A barrage of fake user reviews has hit the Metacritic page for Assassin’s Creed Origins, all of them positive, and all of them gibberish.


“Ways better than assassins creed unity and assassins creed syndicate,” reads a review that appears roughly a dozen times, each from a different username. “it is more mature and bayek is interseting character, and de historical characters are handeld well.”

It’s not clear just how many of Assassin’s Creed Origins’ Metacritic reviews are fake, but the game currently has an 8.0 user rating from over 600 reviews. Just one scan through the page is enough to notice that something is fishy, even by Metacritic user review standards. There are a number of blurbs repeated among different reviews, and quite a bit of nonsensical English.


In an e-mail to Kotaku, Metacritic boss Marc Doyle said that this sort of thing has happened before. “It’s not a frequent occurrence - maybe 2 - 3 games a year,” Doyle said. “And yes, we’ve been aware of this case, and we’ve been moderating those reviews (and suspending those accounts - most off of which had one single review in their history). The people doing it appear to be changing it up with the chunk of text they keep replicating, but our moderators are working overtime to combat it.”

Metacritic’s user reviews are not as pivotal to the video game industry as the site’s Metascores, determined by reviews from professional and hobbyist game outlets, which are used across developers and publishers to gauge the quality of video games, hand out bonuses, and help companies decide what games to pursue next. But “user score” and reviews are still prominent on every video game’s Metacritic page.

One set of user reviews for Assassin’s Creed Origins. Image compiled by tipster Julien (thanks Julien!)

Some other reviews that repeat multiple times across Assassin’s Creed Origins’ Metacritic page include:

OMG, this game is so amazing and has most beautiful graphic.. gameplay/combat is great.. Bayek is awesome character.. i didn’t notice anything weird yet.. story is very interesting.. Keep up Great job Ashraf Ismail !!!!!! i am enjoying every minutes of it


And:

great game and amazing ac game, great comeback for assassins creed series, best ac game since assassins creed black flag in 2013. modern day is great too


And:

Was worth waiting for this game. I’ve played all Assassin’s Creed games since the first one. And for me Origins took the crown of Assassin’s Creed 2, as the best AC game. Not a perfect game but Ubi is in the correct way. It has a nice combat system, great graphics, good story and great mechanics/rpg elements.


Some of them are sillier than others:

h/t Julien


As always, remember that everything on the internet is fake nonsense.