Last year a massive controversy over Gamespot's poor review of Eidos' Kane and Lynch: Dead Men resulted in an editor being fired and other Gamespot writers resigning, allegedly over pressure from Eidos over the unfavorable review (Eidos has always denied this). Now an PR rep for a UK company is denying similar allegations over supposedly poor reviews of Eidos' latest game, the action-adventure title Tomb Raider Underworld.

Videogaming247.com reported earlier this week that Eidos' UK PR firm for the game, Barrington Harvey, had asked reviewers to not post up any reviews for Tomb Raider Underworld that would be lower than an 8 out of 10 score until this Monday, Nov. 24. The site quotes a statement from an unnamed person at the PR firm who stated, "....we're trying to get the Metacritic rating to be high, and the brand manager in the US 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."

However a new statement from Barrington Harvey director Simon Byron denies this, saying that they only issued an embargo of last Wednesday, Nov. 19, to review the game, adding, "Nothing else. No further obligations whatsoever. " He also says, "Any site, be it Gamespot or whoever, is entirely within their rights to post whatever score they want and no-one is under any sort of obligation to delay any review."

Byron says, "Barrington Harvey has been working hard to ensure the launch scores of Tomb Raider Underworld are in line with our internal review predictions over the launch weekend - but to suggest that we can in some way "silence" reviews of the game is slightly overstating our influence."