The Last of Us Part 2 Gets Review Bombed

The inevitable has come for The Last of Us Part II now that the game has been review bombed on Metacritic to push the User Score down to a “generally unfavorable” score of 3.4. That quite a leap from the 95 Metascore based on reviews from critics that went up just over a week ago, but it’s also not too surprising. Anti-The Last of Us Part II sentiment was brewing before the game released after leaks attempted to spoil pivotal parts of the story, and evidence of somewhat organized review bomb efforts have been shared online, though there will of course be some people who actually didn’t like the game and left legitimate reviews.

Head over to Metacritic and you’ll see the low User Score as it currently stands. The game was lauded last week as the best-reviewed game of the year so far with a score of 96, though that score has now dropped one point as more critic reviews came in. You wouldn’t be able to tell it earned that achievement from the User Score though since the two are so different.

A total of 26,150 ratings from users have been logged in Metacritic with 18,128 of them in the red as negative reviews. We know from playing through the game that it takes around 35 hours to beat, quicker if you’re not searching through every nook and cranny for details and resources, so one must ask themselves then how so many reviews were left for a game on the day it came out.

Neil Druckmann, the writer and director of The Last of Us Part II, shared a tongue-in-cheek tweet this week bringing attention to the “passion” of the fans evidenced by so many user reviews.

Perhaps people watched streamers play through the game and then offered their reviews on the game based on someone else’s playthrough, but the more likely answer is that the vast majority of the negative reviews were from people who hadn’t touched or completed the game yet. We’ve seen screenshots of people on forums apparently attempting to organize review bomb efforts, though review bombing is common enough of a practice now that it doesn’t really take much organizing to imagine what’s going to happen to a controversial game. We’ve seen time and time again that games get review bombed for a number of reasons ranging from platform exclusivity to ideas users don’t agree with, so review bombing is an expected outcome at this point for any game with a controversial buildup to its release.

There will of course be people who don’t actually like parts of The Last of Us Part II. Some may say they wished the gameplay would’ve evolved more while others will have legitimate grievances with the way characters were handled based on their personal experiences with the game. The same can be said for the opposite side as people blindly through out perfect scores to counter the review bomb, but it’s clear which side came out in larger numbers.

The Last of Us Part II is now available for the PlayStation 4.