Category: Video Games

For the past month, many of my gaming hours every week have been dedicated not to action-packed fantasy adventures like Final Fantasy XVI, but to picking mushrooms, fishing, and crafting furniture in the upcoming cozy MMO: Palia. Channeling the likes of Disney Dreamlight Valley’s community-building, Palia hopes to kick things up a notch by throwing players together in one big server and letting them loose to farm, hunt, and romance NPCs alongside one another, and from what I’ve played so far that premise has enormous potential. I never knew that I wanted to catch bugs and go fishing with my buddies in an online cozy game, instead of fighting alongside them in a battle royale, but here we are – Palia’s got me hooked.

If you aren’t familiar with the genre, cozy games are recognizable for their slower pace, emphasis on homemaking, and social links, with notable entries including Animal Crossing and Stardew Valley. Most don’t have combat or fail states of any kind, instead putting calmer activities like gardening, fishing, cooking, crafting, and decorating front and center. While many games in the genre have only limited multiplayer components or are strictly singleplayer, the upcoming Palia reimagines the formula as a massively multiplayer online game where social interaction and real-world cooperation is at the heart of things.

You’re able to see and interact with other players out in the world, and even help out with things like hunting or mining for raw materials like copper. All of the basic multiplayer functionality you’d expect to find in Animal Crossing are accounted for, and I was able to do everything from visit friends at their own homestead, to send items via mail to assist others with their cozy undertakings. But where Palia sets itself apart is with joint activities that make clever use of the multiplayer nature of an MMO, like when I wanted to cook an advanced recipe that had multiple steps that needed to be performed in a short window of time, which required an extra pair of hands – or two.

Multiplayer is baked into nearly every aspect of Palia. Hunting was a whole lot easier when I had multiple bows trained on my prey, and fishing was way more beneficial in groups due to fishing buffs I’d get when casting out with friends. There’s even some essential items that could only be acquired when working together, like magic-infused trees that regenerate their health faster than I was able to reduce it with an ax…at least alone. But by working with another player, I was able to cut these trees down to size and reap the valuable magical materials I needed for my next crafting project.

Naturally, Palia also has a ton of social links and dating sim mechanics baked into it, with a decent range of romance options available from the suave and stylish Jel, to the cranky and sarcastic Kenyatta. I also had plenty of opportunities for non-romantic friendships with the likes of Badruu, a dad joke slinging farmer, and a very polite automaton named Hekla. The cast of characters so far has been great, with plenty of loveable folks to spend your time with, each with their own questlines that help you get to know them better.

Sadly, there doesn’t seem to be any attempt to add social link elements between players, though (at least for now), which does seem to run counter to the game’s MMO premise. I’d thought that hanging out with specific players or fulfilling one another’s item requests would rank up player-to-player relationships, but it didn’t. Here’s hoping that gets added at some point, because that would take the multiplayer component to a whole new level.

I’ve already spent more time than I care to admit running around Palia during the alpha period, and plan on spending many more in the beta, which just launched today. If you see me catching grasshoppers and hang-gliding around town, feel free to stop and say hello!

Travis Northup is a writer for IGN. You can follow him on Twitter @TieGuyTravis and read his games coverage here.

Last week, a Reddit user by the name of u/SayFuzzyPickles42 took to r/Nintendo to ask a rather strange question:

“Weird question – why is the highest user-reviewed Nintendo game of all time an obscure DSiWare game called Metal Torrent?”

According to FuzzyPickles, they were looking at Nintendo’s user reviews to see where Pikmin 4 had landed, and were surprised to see an obscure DSiWare title called Metal Torrent at the top with a sky-high 9.6 rating. It currently sits above classics like Super Metroid (for Wii), Pokemon SoulSilver, the Metroid Prime Trilogy, and Banjo-Kazooie in the user ratings, despite having a much lower critical Metascore of 62.

In the replies, a handful of fellow redditors offered their theories about this mystery. Maybe this was an example of “meme-brigading,” where a group of community members band together to artificially inflate user scores of a lesser-known game by flooding a page with positive reviews. Maybe there’s an underground cult following that’s just very, very into Metal Torrent. Or maybe it’s just rated so highly because it was (for many) a free game, and people like free things.

While the Nintendo subreddit seemed fairly quick to dismiss the question, FuzzyPickles had me intrigued. Why was Metal Torrent at the top of the Nintendo user review scores? The answer, as it turns out, was none of the things the Reddit community suggested. Rather, it appears to be the quiet work of one gamer who, in 2020, was very upset about a completely different video game, and took out their frustration on multiple Metacritic pages. And while their handiwork has largely been erased elsewhere on Metacritic, Metal Torrent’s dubiously earned crown remains as a strange artifact, and a reminder of how easily manipulated online score aggregators truly are.

‘Five Bucks Well Spent’

Metal Torrent is a vertical scrolling shooter that launched worldwide in 2010 as a DSiWare title available for 500 Nintendo points on the Nintendo DSi, or $4.99 on the 3DS. It was developed by Arika, a Japanese studio better known for the Endless Ocean games and, most recently, Tetris 99. Our review back in 2010 gave Metal Torrent a 7, saying it delivered a “torrential downpour of bullets, but not of content.”

As of 2014, Metal Torrent’s online leaderboards were shut off with the loss of Nintendo DS online support, and there hasn’t been anything resembling a re-release or resurgence of interest in this little shooter since. So while there’s no reason to slander this little schmup, it’s…kind of a nothing game. Not that big a deal when it launched, not easily accessible today, and by now old enough that any semblance of a community it may have had is now long gone. Not really the type of game you’d expect to see at the top of any rankings, even rankings as fickle as average user ratings on Metacritic!

Sometimes relatively unknown games end up highly-ranked thanks to a small but passionate community, but this doesn’t seem to be the case with Metal Torrent. At the time this piece was written, Metal Torrent had 1,402 user ratings. That’s not as many as, say, Tears of the Kingdom (which has over 8,000 at the time of this piece), but it’s certainly enough to consider its 9.6 user score a reasonable average on its face, especially considering 1,339 of those reviews are positive. But here’s where things start to look odd: of those 1,402 reviews, only 11 users left comments. Nine of those comments were extremely negative, giving the game only a 0 or a 1. One commenter gave it a 5 (specifically noting they did so because they felt the user score was too high). And one commenter, KuranushiShizue, gave it a 10 in February of 2020. They said:

“A rather brilliant lost hidden gem made by Nintendo.

“Score attack action has never been this amazing.

“Evidently they brought their A-game for the music, it’s just as wonderful as you’d expect.

“They really knew what they were doing when they made this! It’s 5 bucks well spent!”

Clearly, something funny is going on with Metal Torrent’s user score, but it’s unclear exactly what. Curious, I began to trawl the Internet looking for sources of an explicable surge of Metal Torrent adoration that would explain the apparent invisible fan community clamoring for their DSiWare schmup to be #1.

Summer of Review Bombs

First, I used the Wayback Machine to try and pin down exactly when Metal Torrent topped Nintendo’s user-rating charts. The page doesn’t have a ton of archives, but I was able to find a few that narrowed it down. Prior to 2020, Metal Torrent wasn’t anywhere near the top of the charts. But by August 2020, that had changed, and it was beating out Super Metroid with the same score it has now. A snapshot of Metal Torrent’s page taken in February of 2020 showed that at the time, the game had 41 ratings and a user score of 8.6. The next snapshot, taken in November of the same year, shows 823 ratings and a user score of 97. So clearly something happened in the middle of 2020 to skyrocket Metal Torrent’s user favor.

The question was: what? At first, I assumed a popular content creator must have streamed the game and gotten a surge of support for it, but combing through Twitter, YouTube, and Reddit didn’t reveal anything resembling a fan campaign, a call for positive attention, or literally any meaningful discussion of Metal Torrent whatsoever. Who, then, was so obsessed with this obscure game?

Up to this point, I hadn’t thought about review bombing as a serious possibility for what was happening to Metal Torrent. Review bombing typically (but not always) comes for well-known games that have some sort of controversy (real or perceived) attached to them. But at this point, I was running out of ideas, so I began to look for review bombing campaigns that took place in 2020. It was a busy year for review bombers, who went after The Last of Us Part 2 that summer over its inclusion of queer characters. The campaign was so intense, Metacritic quietly changed its policies on user reviews to prevent users from submitting game reviews until 36 hours after a game was released. Was this what happened to Metal Torrent, then? Had it simply been caught in the crossfire of bored review bombers upset about The Last of Us who wanted something to mess around with?

While that’s one possible explanation, a far more likely one presented itself shortly after. And it regards another 2020 review controversy surrounding a very different game: AI: The Somnium Files.

The A-set Defender Logs On

AI: The Somnium Files was review bombed earlier in 2020, in February. At first, fans suspected it was being targeted due to the inclusion of a pro-LGBT scene late in the game, but initially it was unclear who was responsible. However, a culprit almost immediately appeared and identified themselves.

A ResetEra member going by the username “Krvavi Abadas” first posted a long, oddly detailed explanation of how anyone could manipulate user reviews on Metacritic, including specific time-stamped details about how, when, and even potentially why a single individual might have done such a thing. It didn’t take Era users long to put two and two together and accuse Krvavi Abadas of being the review bomber, to which they almost immediately confessed.

Krvavi Abadas went further, though, and also explained why they were doing all this. According to their post, they were upset about the game’s treatment of the character A-set and wanted to express that. But they also had a secondary motive. Krvavi explained that they had read articles about Warcraft 3 Reforged becoming the “worst user-scored game on Metacritic” earlier that year, and wanted to demonstrate how manipulable the Metacritic system actually was. “The plan was to make a proper thread a few days after my tests were finished, demonstrating how you can easily turn any obscure game into one of the best or worst games of all time with just a few hours of work,” they wrote.

What does this have to do with Metal Torrent? Well, Krvavi Abadas didn’t just review bomb AI: The Somnium files. They also confessed to having manipulated the average user score of another Spike Chunsoft game, Crystar, to be much higher than it was previously. And they did the same thing to Metal Torrent, taking it up to a 9.6 user score with 66 ratings back in February of 2020, per a screenshot posted by the user. On both games, they claim to have left a calling card of sorts in the written reviews by leaving references to AI: The Somnium Files. Their Metal Torrent review, the same 10/10 review we quoted above from February of 2020, is even structured so that the first letter of each sentence spells out “A S E T.”

Since this incident, AI: The Somnium Files appears to have had its user score reset to counter the review bombing. But Crystar and Metal Torrent seem untouched. Both games continued to receive hundreds of positive reviews without context added in the ensuing months, with Crystar’s PS4 version remaining the highest user-rated Spike Chunsoft title despite middling critical, PC, and Switch reviews, and Metal Torrent similarly topping Nintendo’s publisher charts. While it’s unclear whether or not this continued surge of reviews was the work of the same culprit, it does seem extremely likely that either Krvavi Abadas continued their review manipulation long after they were exposed, or that their explanation on Era inspired a protege or two to continue mucking around with user scores in their wake. In fact, it’s entirely possible that even more games on Metacritic have been impacted by this tactic over the years. Metacritic declined to provide comment for this piece.

User scores in any context are always a tricky feature to navigate. Taken at face value, user reviews on storefronts such as Steam or on platforms like Metacritic can be a helpful tool to get an at-a-glance look at what individuals and communities at large think about a game both at launch and over time. They can serve as spaces for communities to surface helpful information about bugs or technical issues, or explain how a piece of art impacted them. But the internet is the internet, and wherever spaces are made for individual expression, it’s inevitable that some folks will show up and try to wreck them. In recent years, for instance, review bombing has been a popular tactic for extremist audiences to express anger at art depicting groups they dislike. And fortunately, for the most part, that flavor of review manipulation has been countered by sites like Metacritic and Steam. But it’s also clearly possible for individuals to quietly manipulate numbers to paint a false portrait of community consensus for any reason they like – including being mad about a character in a video game – which makes trusting aggregated scores a dicey prospect indeed.

In short: while aggregate scores may be interesting sometimes, numbers can’t always be trusted. It’s far more valuable to take our reviews head Dan Stapleton’s advice and actually read individual reviews from critics and users to see what people are really saying about a game. In the case of Metal Torrent, the supposed best Nintendo-published game of all time by user score, reviews like “Boring shoter.. not tu much to add here” might nudge you toward runner-up Super Metroid on the Wii instead.

Rebekah Valentine is a senior reporter for IGN. Got a story tip? Send it to rvalentine@ign.com.

A physical version of the recently-released, previously digital-only Star Trek: Resurgence comes out October 6 on PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X and S, and Xbox One.

PS4 owners get a free upgrade to the PS5 version (currently the PS5 plays the PS4 version in emulation). The new versions include a raft of bug fixes and quality-of-life additions, too.

Star Trek: Resurgence is a third-person narrative adventure game developed by Dramatic Labs, a team that includes over 20 former Telltale staff. It tells an original story set shortly after Star Trek: The Next Generation and follows the crew of the U.S.S. Resolute.

IGN’s Star Trek: Resurgence review beamed up a 7/10: “The story of Star Trek: Resurgence does an excellent job of capturing what makes Star Trek work by presenting strong characters and tough decisions. Some storylines lack closure and it doesn’t always run smoothly, but its heart is in the right place,” we said.

Wesley is the UK News Editor for IGN. Find him on Twitter at @wyp100. You can reach Wesley at wesley_yinpoole@ign.com or confidentially at wyp100@proton.me.