In gaming, reviews are highly influential opinions that can either drive up or choke out sales. A glowing review from a well-known personality could bring a whole new audience to a game, but a review dragging a game could make players wary to try it out. While most reviews offer a person's unique perspectives, there are times where groups of people get together to push multiple reviews out, and "review bombing" has a long history in all kinds of media.
More often then not, any kind of coordinated review bombing is to post a bunch of negative reviews about certain media. Sometimes these are to air frustrations with a game or how it is being run, or complain about issues with the company behind the game. Other times it is just a group of disgruntled fans trying to make a point. Games of all kinds can be subject to negative review bombing, from titles like The Last of Us Part 2 to Pokemon Sword and Shield to Valorant. The more rare, but not unheard of, alternative is positive review bombing.
Balan Wonderworld's Troubled Launch
Balan Wonderworld is an action platformer developed by the creators of Sonic the Hedgehog. With Square Enix helping publish the game, there were many hopeful fans looking forward to a unique and standout title. Unfortunately, the game's demo was met with widespread criticism, citing a general lack of polish and underwhelming gameplay. Balan Wonderworld launched last month with no pre-release reviews, so all critic reviews have had to come out since the game's release. Currently, the critic reviews of Balan Wonderworld are almost entirely mixed or negative, with only two positive reviews noted on Metacritic.
This chain of events sets up probably the most accurate showcase of positive review bombing so far. Once users were able to post reviews to Metacritic, the amount of positive reviews exploded, with many being perfect scores. It is not unheard of for user reviews to be different from critic reviews, especially with movies and video games. However, when the differences are so stark like they are with Balan Wonderworld, it leads people to dig a little deeper. Some investigative users discovered that many of the accounts posting perfect scores for Balan Wonderworld were not only new, but had only reviewed this one game.
While these reviews could very well be genuine, some players are looking at them with raised eyebrows. Aside from the more suspicious accounts, there are certainly users that do enjoy the game and have therefore reviewed Balan Wonderworld positively. If review bombing is generally a coordinated effort to post negative reviews to a game in order to tank its average review score, then what's happening with Balan Wonderworld is a demonstration of the opposite concept, positive review bombing.
Fall Guys and Servers at Launch
Mediatonic's Fall Guys briefly experienced its own version of positive review bombing when the game launched in August 2020. With a flood of players trying to enjoy the game and purchase content, the Fall Guys servers had some issues. Mediatonic ended up closing the servers for a short time for maintenance, which led to a surge of negative reviews decrying the situation.
After the developers pointed out the negative reviews on Twitter, some fans took it upon themselves to balance the scales. Many players took to Steam to post positive reviews praising the game, asking for other users to be patient when servers are getting fixed. Similar to Balan Wonderworld, the positive reviews were made in response to the negative reviews, but definitively by actual players of the game.
Death Stranding Being a 'Walking Simulator'
Quite similar to Fall Guys, when Kojima Productions' Death Stranding was released in 2019, it received its fair share of negative reviews. Many criticized the game for its slow pacing and lack of action, among other things. For some, they felt that it was just a glorified "walking simulator." The amount of reviews panning the game must have spurred on the players who liked Death Stranding to write their own positive reviews of the game. There has been an influx of negative reviews for Death Stranding after it announced crossover content with CD Projekt Red and Cyberpunk 2077. Unfortunately, there will always be some gamers who just aren't pleased.
Assassin's Creed Unity and Notre-Dame
Perhaps the first game to bring about the concept of "positive" review bombing into public consciousness was Ubisoft's Assassin's Creed Unity. In early 2019, Parisian landmark Notre-Dame was struck by tragedy, dealt with a fire that went out of control. In support of its restoration efforts, Ubisoft pledged to donate large sums of money, and released Unity to players for free since it was set in Paris. Many players took to the reviews section to post in support of Ubisoft's solidarity efforts, and while some reviews had nothing to do with the game itself, many actually commented on the game and why the person liked it.
Valve had previously introduced to tools to combat review bombing on Steam, but was confused when this sudden influx of positive reviews came in for Assassin's Creed Unity is such a short period of time. Technically, for Valve, the criteria for review bombing has to involve negative intent. Since most of these positive reviews were made by people actually playing the game and offering opinions on the game, Valve decided to leave the reviews alone.
Sites like Metacritic have adjusted their policies to combat review bombing, but situations still pop up every once in a while. It doesn't seem like the practice of positively review bombing a game will become a regular occurrence as of yet. It will be interesting to see what other games, if any, might get into these situations like Balan Wonderworld, Fall Guys, Death Stranding, and Assassin's Creed Unity.