![]() ![]() But here’s where things start to look odd: of those 1,402 reviews, only 11 users left comments. ![]() That’s not as many as, say, Tears of the Kingdom (which has over 8,000 at the time of this piece), but it’s certainly enough to consider its 9.6 user score a reasonable average on its face, especially considering 1,339 of those reviews are positive. At the time this piece was written, Metal Torrent had 1,402 user ratings. Sometimes relatively unknown games end up highly-ranked thanks to a small but passionate community, but this doesn’t seem to be the case with Metal Torrent. Not really the type of game you’d expect to see at the top of any rankings, even rankings as fickle as average user ratings on Metacritic! Not that big a deal when it launched, not easily accessible today, and by now old enough that any semblance of a community it may have had is now long gone. So while there’s no reason to slander this little shmup, it’s…kind of a nothing game. Our review back in 2010 gave Metal Torrent a 7, saying it delivered a “torrential downpour of bullets, but not of content.”Īs of 2014, Metal Torrent’s online leaderboards were shut off with the loss of Nintendo DS online support, and there hasn’t been anything resembling a re-release or resurgence of interest in this little shooter since. It was developed by Arika, a Japanese studio better known for the Endless Ocean games and, most recently, Tetris 99. Metal Torrent is a vertical scrolling shooter that launched worldwide in 2010 as a DSiWare title available for 500 Nintendo points on the Nintendo DSi, or $4.99 on the 3DS. ![]() And while their handiwork has largely been erased elsewhere on Metacritic, Metal Torrent’s dubiously earned crown remains as a strange artifact, and a reminder of how easily manipulated online score aggregators truly are. Rather, it appears to be the quiet work of one gamer who, in 2020, was very upset about a completely different video game, and took out their frustration on multiple Metacritic pages. Why was Metal Torrent at the top of the Nintendo user review scores? The answer, as it turns out, was none of the things the Reddit community suggested. While the Nintendo subreddit seemed fairly quick to dismiss the question, FuzzyPickles had me intrigued. Or maybe it’s just rated so highly because it was (for many) a free game, and people like free things. ![]() Maybe there’s an underground cult following that’s just very, very into Metal Torrent. Maybe this was an example of “meme-brigading,” where a group of community members band together to artificially inflate user scores of a lesser-known game by flooding a page with positive reviews. In the replies, a handful of fellow redditors offered their theories about this mystery. It currently sits above classics like Super Metroid (for Wii), Pokemon SoulSilver, the Metroid Prime Trilogy, and Banjo-Kazooie in the user ratings, despite having a much lower critical Metascore of 62. “Weird question - why is the highest user-reviewed Nintendo game of all time an obscure DSiWare game called Metal Torrent?”Īccording to FuzzyPickles, they were looking at Nintendo’s user reviews to see where Pikmin 4 had landed, and were surprised to see an obscure DSiWare title called Metal Torrent at the top with a sky-high 9.6 rating. ![]()
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