Poll: Can a review be valid if the reviewer did not finish the game in question?

[newwiseman]

I love the studio defense of "it gets better". The very idea is an insult.

Good gameplay, no matter how complex or confusing the possibilities may be, builds up to the full freedom while utilizing the build up time to train the player.

Same with story, I don't care what the resolution of a story is if the characters are one dimensional and the story is terrible. Just like no twist in the world can make up for M. Night Shyamalan's shitty stories.

If something isn't engaging or minimally interesting from the start then the creators have done something wrong. When's the last time you read a book about a man who lives in a gray box and spends all day working as an accountant but finds an interesting life in the last chapter? Never, the last chapter is the start of the story, the boring blandness of pre-life can be filled in later.

It's as stupid an argument as why is the main character in anime, movies, and games always the most interesting person there. Because, they're the MAIN CHARACTER.

 

[BENZOOKA]

Can a review be valid if the reviewer did not finish the game in question?

Absolutely. Some games are freakishly long and I believe most reviewers are in somewhat of a schedule to finish their reviews anyway. It's not about completing a game, but reviewing a game.

 

[Thespian]

There is a certain point where you stop playing a game because it has not given you reason enough to continue, or because it is not your type of game. In option One, the game thoroughly deserves a premature trashing. In Option 2... Don't review it, get the help of someone who did, or just state that it's not your type of game in the review.

Simples. Games are not like films. It is not an hour and a half of sloppy content you must endure. It's actively engaging in 7-10 hours for a short game, 15-20 hours for another, when nothing is getting better.

Besides, a good reviewer can get a feel for a game early on.

 

[gamepopper101]

A game review should be about what a person thought of a game, that person doesn't have to beat it, just play it enough to have a fair opinion of what they played.

 

[timeadept]

Just like the poll asks.

Now since yahtzee is such a celebrity here, I feel the need to call him out on this. After yet another review where he openly admits to not having finished the game in question, I for one think he's becoming more and more full of shit. Don't get me wrong, I don't sympathize with the games over the reviewer and I definitely am not going to go blow a bunch of money on some game I don't care about to prove him wrong. But should people in such a position be obligated to at the very least finish the game before calling it one of Satan's balls.

I'm sure someone has said this in the 4 pages, but time is money.

Yahtzee is employed by The Escapist to review games, write articles, and possibly other stuff as well. He may have a life ect, we don't know, but the point is, everyones time is valuable to them, and if Yahtzee believed that the game was not going to get any better, then by not finishing it he's saving himself some time and effort to allocate elsewhere.

There are huge extremes in this subject as well, such as, should Yahtzee have to finish a game 100% to know how good it actually is? I say no. Likewise, should there be a logical minimum for each game? Probably. But pretend for a moment 'Tetris' was brand new and none of us had heard of it, Yahtzee could probably sub it up in 30 minutes / 1 game. It's circumstancial, and in this circumstance, he had made up his mind and was done with it.

Yes but the question is not so much what's good for him, it's more is he doing US a disservice by NOT finishing a game?

BTW i totally understand where you're coming from and i was going to make that exact point myself, but in hindsight it doesn't make a lot of sense. Would you buy a product that did not do the job it was advertised to do? Probably not, but i do think that there's a point in many games (fairly early on) where you've experienced most, if not all of what a game has to offer, and can reasonably predict what the rest of it is like. I also think that Yhatzee can see this point as well as any of us and it's frankly a damn good skill to have with a job like his. So yeah, for all your reasons it's better for him to not finish every game and it's probably not at our expense.

 

[Kopikatsu]

Also, I would say 'No'. You actually have to go through the game to get a good 'feel' for it. (I've seen people write off Dead Space 2 after chapter 6...there are 15 chapters. At least get to the incredibly frustrating Chapter 14-15 become complaining!)

Ah, I was wondering how many chapters there were. I remember someone telling me there was 11. I'm half-way through, and I was wondering if there any point in doing a new game + after?
I'd apreciate your opinion.

OT: It is a liitle annoying that he doesn't finish the game, but then again, he does have to sit through crap games one after the other, so that has got to try your patience after a while.

The later chapters are shorter than the earlier chapters. (Besides 10. 10 drags on forever. You'll see what I mean.)

Also, yes. I'm currently on my fourth playthrough, I believe. I set random restrictions on myself on more recent ones. (Melee only playthrough with unupgraded PC when absolutely needed! That one sucks, but I did it!)

Also, Yahtzee only has a week to get a game, play it, then make the ZP about it. (I honestly have no idea how long that takes, but hey. The man is strapped for time.)

Edit: He also seems to make indie games and write books in the rest of his spare time, so double 'Hey'.

 

[Star Pancakes Muthaf]

God damn it, can you please stor disgustip with the,"doy you have to finish(insert boring and/ong thing here) to judge it, it was on the fifth comment in, read at least some of the post, that's ninjaing, that's just unoriginality, friggin +1s

 

[Superior Mind]

I think the fact that a reviewer did not want to finish a game is a very telling sign about its quality.

 

[hazabaza1]

If a reviewer can't be bothered to finish a game because they get stuck and have no motivation to continue, that's not a good sign.

 

[lacktheknack]

No. If the reviewer hates it so much they can't finish, then NOTHING WILL MAKE IT BETTER.

Also, take Titan Quest: Immortal Throne. I don't need to play all 250 hours to tell you what it's about, how fun it is, how rewarding it gets... I can accurately tell you all that within the first five hours.

 

[Evil Teddie]

I personally think that the reviewer should play as much as he/she can stand. But I have to admit, some games do get better later, good and bad games both do that sometimes.

 

[lacktheknack]

User Reviews and blogs? Sure. But if someone is paid to review a game to give me an accurate impression of its quality then they sure as hell better finish it. There is also a thing called journalistic integrity, a thing a few reviewers need to be reminded of. No one else could do 70% of a job and expect to be paid for it.
EDIT: Yahtzee excluded. He is a entertainer, not a reviewer.

I love to bring this one up: Titan Quest. With the expansion, it's 250 hours long. That's at least ten days of non-stop playing. In that, it repeats itself three times, and it's a Diablo clone set in ancient mythology.

I wouldn't begrudge anyone for coming up with "It's a Diablo clone", "Its story is uninteresting and irrelevant", "Hitting things so hard they fly out of the world geometry is awesome" and "It's fun, if not somewhat repetitive" over ten hours and getting paid for it.

 

[Sixcess]

Yes it can be valid. If a game is crap for the first ten hours then the chances are it's going to stay crap. Even if it does get better that doesn't change the fact that the first ten hours are crap.

 

[Vausch]

For a game to not be worth playing to the end even if a person has time for it should really say something about it. Yahtzee has done this multiple times before and I'm doubtful it's only due to time constraints. I've given up on games because no matter how long I played it was simply boring to play and seemed more like a chore.

 

[Grand_Arcana]

I think most reviewers don't finish the game, doubly so when the game is horrible. FFXIII, for instance, deserves to be ripped a new one if even after five hours the plot's gone no where and the gameplay is terrible.

 

[RedEyesBlackGamer]

User Reviews and blogs? Sure. But if someone is paid to review a game to give me an accurate impression of its quality then they sure as hell better finish it. There is also a thing called journalistic integrity, a thing a few reviewers need to be reminded of. No one else could do 70% of a job and expect to be paid for it.
EDIT: Yahtzee excluded. He is a entertainer, not a reviewer.

I love to bring this one up: Titan Quest. With the expansion, it's 250 hours long. That's at least ten days of non-stop playing. In that, it repeats itself three times, and it's a Diablo clone set in ancient mythology.

I wouldn't begrudge anyone for coming up with "It's a Diablo clone", "Its story is uninteresting and irrelevant", "Hitting things so hard they fly out of the world geometry is awesome" and "It's fun, if not somewhat repetitive" over ten hours and getting paid for it.

I'd still expect the reviewer to do the main/story quests. Most people are bringing up FFXIII. I have no sympathy for a person who plays games and then writes about the games for a living. Woe is he who has to play a bad game. Suck it up and finish the game. I don't care how long it is. My dad works in a factory 50-72 hours a week. I just can't summon up sympathy for a professional reviewer.

 

[Dastardly]

Just like the poll asks.

Now since yahtzee is such a celebrity here, I feel the need to call him out on this. After yet another review where he openly admits to not having finished the game in question, I for one think he's becoming more and more full of shit. Don't get me wrong, I don't sympathize with the games over the reviewer and I definitely am not going to go blow a bunch of money on some game I don't care about to prove him wrong. But should people in such a position be obligated to at the very least finish the game before calling it one of Satan's balls.

In order to call a game "great," I think you'd have to finish it. But in order to call a game bad? Not so. Think of it this way--if you're trying a new type of sandwich, and you take a bite, and it tastes like a sac of pickled fish assholes, you don't have to finish the sandwich to call it awful. In fact, people would think you a bit stupid if you finished it.

If you take a bite of that sandwich and it's great, you might be tempted to say, "Wow! What a great sandwich!" But what if you get to the middle of it and it's filled with live bees, or shoe polish? Well, now you've mislead others by calling it "great" based on only the outermost layers.

True reviewers, if they're going to give a game a rave review, have a responsibility to experience the entire game. Otherwise, they're just 1) selling a good review to the highest bidder, or 2) basing the review on the pretty wrapping paper of the early experiences, which doesn't provide the potential customer any information they didn't already have.

But when it comes to giving a game bad reviews, or expressing dislike over specific game elements that were awful, there's no obligation to finish it. If the 40th hour of a game is so awesome that it redeems the 39 abysmal hours before it, it's still a bad game--they should have just sold that 40th hour.

Demanding that a critic/reviewer play the entire game before they call it bad is just an underhanded way of trying to disallow critics to call games bad. You say that believing (rightly) that they won't finish the game (because it's awful), and so they won't be allowed to criticize it--thus shielding you from having to hear criticism of a favored game. And if they do finish it, you still wouldn't accept it. It'd be like a restaurant demanding you eat the entire burger before you're allowed to send it back for not being prepared right... and then when you do, saying, "Well, you finished it, so it couldn't have been that bad, now could it?"

A more valid criticism would be against reviewers who openly hate a particular type of game giving it a low rating without honestly accounting for their personal biases first--cases where a particular review is more the reviewer's personal soapbox about "the problem with this genre" instead of information about that particular game. But this gets us back to the difference between a "review" and a "critique," which has been discussed in earlier replies.

 

[FalloutJack]

If it was THAT BAD, then yes. I would say the review is still valid.

 

[Soviet Steve]

As long as the reviewer clarifies that they did not finish the game in question, allowing the audience to get their opinion in context of how much of the experience they've had, I don't feel that their opinion is invalid.