the publisher of an acclaimed indie jrpg has called on review aggregate site metacritic to take action after the game was reviewbombed for no discernible reasonin a recent tweet michael hoss head of product at publisher deck13 highlighted a spate of negative user reviews attached to chained echoes the jrpg launched last year to a metacritic score of 90 as well as a must play badge and it currently boasts very positive reviews on steam in recent days however the switch pc and ps4 metacritic pages have received dozens of negative user ratings each dragging the user scores down to around five or six out of tennow it happened to us chainedechoes has been review bombed on metacritic just plain ratings no reviews no reasons we dont know why it just happened didnt metacritic want to stop this nonsense guess only for aaa games indiedev metacritic gamedev pictwittercomqit6pust5fmay 9 2023see morethose ratings dont come with any written reviews and as such hoss says that neither he nor the development team have any idea where the tide of illfeeling has come from one assumption is that the reviewbomb is tied to localization recently the chained echoes team took to reddit for an ama and the publisher notes that quite often you get hey translate into spanish or when chinese or when brazil port deck13 has tried to explain that due to the length of the game cost of translation and relatively small install bases in some regions localization is often not possible while some players have made their desire for more language options clear however its not certain that this is the problem at the heart of the reviewbombhoss called out metacritic in his individual tweet when we spoke with him he told gamesradar that im still amazed that metacritic is still used by so many platforms eg steam while he doesnt expect them to do anything about chained echoes i do hope that the constant outrage around reviewbombing might lead to a changing situationchained echoes has been out for several months and boasts high reviews elsewhere and as such hoss says hes not worried at all about the longterm impact of this reviewbomb it is more an annoying situation as we cant really do anything about it for others however it can be a much more significant issue especially with the review bombing for lgbtqi content that can seriously damage smaller indie games in terms of sales and while the last of us 2 can deal with that a smaller indie can really suffer therearguably even more important hoss suggests is the fact that what starts on metacritic often leads to people harassing devs via social media or sending them hate mail i wish i was making things up but these situations happen and metacritic bombings are often shared among certain communities and they gain traction and more ammo through that were talking about people who threw years and years of sweat blood and tears into their games and