As you can see - or rather you can't any more - Gamespot gave online FPS/RTS Natural Selection 2 a 6/10 review score. In this day and age, that's basically a critical drubbing from a mainstream site like GS. But the review was riddled with errors.Even Gamespot admitted that the review "contained several inaccuracies" and pulled it. Metacritic - the game marketeers' bible; the game publishers sop to stockholders - however, did not pull its mention of that 60% score. It appears amid a miasma of 80s and 90s. And this is despite the following occurring yesterday:
The original low review written by a freelancer named Eric Neigher has,
as you can't see, been pulled. It's been replaced by the excellent work of the excellent Ashton Raze (
here) and a more acceptable to those in the know 8/10.
The Metacritic score of 6/10 remains though. Why?
Kotaku got Metacritic head Marc Doyle to state the case:
"Yes, the critics we track know - and I spoke to the GameSpot team about this this week - that we only accept the first review and first score published for a given game.
"I'm explicit about this policy with every new publication we agree to track. It's a critic-protection measure, instituted in 2003 after I found that many publications had been pressured to raise review scores (or de-publish reviews) to satisfy outside influences. Our policy acted as a disincentive for these outside forces to apply that type of inappropriate pressure."
Both Gamespot and Metacritic are owned by CBS by the way.
So, yet another reason to trust game reviews then? What do you think,
tell us in the Forum or in the comments below for a quicker hit of opinion.