Resident Evil Requiem: A Banned Review Written by AI

Resident Evil Requiem is certainly the game with the most media attention right now, and it's no surprise: Capcom's title, the ninth in the official saga, arrives on shelves with huge expectations, and naturally, reviews, including our own, are flooding the internet.

Unfortunately, not all reviews are the result of the careful work of professionals and experts: in the Year of Our Lord 2026, sites are increasingly commissioning generative Artificial Intelligence to compile articles of this type, drawing their elements from here and there and passing them off as human work in an effort to gain cheap clicks and pageviews.

Fortunately, there are those who are vigilant: this is what happened a few hours ago on the pages of Metacritic – the site that, as you know, reports all accredited site ratings and calculates a mathematical average – where a review of RE9 was banned after users reported it was clearly AI-generated.

The review was published by the site Videogamer, which once certainly played an important role in video game information but now belongs to the company Clickout, famous for filling its sites with links and connections to its online betting services. Just recently, colleagues at Kotaku reported that not only Videogamer but also other group sites like The Escapist and eSport Insider are now a hotbed of links bordering on fraudulent and AI-generated "content." Specifically, the self-proclaimed author of the article, one Brian Merrygold, is also a non-existent character created with AI programs.

Video Game Journalism and Artificial Intelligence

The person writing this news has exactly 25 years of experience in industry journalism: few will remember the review of Blair Witch Vol.3: Elly Kedward, which was their first. From the perspective of someone who has spent so much time in front of a screen with a controller in hand and even more time pressing keys to compose articles that were honest, precise, as objective and professional as possible, knowing that some people are illicitly taking such work to create pages cheaply and attract clicks through algorithms and sponsorships, at the very least, hurts. AI, mind you, is not capable of "writing a review": it is only capable of summarizing and organizing the reviews it reads around [read: if no one wrote reviews, if all editors were replaced by machines, AI could not write even a single line because it would not have the sources available], and if it does so by passing it off as its own, we are dealing with a fraud.

From this point of view, we can only agree with the position of a colleague like Dom Sacco, who presented his respectable resume on X, specifying how everything has been undone by the easy gains of the AI-based industry.

Fortunately, honest and professional – and above all human – work has not yet been completely nullified, and Metacritic itself, after accepting the reports and banning the review by Videogamer and "Brian Merrygold," published a disclaimer specifying that this kind of work will never find a place among the site's pages and rankings.
...at least until Metacritic itself is acquired by some easy-money company, at least...

Resident Evil Requiem, in any case, is available today on PC, PS5, and Xbox Series X/S.