Many videogames suffer "review bombing" -a large volume of unusually low scores that in many cases do not reflect the real quality of the product- when rated by users. By taking Metacritic's 50,000+ user score aggregations for PC games in English language, we use a Natural Language Processing (NLP) approach to try to understand the main words and concepts appearing in such cases, reaching a 0.88 accuracy on a validation set when distinguishing between just bad ratings and review bombings. By uncovering and analyzing the patterns driving this phenomenon, these results could be used to further mitigate these situations.

Video game developers reached spectacular heights in 2016, creating games that entertained, enlightened, and elevated the medium. These are not those games. These are the losers, the stinkers, the games that wasted the time and money of everyone involved. These games aren't just boring or buggy, but fundamentally broken: They're not so bad they're good, they're so bad it's offensive. I've based this list on Metacritic's five lowest "Metascore" ratings for all games released in 2016.