Game reviews have been losing a lot of credibility over recent years, with nasty news surfacing of reviews being bought, or floods of negative reviews coming in by gamers disgruntled over small details. Metacritic, the #1 review aggregator on the web, sits in the middle of all this, and now another influential industry member has stepped forward to complain.

Matthew Karch, CEO of Halo: Combat Evolved Anniversary co-developer Saber Interactive, has spoken to CVG about his doubts in the reliability of Metacritic.

“I can’t stand the Metacritic thing because there’s nothing which regulates how people feel about games,” Karch said.

“With Timeshift we had people saying ‘I haven’t played the multiplayer, but it looks ok’ and they give us the score. And I’m thinking ‘what you’re saying is I spent two or three years of my team’s time working on this feature and you’re mentioning it as a ‘I haven’t played it, but…’ really?’

“The other problem is – and I’m not complaining because I understand that it’s just part of the game and it’s why I like our affiliation with Halo, because I think it’s going to help the perception on Inversion – in order for Inversion to review what Gears [of War 3] reviews the game would have to score 10 to 15 points higher to get the same score.”

Karch explains: “So in other words, if we made the same exact game as Gears and it was every bit as good in all respects, it wouldn’t be perceived as well because it’s not Gears and also it’s derivative.”

Unreliable reviews have certainly become a problem, and something we’ve discussed on MyGaming before. Metacritic have said they’re stepping up their game to try and stop things like this from happening, but there’s no doubt it’s going to be an uphill battle.