The secrets of 'review-bombing': why do people write zero-star reviews?

The games world is awash with spiteful online appraisals - but what's the point? A committed review-bomber tells all

In an age when everyone's a blogger or social media influencer, it's easy for traditional criticism to get drowned out. It's at the epicentre of this din of competing opinions that Metacritic - a review aggregator owned by CBS that parses disparate media scores into round(ish) numbers - has flourished. Every game, album and movie that is released gets added to site's gargantuan database, and review scores from tens or hundreds of publications are crunched into an easily digestible average.

But on the right side of each product's page is a separate score, a bane of developers, directors and record companies everywhere: the user reviews section. It's a public forum where anyone who registers an account can jump into the discussion, leave their own score and heap praise on a release - or, perhaps more often, pour scorn on one.