While The Last of Us Part 2's Metacritic score was abysmally low at launch as the game got review-bombed by a large number of players, but as more players pick up the game over time, its score is gradually improving. After the success of The Last Of Us, which was released back in 2013, Naughty Dog released its sequel earlier this month, continuing the story of Joel and Ellie.
Although The Last of Us Part 2 was widely acclaimed by critics, the community response was pretty polarizing at launch. Over the past few days, the game has been getting review bombed on Metacritic as players have been expressing their disapproval with certain aspects of the game. A number of critics also expressed their reservations against Naughty Dog's review policy, which was implemented to ensure that critical assessments don't contain too many spoilers but also hindered the writers' ability to create a comprehensive review.
Three days after the launch of the game, The Last Of Us Part 2 had over 38,000 negative user reviews and 22,000 positive user reviews on Metacritic, with the overall score below 4.0 out of 10, which was a striking contrast to the game's critic score. However, as more players are playing the game, the scores are improving with an overall standing at 4.4 at the time of writing this article. The number of positive reviews are still far behind the number of negative reviews, however, trailing by almost 14,000 reviews at time of writing.
Review-bombing is commong in the games industry as a method for disgruntled fans to "get back" at developers who they perceive to have done something detrimental to a game. One of the shortcomings of review aggregators like Metacritic is that it is an open platform, and players are able to express their opinions about the game regardless of whether they've played it or not. The rating after a review-bombing hardly reflects the game's true performance, which is why the practice can be devastating to developers.
One of the major reasons for negative The Last Of Us Part 2 reviews has been the game's narrative structure. Considering that fans of the franchise have profound bond with the characters of the franchise, their uproar against the ending is certainly defensible to a certain extent. However, Naughty Dog did an excellent task in building up to that ending and it isn't like it wasn't justified - something which players will only get to know if they try out The Last of Us Part 2 themselves.
Source: Metacritic