Naughty Dog is one of the few developers who have been able to appease critics and users alike with games such as the Uncharted series and The Last of Us. But with the recent release of The Last of Us 2, that seemed to come to an end with critics universally praising it with meta-score of 95 while users bombing it with meta score of 3.4 at the time of writing.

Some blaming console wars or coordinated bot reviews for the bad user score. As an avid gamer and small-time analyst, I decided to look a bit deeper to have some data driven insights and dived into 17000+ user reviews of the game.

Source Data

The analysis is based on metacritic user review scores for The Last of Us 2. Total 17,000+ individual user reviews have been analyzed for this article. You can download the dataset (semi-colon separated) for yourself from my Kaggle page-

Download dataset

Metadata contains three columns-

  • Users -> The user who rated it
  • Scores -> User’s score for The Last of Us 2
  • Review_Count -> Number of games rated by the user

Now off with the analysis.

Looking at the numbers

First look, it cannot be anymore polarizing with majority of reviews are at two different extremes although 0’ers are far more in number than the 10’ers.

Users are at two different extremes although 0’ers are far more in number than the 10’ers

Another interesting part is the red columns. In both extreme cases, most of the users are first time reviewers. Common consensus is that first time reviewers created account to bring the game down but similar ratio of first timers providing 10s create an interesting dilemma. One can infer that those who loved the game very much, they wanted to rate a game for the first time. Problem is the other end can also claim the same albeit love is replaced by hate here.

Both extremes have ~85% of users whose first reviewed game is The Last of Us 2

Also in whatever categories you look at, at least ~71% of users are first time reviewers. This raises lot of questions but I am no the right person to speculate.

Summary

At the start of the analysis, I was convinced that it’d be easy to determine whether review bombing is going on or not. At the end, I am not sure. If we define review bombing as first time reviewers giving very extreme scores then the 10ers along with 0ers fall in the same category.