It's highly unlikely they're ever bought off. You could argue that they sometimes pander their scores to their audience, but these companies have way too much to lose from being caught giving or accepting money.

Not to mentioned you'd have to bribe an awful lot of people to affect the metascore by a significant amount. If every major publisher was paying dozens of reviewers for every one of their games, it would have leaked out by now. Instead it's just a baseless internet joke, with only those that want to believe it actually doing so.

Perhaps something like this? 

A lot of people are saying Rogue's protagonist is more intesting than most Assassins Creed characters.

Aye basic ability to lie should tell them that that is going to be obviously untrue... if I was asked how much I could lift and I said 5-10lbs over what I could it would be in the realms of reality but this is someone putting a photoshopped pic of themselves on facebook holding up 3 trains and the moon...

There is 1 thing that it could be.... and it takes a lot of trust here, but perhaps the 100% is a troll at the game, maybe ubisoft approached them with a "every extra % gives you an extra % of cash from us type incentive, then rather than bumping up the score by a few % to cash in on the deal and try to avoid making it obvious they went full crazy and gave it 100% clearly showing people that it is bought off and that this kinda thing goes on all the time, at the same time cleaning up as much money as possible from Ubisoft for having offered the underhanded scheme to begin with... since clearly the value of a 60% game having 1 100% review is absolutely 0 (other than something to slap on the GOTY edition I guess) But for that to happen then Playstation lifestyle would need to be pretty intelligent and I'm doubting that is the case.

Sounds like Sony with Destiny. I'm sure it was their idea not to let critics play the game until AFTER release.

Speculating is fun!

Not everything is a console war item, and not everything needs to be compared between platforms in order to justify it.

This has nothing to do with Destiny or Sony, I never mentioned it, the thread is about AC and its reviews. So it's best to keep it that way, without involving your petty gripes about other games and consoles.

But if you really insist on picking a bone as a proud console warrior, the fact remains that the Destiny bundle was available to buy on the game's release date, and the review embargo expired the very minute clock chimed midnight on Sept.9.

Assassin's Creed bundle became available for sale on November 2, nine full days before the game release, with people receiving a basically useless download code to hold on to, and with reviews delayed almost until the late hours of the release date.

I did not even imply, let alone state that Microsoft had anything to do with the review embargo (or with the game in general). I actually tried to praise them for a brilliant strategy, alliwing them to make the most money possible (and AC bundle is consistently their best selling bundle) before the word got out on all of the game's shortcomings, making it convincingly the worst AC game to date.

Both LMAO!

I'm sorry, but that's just funny. I can't stand bugs with body parts completely out of place. But this is just funny

I remember a glitch from AC 3 where my horse got stuck inside a tree. I just laughed at it and moved on

Thats like something straight out of a three stooges film. LOL

Critics weren't able to play Destiny until the release date. That's why established websites didn't have reviews ready for weeks. That was clearly a strategy, they knew the game was going to have modest reviews.

You say, "Microsoft obviously knew the game was crap, so they rushed to move as many consoles as possible before that fact became public knowledge." I'm saying that's exactly what happened with Destiny. Both publishers wanted to keep the quality of the game a secret from consumers. So it must be common practice. Sony and Bungie wanted to move bundles as well, they couldn't have people knowing the truth.

But hey, atleast the AC:U bundle also came with ACIV. So it was bundled with a great game.