Scoring a video game’s quality, whether as a critic or a regular user, is not an exact science. When you’re writing reviews for public consumption, you need to be careful about what you say, and try your best to stick to the facts, whereas users leaving scores can say whatever they darn well please, and assign a score to match. While the sheer breadth of users leaving scores on Metacritic for the average FPS usually results in more heavily-weighted scores that are lower than critic scores on average, sometimes the cosmic wires get crossed, and the opposite is true.
Whether the critic scores coincidentally evened out in a particular range or the users just saw and highlighted something that spoke to them more, it is rare, but very possible for user scores to outpace critic scores on Metacritic. This is especially true for a game genre as varied and ubiquitous as FPSes. I don’t think I could accurately determine why all of these games’ scores ended up this way, but just for fun, let’s make some educated guesses based on available reviews and what we know of the games in question.
All the following user and critic scores have been pulled from Metacritic, and are accurate at the time of writing.
10
Star Wars: Republic Commando
81 User vs. 78 Critic
It’s really surprising that there aren’t more Star Wars FPSes. Single-player ones, I mean, not the multiplayer stuff like both the old and new Battlefront games. Seems like an avenue ripe for exploration, but at least off the top of my head, the only one I know is Star Wars: Republic Commando, a 2005 squad-centric FPS where you command a group of masked troopers across various classic Star Wars locales.
This game was originally released for the classic Xbox and PC, though it received late-stage ports to the PS4 and Nintendo Switch in 2021, which has diversified the score range a bit, albeit mostly on the user side of things. It only takes a little port push to nudge score averages in the right direction, I suppose, as these scores from across the two decades since the game launched have helped to push the user average three points ahead of the initial critic average. It certainly helps that the game has maintained a consistently positive reputation over the years, with only a few hiccups incurred by those later ports.
9
Postal 2
81 User vs. 50 Critic
Have you ever stumbled into a long, caustic post thread on social media and thought to yourself, “something terrible happened here.” That’s kind of the reaction I had when I checked the Metacritic page for Postal 2, the legendarily controversial and irreverent FPS in which an unnamed dude commits all manner of atrocities in a small, crummy town while he tries to settle his daily chores.
Anyone who’s been in this scene long enough knows about Postal 2 through osmosis if nothing else. It was a major controversy magnet back in the day, and the critics were not kind to it for a number of reasons. However, the game’s sheer commitment to offensive irreverence ironically helped to endear it to players, cementing it in their memories and helping the game stand the test of time. It’s almost entirely due to user love that the game managed to get a DLC expansion in 2015, over a decade after its initial release. All of this is to say that, in this particular case, I don’t think it’s especially unusual to see the user scores outpacing the critic scores.
8
Far Cry 3: Blood Dragon
81 User vs. 80 Critic
A better writer than me once said that some games are like old oak trees in that, much like how you can cut open a tree and count the rings inside to determine its age, you can get a general idea of when a game came out just from its aesthetics and idiosyncrasies. For example, 2013’s, Far Cry 3: Blood Dragon, a spin-off of the main Far Cry 3, is steeped in the neon-soaked 80s aesthetic that was starting to become popular again around that time.
Blood Dragon is a delightfully strange little spin-off, reusing a lot of assets from Far Cry 3 with a coat of neon purple paint and a CRT filter poured on top. Critical reception was kind of middling in its day, though I remember user reception being a little more positive. However, this may be a case where retrospective looks are doing more harm than good. Within the user reviews, you can see lower scores from those either having difficulty running the game on newer consoles, or just got used to mechanics introduced in later Far Cry games. I wonder if the user average would’ve been higher without these rear-looking scores.
7
Killing Floor
82 User vs. 72 Critic
Reviewing online multiplayer-focused games can be tricky, because a lot of factors that influence your experience may not necessarily be within the game’s direct control, such as your connection strength and the people you play with. It’s also not really the kind of game you can “beat,” which makes certain things hard to quantify. I’d wager these are factors in the lower critic score on the original Killing Floor, a co-op horde shooter where you battle constant waves of undead abominations.
I actually had some friends who played Killing Floor back in the day, and I distinctly remember one of them telling me, “I kind of hate this game, but I also kind of love it.” Many of the critic scores on Metacritic make some unflattering comparisons to Left 4 Dead, calling the game low budget and begrudging the fact that it started as an Unreal Tournament mod. While some users have similar opinions, many more seem more than happy with the kind of game that it is, both in its time and retrospectively, even compared to later Killing Floor games.
6
Red Steel 2
82 User vs. 80 Critic
As someone who lived through the Waggling Years, I can resolutely say that, while I loved my Nintendo Wii, I don’t miss it. Despite what we all expected from motion controls, it wasn’t a great console for FPSes, due in large part to hardware limitations. In spite of that, there was at least one FPS on the console that managed to endear itself to players: Red Steel 2, a stylish action romp where you switch off between gunplay and swordplay, both controlled by the Wii Remote.
Something very interesting about this game’s ratings is that, unlike most other games on Metacritic, the user and critic reviews are almost equal. There are only 93 user ratings versus 73 critic ratings. All the critic reviews are from 2010, but most of the user reviews seem to be retrospective, with some even being from 2026. If I were to hazard a guess, due to the aforementioned problems with FPS gaming on the Wii, there wasn’t much of a user response back in the day, but now that it’s become more of a novelty in hindsight, the user presence has started to tick up.
5
Mouse: P.I. For Hire
81 User vs. 80 Critic
A good aesthetic can carry people over a game’s minor mechanical shortcomings, using style and humor to smooth out the rough bits. For example, Mouse: P.I. For Hire’s primary aesthetic is that of classic rubberhose cartoons and gritty detective noir, following a mouse detective as he tries to uncover a seedy conspiracy in his city on the business end of a tommy gun.
Mouse’s average scores are only 1 point apart, with an 81 from users and an 80 from critics, but it’s a difference I find rather surprising given the game’s generally positive reception in the public consciousness. It’s a good reminder that Metacritic averages aren’t absolutely accurate all the time, consisting only of aggregated critic scores and users who bother to leave reviews on the site specifically. If nothing else, I was pretty surprised to see that Mouse had a score disparity, specifically because I reviewed the dang thing and scored it pretty generously.
4
Painkiller (2004)
82 User vs. 81 Critic
The mid-2000s saw the beginning of the Brown Years, where just about every FPS became a brown-colored military shooter with an emphasis on cover combat. Before the Brown Years settled in earnest, though, we still got a few old-school shooters in the style of Doom and Quake, with a standout being the original 2004 Painkiller, a massive arena shooter where you battle demonic hordes with all kinds of over-the-top weapons.
Painkiller, as an IP, has floated in and out of relevance over the decades, with the most recent instance being the 2025 co-op focused Painkiller. Every time Painkiller floats back to the forefront, you often see people drawing comparisons to the 2004 original, which is probably helping to keep the user score pumped up as curious newcomers come back to the get a taste of the classics. The fact that these newer scores have managed to get the game one point over the critic average is probably just a coincidence, but it’s a nice coincidence.
3
TimeSplitters: Future Perfect
84 User vs. 83 Critic
TimeSplitters is one of those game series that endures in the public consciousness almost exclusively through word of mouth. Since there hasn’t been a new game in over twenty years, it’s largely been up to the user base to keep circulating the proverbial tapes. This is likely how the last TimeSplitters game, Future Perfect, even has a Metacritic presence at all to help hype up its time-and-space transcending, classic FPS gameplay.
In a similar vein to Red Steel 2, Future Perfect has nearly equal critic and user review numbers, 54 and 67 respectively, and very close scores. Interestingly, all the critic reviews are from the game’s original launch in 2005, whereas all the user scores, at least the ones that Metacritic displays, are from 2020 or later. I have a hunch that whatever user scores have been given to Future Perfect are more a result of trying to help preserve the game’s legacy. Not that it doesn’t deserve its praise, of course, but the low user score numbers definitely imply it’s not exactly at the forefront of public consciousness.
2
Metro: Last Light
85 User vs. 82 Critic
When a game reaches a certain level of critical mass, if you’ll pardon the nuclear pun, it almost becomes a given that the user score is going to outpace the critic score through sheer force of presence. Metro: Last Light was a very well-received game when it first released in 2013, telling the then-latest story of survival in a post-nuclear winter, and it seems that healthy reception has kept it buoyed over critic feedback through the years.
The game did just fine critically, earning low As and mid-80s more or less across the board. Its critic score is based on 71 critic reviews, which is a lot for most games. However, the user average is exponentially heavier, based on 3,915 scores, 3,212 of which are in the positive range. With that many users contributing that many scores, it’s effectively impossible for this game’s average user rating to dip below 85. That’s just math, man. People just really like Metro: Last Light.
1
Blood (1997)
88 User vs. 82 Critic
Something mildly annoying about the current trend of remakes, remasters, and rereleases is that publishers don’t always bother to retitle or subtitle newer releases, which creates some organizational headaches. Of course, even when they do, that doesn’t mean people will leave their scores in the right places, as we see with the original 1997 release of gothic horror shooter Blood.
Blood was a very well-received game in its time, and is still fondly remembered by both new and veteran players today. Of course, since it originally came out in 1997, when PC game journalism wasn’t as prevalent, not many outlets actually reviewed it, which is why its critic score is based only on 7 scores. Users, on the other hand, have been contributing more scores over the years, particularly thanks to the game’s 2019 remaster, Fresh Supply, which technically has a separate Metacritic page, though that one also has higher user scores for similar reasons. Some user scores are reflected on both versions, while others aren’t, so the math here is a little screwy.
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