After just five months since Chained Echoes‘ release, the old school RPG hommage was reviewed bomb on Metacritic this week bringing its user score from somewhere in the eight range down to between a score of five and six, first spotted by GamesRadar.
This came out of nowhere and Deck13, the game’s publisher has no idea why – the reason being no written text was given to these most recent ‘critical’ user reviews. An employee of Deck 13 recently called out the review bombing yesterday on Twitter and thankfully Metacritic took action today by removing these user reviews bringing the score back to where it previously was.
“Now it happened to us. Chained Echoes has been review bombed on Metacritic. Just plain ratings, no reviews. No reasons. We don’t know why, it just happened. Didn’t Metacritic want to stop this nonsense? Guess only for AAA games,” Deck13’s Head of Product, Michael Hoss said in a tweet early yesterday morning.
Now it happened to us. @ChainedEchoes has been review bombed on Metacritic. Just plain ratings, no reviews. No reasons. We don't know why, it just happened.
Didn't @metacritic want to stop this nonsense? Guess only for AAA games. #indiedev #metacritic #gamedev pic.twitter.com/Qit6pusT5F
— D13's Michael (@CrashOberbreit) May 9, 2023
As someone who actually did review Chained Echoes for Console Creatures which was easily one of my favourite RPGs of 2022, I can only surmise that it might have to do with the game’s LGBTQ+ inclusion into its narrative; which I really appreciated. Now all this sounds weirdly familiar… oh yes the same thing happened not that long ago to Horizon Forbbiden West’s most recent expansion, The Burning Shores when users decided to flood the game’s Metacritic page with abusive and disrespectful user reviews for the game’s inclusion of a same-sex romance dialogue option for the game’s protagonist, Aloy. This all led Metacritic to actually push for stronger moderation on its site which seems needs more work for all games if this Chained Echoes review bombing is anything to go by.
The only thing I question on review bombing Chained Echoes is the timing of all this, honestly, why do all this now after the game has almost half a year of sales under its belt and not when it was first released? It’s whatever, if anything it’s a great reminder that Chained Echoes is a great game if you haven’t picked up yet, check out our review to get a better idea of what to expect if you haven’t tried it yet on Game Pass.
“Chained Echoes is easily one of the best JRPG tributes out there and the second-best RPG of the year with beautiful visuals celebrating the foregone 16-bit art style. In recent memory, Chained Echoes easily tells one of the best stories in the genre with a focus on political unrest alongside a great cast of likeable characters in a warring fantasy land with retro mecha technology, Dennis said in our Chained Echoes review.
