10 Video Game Review Scores Fans Lost Their MINDS Over
The Starfield review discourse has gotten totally out of hand.
It's no secret that reviews matter a whole hell of a lot to video game publishers, because when customers are being asked to part with as much as £70 for a new AAA game on launch, it makes sense that they'd want to be educated about their purchase.
As such, publishers have been straight-up paying developers bonuses for reaching certain review score milestones on aggregator site Metacritic - or in the case of Fallout: New Vegas, which missed its milestone by a single point, not.
Publishers may do all that they can to ensure positive reviews upon release, but when review discourse gets wildly out of hand, it's often overzealous, over-invested fans who are actually to blame.
Many prominent game critics have spoken about their disdain for ascribing numerical scores to their game reviews - it's reductive and invites inane 1:1 comparisons to previously penned reviews, ignoring precious things like context.
And so, for better or worse, we come to these 10 video game review scores, each of which caused a not insignificant firestorm online, no matter who was ultimately to "blame."
The main takeaway here? A lot of people care way too damn much about this stuff...
10. IGN Dings Pokémon Omega Ruby & Alpha Sapphire For Having "Too Much Water"
Let's kick things off with perhaps the most meme-worthy review in the history of modern games journalism - IGN's infamous critique of Pokémon Omega Ruby and Alpha Sapphire.
Reviewer Kallie Plagge awarded the remake a solid 7.8/10 score, praising it as a fun but dated adventure, while lamenting its excess focus on water-type Pokémon and navigating water-based routes.
The video version of the review then added a closing three-word sentence that launched a thousand hate-filled tweets against IGN: "too much water."
The remark quickly went viral, with many mocking IGN and Plagge - the latter of whom presumably had nothing to do with the video's added text - for such a seemingly silly-sounding criticism.
Yet it absolutely made sense to anyone who actually read the written review, but because nuance doesn't exist on social media, of course "too much water" was instantly immortalised as an Internet meme.