Metacritic has been forced to remove a suspicious-sounding Resident Evil Requiem review published by a previously high-profile website, after claims that the outlet was now pumping out AI slop.
The popular review score aggregation source told Kotaku it had now delisted a 9/10 Resident Evil Requiem review from veteran UK website Videogamer.com after concerns were raised about its authorship following cuts to its human staff.
Videogamer’s 543-word appraisal of Requiem, still live on its own website, is published under the byline of “experienced iGaming and sports betting analyst” Brian Merrygold. Alas, Merrygold does not appear to exist. His profile image includes a URL that suggests it was created by ChatGPT in October last year, the same month a social media profile for the author was created that’s yet to be used.
Merrygold’s persona, along with several others on the website, have been used to publish what appears to be AI-generated gambling slop on Videogamer over the past few months. Kotaku reports that Videogamer’s new owners Clickout then began using these same personas for video game coverage this month, after human writers were made redundant.
“The RE Requiem review and a handful of other Videogamer reviews from 2026 have been removed,” Metacritic co-founder Marc Doyle acknowledged.
“Metacritic has been a reputable review source for a quarter century and has maintained a rigorous vetting process when adding new publications to our slate of critics,” he continued. “However, in certain instances such as a publication being sold or a writing staff having turned over, problems can arise such as plagiarism, theft, or other forms of fraud including AI-generated reviews.
“Metacritic’s policy is to never include an AI-generated critic review on Metacritic and if we discover that one has been posted, we’ll remove it immediately and sever ties with that publication indefinitely pending a thorough investigation.”
Metacritic’s warning comes at a time when all kinds of journalism face an existential crisis due to the rise of AI. From the ability to quickly conjur up regurgitated opinions scraped together from elsewhere, to the fact that search engine article discovery is quickly being replaced by AI summaries, the landscape is much changed. Metacritic’s warning, meanwhile, suggests the company thinks it likely this won’t be the only attempt to get AI slop past its filters.
“Like the result of an experiment conducted in an underground Umbrella Corporation lab, Resident Evil Requiem successfully splices two separate strains of survival horror together into the one highly infectious new mutation,” IGN wrote in our human-authored Resident Evil Requiem review, awarding the game 9/10.
IGN’s Resident Evil Requiem guide will help you every step of the way through RE9. Take note of these key tips and tricks before you get started, and focus on finding these important items early. Plus, our comprehensive walkthrough will make sure you don’t miss a single Bobblehead or file as you try to survive from the Rhodes Hill Chronic Care Center all the way to Raccoon City.
Tom Phillips is IGN’s News Editor. You can reach Tom at [email protected] or find him on Bluesky @tomphillipseg.bsky.social
