Wonderworld Balan Flooded with Positive Reviews from "Fake" Users on Metacritic

Marketed as the newest 3D platformer game from Yuji Naka who is one of the creators of the Sonic the Hedgehog franchise, expectations for Balan Wonderworld are indeed very high before its release. This is also due to Square Enix’s excellent role in marketing the game to the point of bringing it to prestigious game presentation events such as Nintendo Direct. But sometimes expectations are not always good, and so far Balan Wonderworld has received a negative reception from many critics and gamers who are dissatisfied with the quality of the game.

The negative reception turned out to be inversely proportional to the game’s User Score on the Metacritic site, because Balan Wonderworld actually got a high average user score. This may make many gamers feel that the quality of the game actually matches the expectations of fans, but the answer is not so. As ogled by famous gamer YouTubers Spawn Wave through his Twitter account, most of the perfect user reviews for Balan Wonderworld seem strange.

These Balan Wonderworld User Reviews look like a bunch of bots, weird. pic.twitter.com/Yqae0KJhNq
— Spawn Wave (@SpawnWaveMedia) March 28, 2021

If observed more closely, most of them use English that seems “scripted” or not very good, as if they have no valid points to defend why the game is good. We also looked at the profiles of these users and sure enough, in their account records they only make reviews for Balan Wonderland, which means this Metacritic account could have just been created just to give a perfect review of the game.

Sounds suspicious indeed, but we feel that this may be the work of a party (possibly fans) who do not accept the game getting low reviews. For that they may create many cloned Metacritic accounts in order to push the game score higher. At least we wouldn’t be surprised if this was the real scenario that happened behind the scenes.

Balan Wonderworld itself is now officially released on PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, Xbox One, Xbox Series, Nintendo Switch and PC. The quality of the game at this time is not exactly as expected, but we still hope that the developer in the future might be able to improve the game, because if I’m honest this game has quite unique potential and appeal.

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