Horizon Forbidden West Burning Shores was only out for a couple of days before it started to get review bombed on Metacritic. While some of the negative reviews were genuinely critical of the gameplay aspects, like how short the mains story was. Others, however, were far more sinister and downright abusive.
A lot of the negative user reviews stemmed from the fact that there is a dialogue option where Aloy and Seyka will kiss. A large number of negative user reviews for Horizon Forbidden West Burning Shores were nothing short of homophobic it seems.
In a statement provided to Eurogamer, Metacritic called the reviews “abusive and disrespectful” and said it would introduce stricter moderation in the coming months.
Fandom is a place of belonging for all fans and we take online trust and safety very seriously across all our sites including Metacritic. Metacritic is aware of the abusive and disrespectful reviews of Horizon Forbidden West Burning Shores and we have a moderation system in place to track violations of our terms of use.
Our team reviews each and every report of abuse (including but not limited to racist, sexist, homophobic, insults to other users, etc) and if violations occur, the reviews are removed. We are currently evolving our processes and tools to introduce stricter moderation in the coming months.
It seems that Metacritic has been removing the worst of the user reviews but there are still many negative reviews that are clearly only negative because of the aforementioned dialogue option. There are also a few reviews that are aggrieved by what is perceived to be developers pushing a “woke agenda” onto gamers. But that’s probably best left for another conversation.
Horizon Forbidden West Burning Shores currently has a Metascore of 82 but has a user score of 3.8 due to the negative reviews.
I published my review of Burning Shores yesterday and you can read it here. I gave it a 9/10 because it’s great.
