Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom Gets Review Bombed on Metacritic. Is This Nintendo’s Masterclass Really Bad or Are Fans Over-Reacting?

The Nintendo Switch exclusive open-world adventure title The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom finally launched to a universally positive response. Some consider the game to be one of the best games of this generation, while others call it one of the best games ever released.

But there are a bunch of gamers who cannot stand behind all this praise. They claim that this game is not as good as reviews suggest, and they have taken some really extreme measures to make their displeasure known.

Is it fair for gamers to review-bomb The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom?

The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom launched on Nintendo Switch on May 12. The game had a Metacritic score of 97 at launch. Currently, that score has settled down to 96, which is not something to scoff at either. But some gamers think the game does not deserve this rating.

As popular content creator Pyo mentioned in his Tweet a while ago, some people decided to Review Bomb this game on Metacritic. Some of those reviews seem legit, with complaints about frame rate and somewhat dated visuals; others are just copy-pasted criticisms.

This is not an unusual thing to see nowadays; some people Review Bombed God of War: Ragnarok, thinking it does not deserve to be a success. Others do the same to Elden Ring, thinking it should not have won the GOTY. It appears people have decided that Review Bombing is their only path to reaching the developers.

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But how much does it matter when the game is already a success and has made tonnes of money? People who want to play a particular game would play that game, no matter what a review says. Its Metacritic score would not matter to them. Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 has a 4.9 user score on that website, and Pokemon Scarlet and Violet stand at 3.3. But both of these games have sold significantly more than Ragnarok or Elden Ring.

Hence, letting one’s opinion known on Metacritic is not a bad thing, but expecting it to make a difference is somewhat naïve. This only comes down to people respecting what others love to play and letting them enjoy that thing.

Does this game deserve such negative reviews?

In many aspects, Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom is a straight-up masterpiece. Players can literally start walking towards an objective with hopes of clearing it soon enough and not do anything about it even 10 hours after making that decision.

This game has excellent physics, and it has abilities that allow players to go wild with their imagination. Gamers have already started building mammoth robotic contraptions using these abilities. The story is miles better than Breath of the Wild; the characters are intriguing; the map is improved, and the navigation is way more user-friendly.

This game is full of possibilities and innovative ideas, but it lacks a little something: optimization and visual fidelity. When people see a 2023 game on one of the leading platforms, they expect to be blown away. While the game does not look bad, there’s no hiding the fact that it’s based on the 2017 original.

Nintendo could have done better, or they could have waited and launched it on their next-gen system. If one even overlooks the visuals, they are reminded about the limitations of this dated hardware by those constant slowdowns.

None of these things is bad enough to hinder a player’s enjoyment, but they are frequent enough to make players wish this game was on more powerful hardware.

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Let’s hope Nintendo improves those pop-ins and those constant slowdowns soon enough. It’s a flawed masterpiece for now; Nintendo should not leave it as it is, but improve upon it.