My dad always told me than whenever you've impulsively written an angry letter/email/message, one of the best things you can do is sit with it for a while. Don't send it straight away. Leave it to one side for a few hours. Go back and read it again once you've calmed down. Odds are that you've said a lot of stuff you didn't mean, and you'll either take another crack at the message, or simply leave it entirely and move on.
It's good advice that I've always tried to follow, so it's pretty cool to see that review aggregation site Metacritic is now taking a similar approach to its user reviews. The website's new policy is a simple one: You have to wait 36 hours before you can leave a scored review on a game. The idea is that users will have start playing through games properly before leaving a knee-jerk reaction or indulging in "review bombing" for the sake of it.
The new policy was first spotted by PlayStation Universe last week, and it seems to have come into effect with two recently released titles: Paper Mario: The Origami King, and Ghost Of Tsushima. The timing of this change in policy is notable, given that The Last Of Us Part II was subject to a particularly intense review bombing campaign within minutes of release.
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A big part of the speed of The Last Of Us Part II review bombing was thanks to a massive leak which revealed story details that a lot of fans weren't happy with. Armed with these details and no knowledge of the game beyond that, users flocked to the game's Metacritic page to flood it with negative reviews.
The issue with this was that the game's user score was being measured as a metric of its entire worth in some circles. In addition, the thousands of negative reviews from those who hadn't even played the game ended up burying and discrediting the reviews from people who had actually played and had genuine, understandable problems with the title.
At the time of writing, The Last Of Us Part II's Metacritic user score has climbed considerably to 5.5, presumably because people have actually finished the game now. Unfortunately, there are still 58,691 negative reviews - many of which are almost entirely nonsense and based on the leaked plot details alone. Again, there are negative reviews with genuine points and understandable reasons. They just get lost in the din.
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This new approach from Metacritic is unlikely to stop review bombing completely... but the extra time the website has enforced will at least allow a few heads to cool and limit the number of knee-jerk reactions out there.
Featured Image Credit: SonyTopics: The Last of Us Part II, PlayStation, PS4