This past Friday, March 26, was a big day for new video game releases. Not only did Capcom release the latest entry in the Monster Hunter franchise, Monster Hunter Rise, but Hazelight Studios’ It Takes Two launched to rave reviews as well. Another game that was released on March 26 was not nearly as well-received as its counterparts, and now it appears to be getting a suspicious number of positive reviews on aggregate site Metacritic.
Balan Wonderworld was released on Friday, March 26 alongside the likes of Monster Hunter Rise and It Takes Two. Developed by the creators of Sonic the Hedgehog, there was some hype for the game leading up to its release, but the Balan Wonderworld demo was met with widespread criticism. There have been only a handful of professional reviews written for Balan Wonderworld to date, all of them negative, but the game’s Metacritic page is getting flooded with positive reviews.
This was pointed out by SpawnWaveMedia on Twitter. In stark contrast to the critical reviews, Balan Wonderworld user reviews on Metacritic are overwhelmingly positive, with many consisting of perfect scores. And as discovered by Pure Xbox, many of the accounts being used to write these perfect score user reviews are new and have only written a review for Balan Wonderworld and nothing else. This has led to speculation that bots may be involved.
This appears to be a case of review bombing, but instead of flooding Balan Wonderworld with negative reviews, those involved are doing the opposite. This kind of positive review bombing has been done in the past for a variety of reasons, though it’s unclear why this is happening with Balan Wonderworld. It could be that some fans are rebelling against the negative critical reviews, either because they genuinely think Balan Wonderworld deserves higher scores or if they’re just loyal to the developers behind the game.
Balan Wonderworld has had a strange launch so far. Besides the widely negative reaction to the Balan Wonderworld demo and the positive review bombing that seems to be going on, the game also drummed up some controversy for its potential to trigger epileptic seizures. The developers released an update for the game that removed Balan Wonderworld‘s flashing bug, which was causing the seizures, and that same update made some general other fixes to improve the overall experience.
It will be interesting to see if future Balan Wonderworld updates improve the game’s public perception and if it starts getting legitimate positive scores instead of what’s happening here.
Balan Wonderworld is out now for PC, PS4, PS5, Switch, Xbox One, and Xbox Series X.
Source: Pure Xbox
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