November 22nd, 2008 by Kris Pigna

Tomb Raider: Underworld hit stores this week, and in an effort to craft a high early ranking on Metacritic, Eidos has tasked a PR firm to try and convince publications to hold off on their reviews if the scores are below a certain threshold (via Shacknews).

The story first broke when GameSpot U.K. journalist Guy Cocker posted on Twitter that he received a call from Eidos' PR firm, saying that if Underworld was going to get a score below 8.0, they wanted the review delayed until Monday -- three days after the game's release on Friday. Videogamer247 then contacted the U.K. PR firm, Barrington Harvey, which confirmed they were indeed calling publications to try and quell negative reviews.

"That's right. We're trying to manage the review scores at the request of Eidos," a representative said. Explaining why, the representative said, "Just that we're trying to get the Metacritic rating to be high, and the brand manager in the U.S. 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."