Updated for responses.

Yesterday Eurogamer released their review of online game Darkfall. Darkfall is a recently released sandbox MMOG, where players are pitted against in each other in a world where clans battle for territory control. The review in question rated Darkfall with a 2/10. This score is one of the worst given to any game they’ve reviewed in the passed. Tasos, the lead designer of Darkfall Online immediately replied with his own comments.

According to Eurogamer’s scoring policy the score of 2/10 means:

Two – about as entertaining as ‘flu

Avoid at all costs – this is less entertaining than setting fire to a ten-pound note. You’ll have barely ever seen a 2/10 on EG – and for very good reason. A game this bad almost certainly won’t reach our eyes, because publishers generally know better than to send games of this standard to us in the first place. In many cases these are your typical “straight to budget” titles that no sane publisher would try and release at full price, and they certainly wouldn’t want us to rip them to shreds in public.

What you’re facing here is a game with appalling generic visuals built around an awful design, cursed with cretinous AI, brain-frying audio and controls that feel like they’ve been designed to upset people or boost sales of replacement game pads. It could just be that the game is just so hideously old fashioned that someone has released the game by mistake. Who knows what goes through the minds of people who feel the need to try and sell crap? Pity them, and pity the fools that stock it and more so the morons that end up buying it without checking first.

A scathing opinion by all accounts. Tasos, not happy in the least, responded quickly, “The entire review is opinionated and hostile; it attacks the game, the creators and the company at every chance. The creators and developers of Darkfall, as well as the Darkfall community through its reaction, consider this review suspect and question the motives behind its publication.”

The review alleged that “every little thing Darkfall does is tragic, but without a personality that might make you feel sorry for its developers, Aventurine. From the grubby textures and grammatically incorrect quest text to the anarchic control system, any attempt to glean joy from this torrid husk of an entertainment product is met with disdain. It’s almost as if Darkfall doesn’t want you to play. But nevertheless, a job is a job, and play I must.”

Rerollz has not had the chance to review Darkfall Online.

Update:
Eurogamer Responds to Tasos’ forum post. In the Editor’s blog he writes, “The reviewer in question, Ed Zitron, disputes the server logs that Aventurine presents as fact. According to the logs they supplied, Ed played the game for just over three hours. Ed says the logs miss out two crucial days and understate others, which suggests they are incomplete, and he insists he played the game for at least nine hours. ”

Which brings us to Tasos’ second response. Tasos writes, “We stand by our logs and we’re willing to prove our claims. Eurogamer can send one of their technicians here, we will be happy to cover this expense, and he can examine our procedures and our logs himself and he will be satisfied that our logs are accurate. That, or they can do what they’re doing at the moment: believe their reviewer blindly and keep an unfounded and damaging review of our game public on a few minutes of actual play-time.”

Other than the hard critique, there seems to be a dispute of how much time the reviewer spent with the game. The Reviewer claims nine hours were used to get to the know the game. However, Tasos claims, “We don’t believe that the 9 hours of MMORPG playtime Eurogamer is satisfied with, is anywhere near enough to review a MMORPG game of this size. It’s not even enough to get first impressions and these say very little about the game experience. Most gaming sites understand this and they’re using actual Darkfall players logging 100s of hours before they review our game. We believe that this is the only way to go in writing a complete review of an MMORPG like Darkfall.”