Oh dear. It seems that Eidos has not learned since the widely-publicized Kane & Lynch fiasco last year, which ultimately resulted in the firing of longtime GameSpot employee Jeff Gerstmann. In a recent Twitter posting, GameSpot UK journalist Guy Cocker revealed that he received a request from Eidos asking to hold back reviews of Tomb Raider Underworld until Monday — after the game’s retail release date — if the score was less than 8.0. Sure enough, the company’s Birtish PR branch confirmed this, explaining that it has been “trying to manage the review scores at the request of Eidos.”

Just that we’re trying to get the Metacritic rating to be high, and the brand manager in the US that’s handling all of Tomb Raider has asked that we just manage the scores before the game is out, really, just to ensure that we don’t put people off buying the game, basically.

Talk about unethical. In other words, their objective here is to mislead the public by asking that reviews containing damaging information about the game are withheld, in hope that more people will be inclined to buy the game.

The firm quickly issued a follow-up to its previous statement, which can be found below.

Barrington Harvey is not in the position of telling reviewers what they can and cannot say. We love Tomb Raider and believe it merits a score of at least 8/10, but if someone disagrees that’s entirely their prerogative. No problem at all. Seriously: no problem.

Our original NDA stated that in order to receive an advance copy of the game, reviewers agreed not to post reviews ahead of 5:00pm, Wednesday 19th November 2008. Nothing else. No further obligations whatsoever.

As you can clearly see from the scores posted so far, Barrington Harvey has no issue with scores of below eight out of 10 being posted online. The Eurogamer review in questions caused “problems” in so much as it originally contained a couple of minor factual inaccuracies which, to its credit, the site has quickly rectified and addressed (without, quite rightly, changing the context of the review).

Any site, be it Gamespot or whoever, is entirely within their rights to post whatever score they want and no-one is under any sort of obligation to delay any review.

As an ex-journalist myself, I firmly believe in editorial integrity and the right to express an individual opinion. As an agency, we never – ever – make demands of the press in terms of awarding scores; at the end of the day, they are free to score as they wish.

Barrington Harvey has been working hard to ensure the launch scores of Tomb Raider Underworld are in line with our internal review predictions over the launch weekend – but to suggest that we can in some way “silence” reviews of the game is slightly overstating our influence.

So, going by this statement, they simply recommended that sub-8 scores were not posted online ahead of next week. Either way, this request — enforced or not, should have never been made. Shame on Eidos.

UK Tomb Raider: Underworld reviews under 8/10 silenced until Monday [VG247]

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