How much do reviews impact your purchases?

[Prince of Ales]

I like to see some in-game footage, and Youtube is usually pretty good for that. You can often pick out a few bits of objective information like how well it runs, bugs etc. You've just gotta filter out all the opinions, because at the end of the day it's not relevant what the reviewer thinks of the game personally. Everybody has different tastes.

Here's a good example:

I used to check out WTF is... when I picked a game, but after I found out that TB absolutely hated Borderlands 2, one of my all-time favorites, I stopped trusting his opinions as much.

I remember TB made quite a point of how good the PC port for that game was. And that was a big deal because the port for the original Borderlands was pretty awful. The fact that he didn't like the game, that meant nothing to me; I still went and bought it. It was a useful review for me due to the technical information.

 

[Ryallen]

I like to see some in-game footage, and Youtube is usually pretty good for that. You can often pick out a few bits of objective information like how well it runs, bugs etc. You've just gotta filter out all the opinions, because at the end of the day it's not relevant what the reviewer thinks of the game personally. Everybody has different tastes.

Here's a good example:

I used to check out WTF is... when I picked a game, but after I found out that TB absolutely hated Borderlands 2, one of my all-time favorites, I stopped trusting his opinions as much.

I remember TB made quite a point of how good the PC port for that game was. And that was a big deal because the port for the original Borderlands was pretty awful. The fact that he didn't like the game, that meant nothing to me; I still went and bought it. It was a useful review for me due to the technical information.

But by the same token, you could watch someone playing a game and think that it looks amazing and have the person playing it say that it is really good, but when you actually get it you realize that you don't like it at all. That's how I bought Far Cry 3. I read some reviews of it, saw some people playing it, and thought "Hey, this looks really fun", so I bought and downloaded it, only to realize that I didn't really like it. It took too long to get anywhere, the driving was just annoying, and none of the actual game world interested me.