Eurogamer called out for bad review, journalist alleged to have not played game

We give games low scores every now and again, and sometimes developers are not happy about it – see here and here. However, we always put some solid time into the game before we dish out the low numbers. Regretfully, it seems Eurogamer has messed up with one of their reviews, and the developer of Darkfall Online has called them out, claiming they reviewed the title after playing for less than two hours, and then giving it a score of 2/10.

“When we read the hostile review by Ed Zitron, one thing became apparent: he had not played the game at all. Eurogamer readers and Darkfall players are posting bullet lists of factual errors in the story. The reviewer hadn’t even figured out the very basics of the game before he wrote about it. We checked the logs for the 2 accounts we gave Eurogamer and we found that one of them had around 3 minutes playtime, and the other had less than 2 hours spread out in 13 sessions,” comments Tasos, one of the games developers on the titles official forum.

“Most of these 2 hours were spent in the character creator since during almost every one of the logins the reviewer spent the time creating a new character. The rest of the time was apparently spent taking the low-res screenshots that accompanied the article. At no point did this reviewer spend more than a few minutes online at a time.”

The comments section of the Eurogamer review is also currently filling up with complaints (around 350 at the time of writing).