Review bombing as a form of consumer protest is not new, nor is it something that platform holders like Valve take very seriously. But the tactic shows no signs of abating, especially on Metacritic, where the barriers to entry for venting resentment are much lower. In fact, according to indie developers on the receiving end of Metacritic bombardment, it is surprisingly easy to single-handedly lower the Metascores of some titles.

Benjamin de Jager of TurtleBlaze, which recently released the charming platformer Kunai, wrote in Gamasutra that the game fell victim to such a solo review bombardment, taking the game's user Metascore from 8.1 to 1.7 He writes.

"This is not a coordinated attack by a group of unhappy players who want to claim injustice on our part. Knai was targeted at random by a single person who claimed to be livid and angry."

De Jager points to a recent (now deleted) Reddit post by a user claiming to have lowered Insurgency Sandstorm's metascore. According to a screenshot provided by De Jager, the Reddit user claimed no particular malice toward the game, and that the action was caused by something else entirely (wait for it): anger over the absence of an important character in Pokémon Sun & Moon.

I won't post the quote, but here are some screenshots of the Reddit post instead (the thread, minus the opening post, can still be viewed here). Although I could not confirm it myself, de Jager claims that the same user who targeted Insurgency also targeted Knai.

It wouldn't have taken much to review-bomb Kunai: given how few user reviews there have been since launch, lowering the metascore wouldn't have taken long for someone determined to do it. confirming ownership of the game like Steam doesn't block services like Mailinator, which allows multiple reviews to be posted from the same IP address and quickly generates email addresses. In other words, it's easy.

De Jager notes that the studio contacted Metacritic about the situation, and it seems to have worked.

De Jager's full blog post can be checked here.