Massively recently reported that Eurogamer has re-reviewed Darkfall, an MMORPG that was released in North America a few days ago but has been available to European gamers since early this year. It’s unorthodox that a website would review a game more than once, so here’s the backstory.

Eurogamer reviewed Darkfall back in May and gave it a 2/10. Lead developer Tasos Flambouras did not take too kindly to this low score and vented in the Darkfall forums, claiming numerous inaccuracies in the review and that the reviewer only spent two hours (according to their system logs) playing the game. He insisted that the review be taken down. Naturally, reviewer Ed Zitron retorted that he spent more time than that, while the editors rejected the request to take down the review. Still, Eurogamer decided to review Darkfall again, with a different journalist. Amusingly, while the new review spanned four pages, the game fared no better and received a 4/10.

I started thinking of the concept of re-reviewing a game and whether or not Eurogamer should have even done so in the first place. At some point or the other, every reviewer (of all forms of entertainment) has put out a review that wasn’t well received by the fans. A few years ago when I used to review films and music, I encountered the wrath of Clay Aiken fans after writing a negative review of his CD. It wasn’t pleasant but hey, it happens. It’s part of the business. We expect angry fanbois and girlz to bring down the thunder. We know that they’ll accuse us of not knowing what we’re doing, being stupid, unprofessional, and a host of other insults and jabs.

However, the Darkfall drama is unique in that the lead developer himself accused Zitron of an unfair review and demanded that it be taken down. I’m sure that it’s disheartening for developers to see their hard work harshly criticized, and even more so if said developers are small fish in the large pond that is the gaming industry. That being said, developers should also expect that not everyone will like their game. That is the nature of putting out a product for the public.

The Darkfall dev should have just accepted the low score and moved on. Instead, he made a big deal out of this one review. To publicly call out Eurogamer in the Darkfall forums is rather petty. Why didn’t he just talk to the editors privately? On two occasions I was contacted in regards to a mediocre score I gave. One was a budding director whose short film I reviewed, and the other was a PR person for a particular game company. It was already questionable enough that I would even be contacted regarding my reviews, but at least they didn’t publicly complain about it. If Flambouras had proof that the game wasn’t reviewed fairly, he should have privately contacted the Eurogamer editors. He’s within his right to insist that Darkfall be reviewed properly, but to rant in an obviously biased forum was not the way to go about solving the issue.

Meanwhile, Eurogamer’s response to the situation by re-reviewing the game has put them on a slippery slope. Editors should always stand by their reporters and trust in their writing, unless cold hard evidence proves otherwise. Instead, they acknowledged that the first review was poor by assigning another journalist to review the same game twice. Granted, he claimed that he had evidence of Zitron’s lack of playtime via system logs, but did the editors actually see it? I doubt it, and they just took his word for it.

I hope that re-reviews don’t become commonplace in any form of media. As game journalists who review games, it’s our responsibility to write fair and accurate reviews. We should be able to do so without fearing that a game company will demand that a review to be taken down because they didn’t agree with the score. Furthermore, we should be able to trust that our editors support us and won’t second judge by getting someone else to re-review a game we’ve already written about.