finding the initial gameplay boring. One user stating it’s a “glorified, overhyped delivery simulator.” another “this is supposed to be a video game not a movie” and another “This game wants to be everything”.

Of course, it was fairly understood in terms of gameplay footage and trailers leading up to the release that Death Stranding would feature a lot of walking and cinematics. However, it seems most of these negative user reviews didn’t seem to expect these features so prominently.

In fairness though, there was a great deal of footage shown that shows combat taking place against other humans, and also weird big slimy things that come out of the ground. I personally watched a live stream last night from a sponsored stream and for a good hour there was only a small battle that took place.

On the more positive side of the user reviews, players are saying, “Not a game that all players will love” and “This game explores beautifully what we have been conditioned to take for granted.” along with other mentions of praise to various different aspects, such as the story, gameplay, and graphics.

Review bombing tends to happen fairly frequently with popular titles. For example, we’ve not long just seen Call of Duty: Modern Warfare get review bombed by players who weren’t happy with the focus on using Russians as the main antagonist and the way the story, in general, played out. And while I personally don’t let user reviews entirely sway my desire to grab a game, it’s always worth seeing the conversation for both for and against.

I say this because from the negative reviews I can see that I might need to ensure I have the time to play it. And the positive reviews are saying it’s going to be worth my time for the graphics and story.

Death Stranding is available now on PS4 and will be arriving on PC next year on Steam and the Epic Games Store.



Posted: Nov 11, 2019 10:25 am
Related Forum: PlayStation Forum

Source: https://www.dualshockers.com/death-stranding-postitive-negative-review-bombing/