My two cockatiels Oreo and Kiri preening each other

Check the usernames, that wasn’t me

Because my initial comment was about metacritic and my argument is that metacritic is a bad indicator of review bombing because it actually encourages it

The reason it’s lower on metacritic is mainly due to the fact that the critics rating is too high, imo. This leads to disappointed players leaving extra bad scores (i.e. 0/10) to offset the total score. In a way that’s review bombing, but only as a reaction to the inflated critics’ reviews (which I often suspect to be bought or bribed).

Usually the Steam reviews are a lot more reliable. As I said, metacritic’s system is shit and encourages rating manipulation.

Metacritic’s user rating system is just shit. You see the game rated higher than deserved and you can either

• give it an honest rating resulting in the total score dropping by 0.01
• give it a zero rating and have the score drop by 0.1

Of course most people chose to rate it in a way that has more impact on the total score, so it’s no wonder we see 0/10 and 10/10 more than anything else.

This phenomenon will be even more exaggerated if critics ratings are undeservedly high, as is the case with Starfield.