While James Stephanie Sterling may have a history of correctly predicting and calling out some of the worst trends in the video game industry to the point of declaring themselves the "Cassandra of gaming", the same cannot always be said for their takes/reviews of specific video games, which have frequently landed them in hot water with various parts of the internet.
- Steph's review of The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild stirred up a ton of hate from Nintendo fans due to Steph's complaints about the game's weapons durability, menus, enemies that can kill Link instantly, and being annoyed by the stamina system. Despite the fact that Steph liked the game enough to give it a 7/10 rating (or 'good', which makes the allegations even more ridiculous), fans accused Steph of either playing the game wrong or is intentionally trolling to get more clicks to their site and raise ad revenue (even though Steph's website is entirely ad free). Just like the debacle their No Man's Sky review caused, Steph's website was DDOS'd by angry Zelda fans and there were also attempts from them to hijack Steph's Twitter account. They would go on to address these grievances in a March 2017 video
. Even Moviebob, an unapologetic Nintendo fanboy, called out angry Zelda fans for harassing Steph.- Much to their amusement Steph was the target of this kind of backlash after "their" 7.0 score for Super Mario Odyssey started going around. They had, in fact, entirely stopped assigning numerical scores to games in their reviews at the time and had not even played the game yet; somebody just circulated a fake screenshot (one that misspelled Nintendo) and a fringe group of hardcore Nintendo fans didn't bother to look into it. Incidentally, when they actually did play it, they loved it.
- And then, they played the sequel and, finding it to have both retained the fun parts and stubbornly and faithfully carried over just about all the flaws and frustrations of the original, had about the same emotional response to it in the end and gave it the same score. History, inevitably, quickly repeated itself, sans DDOS attacks (though their video offering a major rebuttal to assertions that they hadn't played the game enough, as well offering a case that forcing a reviewer to play a game to completion would probably make them more critical of that game, ended up temporarily being wrongfully age-restricted. Considering the evidence Youtube presented was using The Creation of Adam as grounds for restricting on the basis of nudity, Steph hasn't ruled out the possibility the video was mass-reported by salty Nintendo fanboys).
- The Jimpressions review of Red Dead Redemption II saw Steph generally being annoyed by the game's "obsession with detail" despite overall liking the game, and asks the audience if things like having to eat, sleep, hunt with the proper weapons, and having realistic horse testicles was worth any possible sacrifice in regards to good gameplay. The backlash was piled on enough that Steph had to put out a followup video further clarifying their "obsession with detail" argument.
- In a similar vein, their Jimpressions review of Death Stranding had similar gripes, checking off a lot of their personal pet peeves — equipment degradation, convoluted, non-linear storytelling, and game mechanics emulating reality just for the heck of it, playability and fun be damned. They generally liked the asynchronous multiplayer aspects of it, but was otherwise either bored or annoyed with the several hours they spent on it, lambasting the "Grip for Balance" mechanic in particular as something that adds literally nothing to the overall enjoyment of the game. Steph's usual viewership generally agreed with the review (with some begrudgingly accepting that the game simply wasn't their style); elsewhere on the Internet, unsurprisingly, Steph was thrown in with the likes of incompetent game journalists by rabid Hideo Kojima fans, despite their insistence that the review was nothing personal against Kojima Productions. What bolstered the latter group's case was the fact that Steph never came close to beating the game, something Kojima suggested people do before giving it bad reviews.
- Steph: Death Stranding is boring, and when it isn't boring, it's fucking irritating, so... can't really recommend it. Seven out of ten.
- Inverted with the Dynasty Warriors franchise: Steph is one of the few video game journalists to consistently give the games favorable reviews, and as they addressed in a video where they proudly proclaimed the series to be the "Citizen Kane" of games, their hatedom has used this fact to try and discredit them. That said, their relation with the series has soured a little bit in later years, especially with the release of Dynasty Warriors 9.
- Played straight with their scathing 2/10 review of Duke Nukem Forever on Destructoid, inciting massive rage and prompting Steph to go further in depth behind why they didn't like the game (the sexist content along with the fact that they thought the gameplay sucked) and explaining, multiple times, how Destructoid reviews worked.
- Played straight yet again with their Senran Kagura 2: Deep Crimson review where they gave the game a 3/10. Although some fans thought Steph's review could've been better but got that the joke was that they focused on non-breast portions of the game about as much as they felt the game itself did, others weren't pleased with Steph going on and on about the characters' breasts and simply dismissed the review as factually wrong. This didn't stop the game's publisher, Marvelous, from poking fun at it, however.
- They gave Batman: Arkham Origins a 5/10, which led to a case of Broken Base and some rather vicious comments being hurled their way. They themselves now smugly claim said review was Vindicated by History, as the game's reputation has declined since launch.
- Their low score for Mario Kart 7 (a 5/10) and high score for Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 had sparked a massive outrage among Reddit and Destructoid because they slammed Mario Kart 7 for not offering anything new to the series while praising Modern Warfare 3 for changing things up slightly to keep the series fresh. People felt Steph was being a hypocrite for praising Modern Warfare 3 because they felt like the game was too samey overall, while Mario Kart 7 innovated the gameplay of its series way more by adding gliders and underwater driving. Steph ended up dedicating a full episode to their rebuttal, which can be summarized as "I did fully explain this in the reviews themselves you know."
- Steph absolutely hated the controls in Star Fox Zero and spent the majority of their review complaining about how awful the controls were and how Nintendo were being stupid trying to use a completely different control scheme for the sake of being "innovative" rather than to properly serve the game. Fans of the game complained that Steph either sucked at the game or refused to give it a chance, feeling like Steph was making the controls sound worse than they really were. It obscures their other criticisms of the game, which they felt that, even without the control issues, was mediocre at best.
- TotalBiscuit had a field day pointing out how Steph gave Vanquish a surprisingly-crappy score (considering the former's massive disdain for pad-controlled shooters and 30 FPS games, both of which Vanquish is an example of, this says a lot).
- Their score of 5/10 for No Man's Sky created quite the outrage due to their opinion on the game not having a lot to do and how there seems to be more focus on the huge spectacle rather than having things to interact with. They also criticized the game for making everything into a mindless chore and that each new planet feels like copies of each other with a new color slapped on. Steph's review angered fans so much that they attacked their web site until it crashed.
- Steph's choice for Modern Warfare Remastered as "worst game of 2016" resulted in a huge case of Broken Base, in no small part because of Steph's stance on microtransactions. note
- Steph's constant criticisms over Nintendo's business practices garnered some people who think Steph is either being unfair towards Nintendo or are tired of hearing about them complain about the company. It also didn't help that Steph was not impressed by the the reveal event of the Nintendo Switch and seemed to be more angry at Nintendo's decisions when it came to the games and the structure of the system (online services, the voice chat, etc). Ironically, they have since declared the Switch their favorite console of all time.
- Their review of Yooka-Laylee caused yet another heavy divide from their fans and those who liked the game. Steph complained about how the game is just a retread of old school 3D platformer games that includes all the flaws that entails (badly made control scheme, bad camera quirks, bad level design etc.), nor does the game try to do something different in the genre. Steph then gave the game a 2/10, which itself caused issues as even those who agreed with their sentiments found the score to be absurdly low, as the game does at least work (a few games they've also reviewed, like Arkham Knight got a 5/10 from Steph, despite categorically running worse and missing a bunch of graphical features at the time). Cue fans thinking that they're trying to clickbait, or otherwise cause controversy.
- They had a lot of people breathing down their neck for giving Shenmue the Once Original, Now Common treatment, claiming that the Like a Dragon series is a superior successor.note One particular response was so over-the-top that Sterling brought back Commentocracy just to make fun of it.
- Steph really ended up kicking the hornet's nest with their scathingly negative review of Sonic Frontiers, giving it a 1.5/10. They complained about, among other things, broken physics that caused numerous cheap deaths, absurdly poor camera controls, cheap, frustrating boss fights, tedious and unfun side activities, an open world that they claim is so lifeless and visually out of place for the Sonic franchise it feels like a borderline asset flip, and that one of the few things they actually liked, the Cyberspace levels, were just lazy rehashes of levels from past games. What really set people off was the very unprofessional attitude in the review, with how they directly insulted Sonic Team, calling them "lazy hack fucks", which was seen as in incredibly poor taste since the review came out shortly after it was revealed that Sonic Team had been under intense crunch and mismanagement by Sega during Frontiers' development. None of this was helped by them declaring Frontiers their worst game of 2022, going so far as to outright insult the fans who actually enjoyed it, directly claiming that the game's fans have "zero standards" and "will eat up anything Sonic Team shits out".
- Over the course of their career, Sterling has often run against the grain of Sonic fandom opinions. They are on record as really loving Sonic the Hedgehog 4 but really hating Sonic Colors where most fans agree the latter was one of the best Sonic titles of its era and the former was a frustrating failure to recapture the original games' charm, and gave a higher score (4/10) to Sonic Forces than Frontiers, a game that caused a major Broken Base but which Sterling sorta likes. To their credit, they would later acknowledge that their opinion on Frontiers is in the minority, and that for as much as they hated it, it still managed to be one of the most critically acclaimed and best selling Sonic game in years and they hope that Sega will make a better sequel to it (though they highly doubt they will, given Sega's notorious tendency to completely drop previous Sonic game mechanics in favor of something new).
- Fans of the 2023 Dead Space (Remake) did not like their review of the game. While they did have an understandable reason for disliking the game (mainly, the issue of the original game's developers being Screwed by the Network and the stigma that surrounded the remake's very existence as a result) and admitted that it contributed to bias, many commenters stated that it felt as if Steph was deliberately going into the game expecting to hate it just because of the background of its existence. That said, even during their actual review where they put aside the game's background and instead focused on the game itself, they generally disliked many of the changes that were made to the game, such as Isaac being fully voiced, whereas many fans generally welcomed them. Their opening of the review with the statement that the remake "offends [them]" did not help matters in the slightest, and the comments section of the review is filled with people accusing Steph of being disingenuous as a result. Also, their complains about Isaac face was seen as really petty and insulting to the voice actor it was modeled after.
- A lesser example, since the game in question wasn't part of a big, well-established franchise or from a particularly big-name developer so they didn't face the same kind of vicious backlash as in a lot of the cases above, but their review of Remnant: From the Ashes was criticised heavily by people who'd played more of the game than they did (which turned out to be most of them) as just being outright factually wrong. One of Steph's biggest complaints about the game was how samey, repetitive and bland the world and enemy design was, which combined with the gameplay footage used in the video review, gave away the fact that they'd never actually made it off Earth to any of the varied alien worlds that make up the other 3/4 of the game and just assumed that the entire game was the same as what they'd already seen. Tragically, they even stated at the end that they'd beaten the first several bosses that they'd encountered, including the world boss of Earth, so they had apparently given up on the game literally a short unopposed jog away from getting to leave Earth. Although fans do seem to agree that the game up to that point did live down to their criticisms (and their complaint that every boss is accompanied by a never-ending swarm of minor enemies that gang up on the player and distract them from the main threat was also a common criticism of the game even among its fans), it does mean the rest is unrepresentative.
