A slew of Pokemon fans haven't taken too kindly to Nintendo and Game Freak's Pokemon Yellow 'remakes' Let's Go Pikachu and Eevee for the Nintendo Switch.
As such, a number of people have opted to review-bomb the games online, with allegations that the titles deviate too far from the main-series formula. That's despite the franchise's next mainline entry being pencilled in for next year.
While you can still battle trainers, you can’t battle live pokemon, for example. Instead, players capture them simply throwing pokeballs, a system just like Niantic’s location-based augmented reality game Pokemon Go.
Other players have shown frustration with legendary pokemon Mew being an incentive to buy the Pokeball Plus, which lets players take pokemon from the game into the real world.
Running a-Muk
The act of review-bombing is typically taken by hordes of players that spam user review portions of websites in hopes of dissuading others from buying a game and in-turn impacting sales to get their point across.
Objections to games can come from a myriad of different reasons, from those who aren’t happy a game has gone in a different direction to its predecessors to those who don’t approve of specific mechanics like in-game purchases or the use of DRM.
For Let's Go Pikachu and Eevee, review aggregate website Metacritic and Amazon Japan have taken the brunt of the latest review-bombing. The latter has gone as far as to purge its review section and remove the overall aggregator.
Currently, only three reviews are listed, which is a five-star review from a local buyer and a three and one-star review taken from Amazon’s US site.
Gloom with a Mew
Over on Metacritic, one reviewer went as far as to say: “If you buy this game you're saying you're ok with paywalls, ok with saying a big **** off to competitive players, ok with removing core mechanics, ok with going to the same region over and over because blind nostalgia sells.”
Another, meanwhile, called it a “low effort cash grab," with other comments following a similar tune.
That’s not to say that every negative user comment isn’t a well-intended criticism. But as Nintendo Life has pointed out, a vast majority of negative reviews for Pokemon Let's Go Pikachu and Let's Go Eevee have come on the day of release.
Of course, the day of release is when Metacritic first allows user reviews to appear, but it also suggests that many haven’t played the game thoroughly and have instead opted to vent their various frustrations about just the concept.
Based on 862 user ratings, Pokemon Let's Go Pikachu currently holds an average score of 5.5 out of 10, with 439 positive takes, 45 mixed and 378 negative reviews. Comparatively, the critical consensus holds an average rating of 81 out of 100, with 42 positive takes and eight mixed.
