Death Stranding is Currently Being Torn to Shreds on Metacritic, It Doesn’t Deserve This
InfoSearched
A brand-new Hideo Kojima game just got buried under a pile of zeroes it didn’t earn.
Death Stranding hit PlayStation 4 shelves on November 8, 2019, arriving with a Metascore in the low 80s from critics who actually spent the twenty-plus hours needed to see it through. Then Metacritic flipped on user reviews, and within hours the game’s audience score cratered under a wave of 0/10 ratings that had little to do with the actual experience. Gaming commentator MBG dug into the numbers and came away convinced the backlash wasn’t just harsh — it was coordinated and, in his words, undeserved.
- Death Stranding launched globally on November 8, 2019, as a PS4 exclusive from Hideo Kojima, earning a Metascore in the low 80s from critics.
- Once user scores went live, a flood of 0/10 ratings hit within hours, many dismissing the game as a “walking simulator” or “delivery boy game” without engaging its mechanics or story.
- Fans responded with a counter-wave of 10/10 scores to offset the zeroes, turning the user average into a tug-of-war between two extremes instead of an honest reading of player reaction.
The Numbers Tell Two Different Stories
Critics who covered Death Stranding ahead of launch landed on a Metascore in the low 80s — solid, if not universally glowing, and roughly in line with how the press treats most ambitious Kojima projects. That score reflected people who’d actually finished the game, dealt with its cargo-hauling loops, and sat through its sprawling cutscenes. The user score told a completely different story almost immediately after the review gate opened, with ratings clustering at the extremes rather than settling anywhere in the middle.
MBG’s video walks through just how lopsided it got: a wall of 0/10 scores stacked up within the first few hours of user reviews going live, dragging the aggregate down in a way that had nothing to do with a gradual, organic reaction from people playing the game at their own pace.
Zero-Effort Zeroes
What stood out to MBG wasn’t that people disliked Death Stranding — plenty of legitimate criticism exists for a game built around trudging across terrain with a stack of packages strapped to your back. It was how many of the negative reviews read like they were written by people who never touched a controller. Reviews dismissing it as a “walking simulator” or a “delivery boy game” kept surfacing without any mention of the game’s narrative themes, its strand-based multiplayer, or the asynchronous systems letting players leave ladders, bridges, and supplies for strangers.
People are giving the game a straight 0/10, and it’s not cool, at all.
That’s the core complaint MBG returns to throughout the video — not that criticism is unwelcome, but that a one-line dismissal typed out minutes after launch shouldn’t carry the same weight as a critic’s full playthrough. Kojima’s game asks for patience most blockbusters don’t, and reviewers willing to give it that patience landed somewhere far more generous than a zero.
The Counter-Campaign Made It Worse, Not Better
As the 0/10 scores piled up, defenders of the game fired back with their own flood of perfect 10/10 ratings, an attempt to drag the average back toward something resembling the critical consensus. The problem is obvious: neither extreme reflects a genuine, considered opinion of the game. Death Stranding ended up with a user score built almost entirely out of overcorrection in both directions, which tells a prospective buyer far less than the critic scores do.
It’s a pattern gaming audiences have seen before whenever a divisive, big-budget release drops — the same review-bombing dynamic that hit other high-profile titles once online discourse turns into a battleground. Anyone who followed the backlash cycles around other polarizing releases, including some of the reactions to what people hated about Cyberpunk 2077, will recognize the shape of it: legitimate gripes get drowned out by review scores weaponized as a statement rather than an assessment.
An Unconventional Game, Not a Bad One
MBG is careful not to claim Death Stranding is flawless or that everyone owes it a glowing review. He acknowledges it’s a deliberate, unconventional design that plenty of players will bounce off of — the pacing is slow by design, and the cargo-management loop isn’t going to hook someone expecting a traditional action game. That’s a fair, honest criticism. What he pushes back on is treating those honest disagreements the same way as a coordinated attempt to tank a score before most reviewers even had the chance to finish it.
For a PS4 exclusive carrying the kind of ambition that made other Sony-backed open-world projects like Ghost of Tsushima stand out on hype alone, Death Stranding deserved a shot at being judged on its own terms rather than getting torched by people typing “0” before the credits even rolled for most players.
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