Metacritic
It’s been a wild summer for PlayStation, as they’ve had two enormous releases in the form of The Last of Us Part 2 and Ghost of Tsushima. And the reaction and conversation around both could not be more different.
The Last of Us Part 2 found itself the center of gaming’s latest culture war where the ammo being used was negative reviews of the game on Metacritic. The game has 130,000 user reviews on the site, probably 6x more than any other game I’ve ever seen, and it has been a constant war between those who loved the game, and those who hated it for various reasons ranging from plot turns to “SJW agendas.” It has been a very ugly war raged on not just that site, but through reactionary YouTubers, Twitter fights and I’ve been documenting it for a while, if not getting swept up in it myself.
Well, uh, Ghost of Tsushima is pretty much the exact opposite situation.
From what I can tell, Ghost of Tsushima has the highest user scores of any PS4 game I’ve seen. And Xbox One game. And Switch game. Yeah.
Ghost of Tsushima is currently rocking a 9.3/10 as its Metacritic user score, the first game to test out the site’s new “you must wait 36 hours before posting a user review” system that was implemented after thousands of negative reviews of TLOU2 came in after the first few hours.
Ghost
This does not seem to be a case of just a small pool of reviews leading to a higher score. There are already 11,000 reviews in, which is well, well above the total that almost all other games get on the site.
For comparison, very few games end up getting above a 9/10 at all in total. Breath of the Wild is an 8.6, Red Dead 2 is an 8.4. But the ones that are closest to Ghost are all-time greats like God of War (9.2), The Last of Us 1 (9.2) or The Witcher 3 (9.2). I can’t check literally every game on the site, but Ghost’s 9.3 is the highest I can find…anywhere.
Is Ghost of Tsushima really the best game of all time? I mean, probably not, but it is extremely good, and shows at least some level of disconnect between critics and players here, this time in a reverse direction. Ghost of Tsushima’s 83 Metascore is certainly solid, but that makes it only the 17th highest rated PlayStation exclusive of all time. Meanwhile, players seem to be calling it one of the best games of this generation, at the very least.
Ghost
I’m somewhere in the middle. While I do not personally think Tsushima is better than the likes of God of War or The Witcher 3, I do think it’s absolutely one of the best PS4 games of the generation. I haven’t done my official review yet, but as a sneak preview, I think I landed on a 9.5/10, the same score I game The Last of Us Part 2, even though the games are dissimilar lots of ways. I don’t need to extol all the virtues of Ghost here, but the visuals, the combat and the story all combine for a truly epic experience, and I am glad to see the game both selling well and being embraced by fans.
I don’t know if it will maintain this all-time high score forever, but 11,000 reviews is a solid amount and I would be surprised to see it dip too far below where it is now. Players are trying to make a statement here, effectively “love bombing” the game with ultra-high scores, but…since I think it deserves it, I’m certainly not complaining.
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