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Mina The Hollower Is Now Metacritic's Highest-Rated Game Of 2026
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this post was submitted on 30 May 2026
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What do you mean by “would not want to have”? Why would we want to have them?
Metacritic is selective at what critic is allowed to be on the site. While OpenCritic is selective too off course, its accepting more voices than Metacritic (and weights them all the same).
But what do they filter on?
There’s certain critics (think right wing nut jobs like Critical Drinker) that I wouldn’t want impacting a score as they’d just rate it low because there’s a minority included in a game.
BTW I just looked up the list of reviewers having an impact on the OpenCritic score, at https://opencritic.com/faq under the section "Where can I find a list of all publications on OpenCritic?". The list of Top Critics is separate from the others, and include The Jimquisition, The Angry Joe Show and Skill Up in example And their opinion is weighted as much as the one from IGN. And I think this is a good thing.
Edit: Forgot why I was looking this up. I could not find The Critical Drinker in the list of Top Critics there. So you are good to go. ^^
Details how Metacritic is operating is uknown. Another reason to avoid it.
That's your personal taste and this is good. But imagine someone else decides for you who can impact the score and how much. If you like Metacritic, that's okay. But OpenCritic takes a more general approach and does not discriminate (at least not as much as Metacritic) and provides a "real" average value. In example I don't want IGN to impact the score too much too, but Metacritic values scores from places like IGN higher than most other platforms. And with excluding Critical Drinker, IGN's opinion has even higher impact on the score.
If you really like that, by all means keep using and looking up IGN. I don't think its the worst in the world or anything like that. I just think OpenCritic operates a little better and that's it. My initial point was to provide and alternative to Metacritic, because I do not like how it operates overall.
Tried it out with Mixtape: This and this both look the same, except Metacritic exposes the brazen astroturf campaigning going on with this mediocre game. I would also expect OpenCritic to have critics that weren't directly paid by Annapurna Interactive on the list to drag the score down. Instead, the critic score is even higher.
The point is not that OpenCritic matches your taste or expectations of a game better than Metacritic. The point is that OpenCritic is more fair by giving everyone the same voice (average instead weighting) and allow more people to speak / vote. This does not guarantee a better result for you, it just makes it more fair and even. This way OpenCritic has less control of the result than Metacritic, because Metacritic has a hidden algorithm that weights voices differently.
My point is that I took a famously overrated game that showed a clear disconnect between paid-off journalist shills and users who actually played the game. One of the sites exposed the disconnect. The other gave it a "80% player rating".
But that is a systematic issue of those outlets, not an issue with the aggregator. OpenCritic just collects the ratings and presents an average. It's not their job to control more. OpenCritic is just a mirror of those ratings. If those sites and outlets gave 10/10 all of them, then it should be reflected in the OpenCritic (and in Metascore for that matter).
What I'm hearing is, if I want actual useful critic scores, stick to MC because OC is easier to game.
Why do you think Metascores critic score is more useful than OpenCritics? I don't think that Metascore is more useful, just because it weights IGN more and ignores certain sources. I prefer a more neutral representation, than a hidden algorithm that controls the outcome (similar to how Google controls their search results).
Since you bring up Google - do you remember the search engines of yore, when websites were ranked by how many times a search keyword appeared on a page? Those were neutral representations, and they were shitty as heck. Algorithms aren't necessarily bad, they can filter out a lot of chaff. In this case the chaff being reviewers who blast a game because it's 'woke', etc.
My point with Google was, that Google is in charge and controls the output. Maybe not the best comparison here to make a specific point, as all other things around doesn't matter to what I was trying to say. Google off course is there to find websites and an algorithm to weight them is important, to ignore spammers and such. So Google tries to give a score to each site, where there does not exist a score. So yes, it was my bad for bringing this up, because that is a different task than an aggregator for gaming scores.
Metacritic should be seen as an algorithm with their own rating, rather than an aggregator. They have their own opinion, compared to OpenCritic who just reflect the current state of the ratings. I think an algorithm (especially if its hidden and prefers certain outlets) is bad by definition (by my definition to be precise). I do not want such an aggregator to filter out stuff. If you like that, sure, but I don't think Metacritic should have such power.
Is it possible, even a little bit, that people just have a different opinion than you about a video game? Surely if there was flagrant bribery happening, someone would have receipts and a conscience that compelled them to share it.
Yes, we absolutely see astroturfers stepping forward all the time to clear their conscience.
Actual astroturfing often has a paper trail. "Citizens Concerned About the Whatever" publicly listed as funded by companies who directly stand to benefit from Whatever's opposition. If it was so easy to buy good review scores, why did Microsoft not purchase them for Redfall? Why did Sony not purchase them for that 2D God of War game? Why did AnnaPurna buy them for this game but not the dozens of other games they publish? Why is the Steam user rating for Mixtape also very high if it could only achieve such ratings via bribery? Is the only explanation for Mixtape's reviews that they were paid off? Or, perhaps, could it be a bunch of people who don't have to prove that they've even played the game leaving 0/10 reviews on Metacritic en masse because they were riled up by Asmongold or some other influencer who traffics in getting their audience mad about "woke"?
I don't know. I've never heard of the game before this post. I'm just pointing out the ridiculousness of hoping for the astroturfers and shills to out themselves because they're feeling guilty.
Oh no, not even because they're feeling guilty. If anything, those same YouTubers who get their audience angry for a living would have a monetary incentive to present proof if it existed. Actual astroturfers advertise their services on LinkedIn, and in order for this conspiracy to work, you'd have to pay off people who don't astroturf for a living.
But by that logic, astroturfing simply wouldn't work, when we know for a fact it works very well.
Astroturfing works where everyone is anonymous, but I don't know how you expect it to work when every reviewer has a byline and an incentive to reveal corruption.