Critics get things wrong. Sometimes a game lands in review copies at exactly the wrong moment, or it ships with bugs that get patched in two weeks, or it's simply chasing a trend the press was already sick of. DualShockers put together a list of ten open world games where the user score on Metacritic beats the critics' aggregate, and it's a fun window into the gap between what we get paid to think and what people actually do for fun.

I've lived on both sides of that gap. I remember review cycles around certain open world games where everyone in the press was groaning about tower climbing and map icons while the people actually playing them put in 90 hours and loved every minute. Sometimes the critic fatigue is legitimate. Sometimes we're just tired and the players aren't.

The same pattern runs through this whole list. Open world games are long, and critics have to review them fast. You're rushing to hit an embargo on a 60-hour game you played for maybe 25, skimming systems the audience will marinade in for a month. Players score the game they lived with. Critics score the game they sprinted through. It's why I always flag in my own reviews when I haven't finished something; pretending otherwise would be lying to you about what your money buys.

The open world part matters here too, more than it might seem. This genre rewards patience in ways review windows punish. Think back to how some of the all-timers aged. Skies of Arcadia, a game I've written about before and will bring up every chance I get, didn't reveal its full charm in the first ten hours either. The Dreamcast audience figured that out through word of mouth, which was basically the 2000 version of a user score. The mechanism changes, the dynamic doesn't.

It cuts the other way as well, and I'd be dishonest if I didn't say so. User scores get review bombed for stuff that has nothing to do with the game in the box: monetization decisions, platform exclusivity, a developer saying something dumb on social media. The critic score gets inflated by hype cycles too, though. Early access to a game, fancy preview events, the general gravitational pull of a big publisher's marketing budget. Neither number is scripture. The interesting cases are the ones where the two disagree by a wide margin and stay that way, because that's a real signal that something about the game's reception took time to settle.

If you want the actual ten games, hit the DualShockers piece. What I'd suggest while you read it is asking which side you'd have landed on for each one. Have you ever loved a game the reviews told you was mediocre, or dragged yourself through a 95 that everyone swore was a masterpiece? I've done both, and the second one stings more. A bad game you can quit. A celebrated game you don't connect with makes you feel like you're the problem.

You're not, by the way. A critic score is a snapshot from one person under deadline. The user aggregate is a snapshot from thousands of people under no deadline at all, with all the baggage that carries. The truth, as usual, lives somewhere in the middle, and the games on this list are the ones where the middle took a while to find.