A Resident Evil Requiem review published by long-standing UK gaming news site Videogamer has been removed from Metacritic after readers pointed out it was written by a fake AI journalist who doesn’t actually exist. Videogamer‘s human masthead was gutted last week, sources tell Kotaku, and the site has been publishing apparent genAI slop ever since.
Videogamer, purchased BGFG a few years back and recently sold to gambling seo spam agency Clickout, gave Resident Evil Requiem a 9/10 in its review this week. But readers pointed out that the writing “reeks [of] AI,” and its author, “experienced iGaming and sports betting analyst” Brian Merrygold, appeared to be a made-up person complete with an AI profile image.
The review in question is full of clichés and generalities rather than specifics about the game and how it plays. Here’s an excerpt:
Resident Evil Requiem is not just a victory lap for Capcom’s survival horror dynasty; it is a chainsaw-revving, blood-soaked testament to why we love getting scared stupid. It is the sort of finale that effectively grabs the franchise by the lapels, shakes it violently, and demands you acknowledge just how far it has come since the tank-control days of 1996. While other series limp toward their conclusions, RE9 arrives with the confidence of a Tyrant smashing through a brick wall.
It happens like clockwork with every major Resident Evil Requiem leak, doesn’t it? We worry if the developers can balance the scales. After the southern gothic reinvention of RE7 and the action-hero theatrics of the recent remakes, the franchise has been having something of an identity crisis. This game solves it by simply doing both. It bonds the trauma of Raccoon City with modern design sensibilities, proving there is plenty of life left in this undead horse. It frames the horror not just as a series of jump scares, but as a legacy that haunts its characters as much as it haunts our backlogs.
It was previously scraped and featured on Metacritic for its review score roundup on launch day. It raises concerns about quality controls for the main video game review aggregator that fans consult before buying games and companies mention in their quarterly earnings reports when touting the success of recent releases.
It’s bleak. I was reading some RE Requiem reviews and found this thing published by videogamer. Can’t find anything about the writer, everything about it reeks AI (dead giveaway being the image). Low effort, gargabe.
Mind you, this review made its way to Metacritic. https://t.co/4STN8DjAwe pic.twitter.com/awk26P9wSA
— Andrés (@Andrew_east) February 26, 2026
“The RE Requiem review and a handful of other Videogamer reviews from 2026 have been removed from Metacritic,” site cofounder Marc Doyle told Kotaku in an email.
As spotted by Gfinity’s Andrés Aquino in a post on X, everything about Brian Merrygold’s profile on Videogamer comes off as suspicious. The byline appears to have no prior online history and the profile image url is tiled “ChatGPT-Image-Oct-20-2025-11_57_34-AM-300×300.png.”
Several other authors on the site have similarly suspicious-looking AI-generated profile pictures that don’t mention they were generated by “ChatGPT” in their file names, suggesting this may have been a slip-up on by Videogamer site management as it pivots the outlet to completely AI-generated junk. Other current bylines on the site include Shooter Orson and Steven Danielson. Like the Merrygold account, all three had their X profiles created in October 2025.
Sources told Kotaku that Clickout began publishing AI-generated content under the casino and gambling portions of Videogamer around that time last fall, but it wasn’t until the staff was axed last week that AI content started being pushed out into the gaming news, reviews, and features sections as well. Older human bylines from the site’s 15 year history have been completely wiped out as well and overwritten with fake AI profiles.
While it’s impossible to verify what content is or isn’t generated with AI with complete accuracy, multiple AI-checkers Kotaku used to verify the legitimacy of the Resident Evil Requiem review sounded alarm bells. It wasn’t the only recent review to get picked up by Metacritic either. A Recent Pokémon FireRed and LeafGreen review, which was published on Videogamer and subsequently featured on Metacritic on February 23, has also been removed from the aggregator’s roundup.
Additional reporting by Ethan Gach.
