I'm largely with what has been said here.
Its ok to talk about the ideology of a game. There are actually a number of entities who do so fairly successfully at times. This 'review' site though?
I think the best test of why people are annoyed is this: Why did the game get 50/100, what does that 50/100 mean?
Literally, it got 50/100 because it didn't agree with the reviewer's ideology. Sure, in a purely technical term of 'review' its a review if you just say something about something retrospectively, however this is a clear, commercial review, and they have expectations. Its being put on Metacritic, with a score. That score needs to mean something, if they're putting it up in places where its intended to inform buyers about the product they're purchasing.
Whilst from what I understand the game as a whole has a bunch of issues, none of them are even glossed over here. No technical or mechanical issues are covered. How effectively it tells its story isn't covered. Design and art are barely covered. In fact, even an ideological analysis is barely covered - its less an analysis, review or critique, and more a "YOU DON'T AGREE WITH ME SO HAVE A BAD SCORE". As others have said, the site itself has said this is what it is doing. THAT is anti-intellectual, discouraging discussion and trying to censor others so that only your view is heard, and its 100% justified for gamers to call out that bullshit - even if their method of doing so isn't the best.
Had it also analysed the game, clearly stated what gave it that score, or perhaps most importantly, discussed the ideology without literally stating that the creators are guilty of thought crime and should be punished... Maybe I could see your point. As the review is? Ha, no. Its garbage. Worse, its garbage with an agenda, that aims to use what modicum of power it has to censor others. That is what is wrong here, not the comments.
Mechamorph said:
I agree with Supernova's stance that political hit pieces and activism have no place masquerading as a review of any sort. However I disagree with the analysis of the consequences. If enough of such "reviews" cause aggregators like Metacritic to be unreliable then gamers will stop relying on them. Consumers are not stupid, they know a con job when they see one. All it will do is to shift the audience to other aggregator sites that do not allow for such shenanigans or to individual reviewers. The games industry in particular tends to be run with very little slack, one or two failed games are enough to sink a studio and a few are enough to kill a publisher. Overly catering to a vocal minority will lead to the shutdown of developers which ought to be enough to convince the rest that while the internet hate mob might be loud, it does not translate to sales. In fact it can translate to a very large loss in sales if a game is perceived to be overly preachy. After all the free market is in theory self-correcting.
The issue is that not only do gamers go to Metacritic for their games, but publishers look at Metacritic scores as a measure of how well a developer did as well. Yeah, sales are the bottom line, but a well selling game with a low Metacritic score will see developers have more control taken from them so the publisher can design by committee, or the publisher may decide that the sales were only from brand name recognition, and the devs didn't do a good job, and put a new team on it. To be honest, I don't know ANYONE who uses Metacritic as anything but entertainment, but seeing as a bunch of people put reviews there I'm going to assume they exist. But the larger issue is that publishers take note of it, and if certain review sites start tilting reviews negatively in order to push a political agenda, publishers will take note and think that's the agenda they should be pushing.
Unless things have changed over the last couple of years and publishers have gained half a hint, but I've heard nothing about that so... Imma just assume this is still the case.