Call of Duty: Modern Warfare came out last week, and it’s garnering mostly positive reviews from critics so far. User reviews, though, are decidedly negative on Metacritic.
The game is getting review bombed on Metacritic from Russians upset with the game’s single-player story. It’s not clear if the reviews are from legitimate accounts or if it’s a concerted campaign against the game.
“Activision is still using that story about ‘bad Russian guys’ what we saw in most of their games in last decade,” one user writes. “Activision made 5-hours [sic] singleplayer mode that ruined all respect to the company from Russian gaming community.”
Several other users complain of “propaganda” and anti-Russian bias. A number of reviews are also written in Cyrillic, the script used for the Russian language.
The Russian government, of course, has aggressively attacked US and European institutions in recent years with misinformation campaigns and attempts to spread state-sponsored propaganda through social media. This may be the latest example of Russia’s incursion into Western democracies, attempting to sway public opinion and sow discord.
