The PS3 Empire strikes back: Gears of War 2 scores 2.8 on Metacritic

October 24, 2008

Following the 360 fanboy-manufactured 6.3 user rating LittleBigPlanet got on Metacritic, PS3 fanboys launched a vicious counter-offensive, targeting Gears of War 2‘s user rating. As the dust settled, Gears 2‘s user rating dropped to a mere 2.8.

Quoth Commissioner Gordon in Batman Begins, “…what about escalation? We start carrying semi-automatics, they buy automatics. We start wearing Kevlar, they buy armor-piercing rounds.”

…they trash our LittleBigPlanet Metacritic score, we trash their Gears of War 2 worse!

Perhaps the inevitable response to the suspiciously low 6.3 user rating LittleBigPlanet got on Metacritic was the review bombing Gears of War 2 got at the hands of angry PS3 fanatics.

Taking advantage of Metacritic’s inability to react to the situation before their upcoming site redesign, over a thousand vengeful gamers bombarded the yet-to-be released 360 title with deliberately low user ratings. Even as i write this article, Gears of War 2′s user rating is now at 2.5 and will likely drop further in the coming days.

So what does this bode for the rest of us? Well, I seriously doubt anyone’s going avoid buying either game based on an obviously manufactured user rating (and if they do, they deserve to miss Gears 2 or LBP anyway). All that’s happened is that some crazies demonstrated they have the impulse control of a four-year old.

While Metacritic’s user reviews are useless to the rest of us for a little while, there’s always the Metascore from “real” critics as Marc Doyle, the founder of Metacritic, pointed out in his post on the user comments section of each game’s page.