Félix ‘xQc‘ Lengyel isn’t one to pull punches in his criticism of video games, but after seeing a flood of “overly bad” reviews for Death Stranding he’s moved to defend it.
The new title, which was developed by Kojima Productions and released on November 8, has proved to be a lightning rod for debate within the online gaming community.
It is the first project director Hideo Kojima has worked on since the production company split off from Konami in 2015, meaning there was a lot of anticipation building towards its launch, and after completing it on stream xQc decided to hit out at everybody who has bashed it with reviews.
At the time of writing, Death Stranding – which recorded PlayStation’s second-largest launch on the PS4 console in the United Kingdom according to GamesIndustry.biz – has an 83% approval rate on Metacritic, which states that the title has “mixed or average” reviews.
During a broadcast on November 10, the former Overwatch professional player said: “Obviously the game was poorly received by trash game reviewers that couldn’t play the game properly and would get stuck on parts where you have to walk a lot, because they couldn’t climb properly because they’re just stupid, so they gave it an overly bad review.”
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“If you’re someone that’s more for gameplay, then, of course, this would have a bad review, but not that bad. Not as bad as people gave it in the first place – no way dude.”
When asked about what he would rate the game out of 10, he decided to go with a 9.5 at the first time of asking, but soon changed his mind – as seen in the clip below.
Even after admitting that he can see why some players have had problems with the game, xQc predicted that it would certainly be scooping several video game awards in the near future.
Whether or not that comes to fruition remains to be seen, but Hideo Kojima and his team will certainly be hoping for something to that effect.