The problem with reviews

[migo]

You'll get reviewers in a few categories.

One would be the likes of IGN, GameSpot, etc - I'm pretty sure they get their review copies comped, so while they'll see most popular games cross their desks, you have to wonder a bit about the objectivity, as sometimes your only hint that a game isn't good is the lack of enthusiasm in their voice. They try to say how a game is fun, but it really isn't.

Another is the average person, either they're a serious gamer who likes doing reviews, or just someone who has bought the game. Either way, you'll usually research a game before buying it, so odds are you'll be happy with it. There won't be many negative reviews coming from someone like this either.

You'll get a hybrid of the two - someone whose job it is to review games, and that off-sets the cost of paying for one, and they'll be a bit more likey than the previous two categories to give a negative review, but they're sometimes a bit too harsh - since it's hard to find negative reviews, and you're in a situation where an 8/10 is a pretty bad insult from somewhere like IGN, people value the few places where you do see negative reviews, but they'll often critique it for something that has nothing to do with the game, like not living up to what previews and concept trailers showed.

It makes it really hard to actually find good reviews, when most of them are positive either due to obligation or the tendency to buy games you know you'll like, and on the flip side, sometimes the criticism for even the smallest things gets blown out of proportion, in some effort to compensate for the overly positive reviews.

 

[eljawa]

thats why we use metacritic to get a summary of the reviews

 

[ALuckyChance]

That's why you look at a lot of reviews, to sift the bias from the truth.

 

[Julianking93]

That's why I like sites that take a large sum of reviews and average them out.

Like metacritic, rotten tomatoes or IMDB.

It's not one person's biased opinion.

 

[NewYork_Comedian]

Ninjad by as eljawa and Julianking.

But yeah, metacritic is a good place to see how a bunch of reviews average out.

 

[Phoenixmgs_v1legacy]

But Metacritic is just gathering a bunch of bias reviews and telling you the average. You can get a feel for whether you like a game or not from reading reviews (bias or not) instead of looking at a number.

---

I feel there is a huge problem with game reviews. It's like every game that's a big release gets a good score because there's nothing horrible about it. Also, it seems like a score of 7/10 is what an average game gets now so every decent game scores between a 7 and a 10, and everything looks good. An average game should get a 5/10, so when a game does get an 8, it means something. There are just some reviews a major games I just don't get. For example, the first Uncharted was a slightly above average game at best but it was very pretty and very polished so it got 8s and 9s when the gameplay was very average at best; the shooting and platforming were below average. I would give Uncharted a 6/10 if I was a professional reviewer based on the objective average-ness of the gameplay. However, Uncharted 2 is just plainly a great game. Also, Assassin's Creed 2 was a very average game (game of the year contender my ass), and the first game was actually better because first game actually tried to have CORE gameplay. The core gameplay of the Assassin's Creed games is supposed to be the assassinating, and AC2 dropped the ball big time, and the main assassinations just felt like slightly better story missions whereas in the first game, the main assassinations were events. Basically, AC2 had no core gameplay so it fails at being a good game. Assassin's Creed's core gameplay should be a mixture of Hitman and the stealth sections from Batman:AA.

There's only a few reviews that I actually have any respect for: Eurogamer, Kotaku (no score, they just tell you whats good and bad), RPGFan (very very detailed reviews for RPGs), and of course, Zero Punctuation (Yahtzee tells me what sucks about the game which is as, if not more, important as telling me whats good about the game. Yahtzee does sometimes make mountains out of molehills.)

 

[migo]

I actually like RPGFan too for RPG reviews, as it's rather specific, and you won't get the crap you do from type 3 reviewers complaining about what's intrinsic to an RPG.

I find Metacritic and GameRankings are also my requirements, but then I have to match it up with demos and watching trailers. Piecing that info together is a lot of work.

Come to think of it, I also like Kotaku's reviews. Lack of score is great. I also initially took a liking to Machinima's Pay, Rent or Pass series, but then I noticed the dude said the same thing about music, and almost every game was a Pay - that wasn't much use to me. He even called Wolfenstein a Pay even though it clearly should have been Rent by his criteria. Another thing I run into, speaking of that, is that reviews will judge a game by $60 initial price tag, rather than just inherrent value and let the user figure out if however much they've found it for is affordable and worth it. I care less about the specific price of a game in relation to how good it is and more if it's something I can afford to pay. My limit is pretty much $10, unless it's a really popular game that refuses to drop in price, and then I'll look at going a bit higher, but $20 is absolute tops for what I'm willing to pay. Having a reviewer look down on a game I've found on clearance for $5 because it's not worth $60 isn't any use to me.

 

[Telperion]

I like www.pelit.fi
They do some honest-to-god journalism over there. And they write really good reviews.
They also review good obscure games that I never would have heard off otherwise.
But now I got to run. It's moving day for one of my friends, and I said I'd help out.
Later!

 

[Bon_Clay]

Here's what I do. Go to average nonprofessional people reviews, and locate the ones that gave the absolute LOWEST score out of all of them. Then I look at theses, read them over and decide if this person is just a dumbass who doesn't like going along with the crowd, or they raise some valid complaints.

Then after reading the bottom 3 or so ratings, if there hasn't been anything that reasonable makes me think the game is crap, I read some other ones to see what good the game offers.

Generally this approach always works out for me, never get my hopes up for disappointing games, and usually find which ones I would enjoy.

 

[migo]

Sadly, Finnish is among the most unintelligible of languages. I can figure out Swedish thanks to knowing German, but Finnish might as well be Swahili for me.

 

[Phoenixmgs_v1legacy]

Another thing I run into, speaking of that, is that reviews will judge a game by $60 initial price tag, rather than just inherrent value and let the user figure out if however much they've found it for is affordable and worth it. I care less about the specific price of a game in relation to how good it is and more if it's something I can afford to pay.

Yeah, I don't understand why reviews will deduct points for a game if they feel it is too short and not long enough to justify the $60 price tag. I just recently played Mirror's Edge and Heavenly Sword and I really enjoyed both of them. Mirror's Edge is the best 3D platformer I've played this gen, I really loved it. I am glad I didn't pay $60 for it because it isn't long; however, I felt the length was just right for the type of game it is. On the flip side, even though I did very much like Heavenly Sword, I thought the game definitely should've been about an hour or so longer. I don't think the price of the game should at all affect the score it gets.

 

[strum4h]

When was a review anything but an opinion?

Did I miss that meeting?

I was thinking the same thing. I can never base my decisions off reviews unless the reviews are mostly uniform. If they are more across the board I usually put more research into whatever it is I am buying.

 

[SimuLord]

Sadly, Finnish is among the most unintelligible of languages. I can figure out Swedish thanks to knowing German, but Finnish might as well be Swahili for me.

Finnish isn't an Indo-European language. It's a Uralic language. So from a linguist's point of view it "might as well be Swahili" (a Bantu language) as well.

(edit: didn't realize the Ural-Altaic language connection had been largely discredited. Why yes, I did start reading about linguistics just for kicks.)

 

[Nedoras]

I don't really pay much attention to reviews. I'd rather experience a game for myself than let someone tell me how it was. I always research and look into games I'm interested in, but I generally ignore reviews. If the game interests me enough, I'll rent it or borrow it from a friend if they own it. If I like the game, I'll most likely buy it. There's been games that I loved that received crappy scores from pretty much everyone, so I believe personal experience is way better than trusting a review.

 

[Something Amyss]

But Metacritic is just gathering a bunch of bias reviews and telling you the average. You can get a feel for whether you like a game or not from reading reviews (bias or not) instead of looking at a number.

thankfully, you can click on many of the reviews to find out why they scored how they did.

I go to Amazon for reviews because they are written by people, not professional (possibly bribed) reviewers.

I'm not sure trading "bribed" reviewers for fanboys and outright idiots is a good move.

There is no such thing as a "good" review, because they are all based on opinion.

Nonsense. A good review will paint a relatively accurate picture of the game and a bad one won't. The idea that opinion somehow mitigates any quality of the piece is utter crap. There are bad opinions. Those based on ignorance or misinformation, for example. Some people will fellate a game while others will dare to take a moderate or even technical look at gameplay.

 

[Phoenixmgs_v1legacy]

But Metacritic is just gathering a bunch of bias reviews and telling you the average. You can get a feel for whether you like a game or not from reading reviews (bias or not) instead of looking at a number.

thankfully, you can click on many of the reviews to find out why they scored how they did.

Yeah, I know that. I was commenting on the people that said they go to Metracritic to determine review average instead of reading the reviews; I'm not sure if they absolutely meant that but they implied that. Metacritic takes a lot of bias reviews and averages them out so you aren't really thinning out the bias much. That's why I said you can gather more info from reading (or watching) a few bias reviews than going to see an average review score.

thats why we use metacritic to get a summary of the reviews

That's why I like sites that take a large sum of reviews and average them out.

Like metacritic, rotten tomatoes or IMDB.

It's not one person's biased opinion.

---

When was a review anything but an opinion?

Did I miss that meeting?

I think you can objectively rate gameplay, graphics, and sound effects to a decent degree. It's still subjective to a degree but not nearly as much as say story, characters, score/music, etc. I can watch a movie and not really be entertained much but I could still say it's a good movie since there was nothing bad about it and it had good acting, writing, plot, etc., it's just that the subject matter probably didn't interest me; I find mob movies so boring but I don't say the Godfather is a bad movie. I like RPGs but I really don't enjoy that many battle systems (I'm very picky with RPGs) but I'm not going to say a game is bad because I don't like the system unless the system is broken in some way. I hate random battles so much, but I don't say such and such (insert classic SNES rpg) sucks. I think I can objectively rate a game I don't really care for and give it a good score if I feel it was a good game but just not my cup of tea.

 

[Savagezion]

Game Informer + Yahtzee FTW. Game Informer is generous in their reviews. Yahtzee is relentless. Whenever I merge those two, it actually paints a pretty accurate picture for me. Although, Yahtzee doesn't review as many games so it is not like you can do it for every game.

 

[More Fun To Compute]

I normally go more by blogs and forums. Game reviews are a dead art and normally say more about the reviewer than the game.

 

[TheRundownRabbit]

The problem with modern-day reviewers, is that they say what THEY think of the game *cough*Yahtzee*cough*, they should look at it through the eyes of the general gaming population.

 

[DustyDrB]

Reviews are biased. Period. What else would you expect from someone's opinion of his or her personal experience with a game?

Now that that that's out of the way.

I find it not too hard to see through people's biases. If they preface their review with how much they have loved a developer's previous work or anything like that, then you know you're dealing with a big fan of the developer (or the genre, or a gameplay mechanic, anything). Also, notice what they focus on in the review: do they say a lot about the story, the graphics, any single thing? Are you typically the kind of person who prefers one of these things be a strength in a game?

I also make sure to note what they say about how the game itself runs. If they say there are some glitches, but nothing game-breaking, I'm fine with that. But if the glitches are more of a problem, I will look for this point in other reviews and then wait for news of a patch (as I am doing for Alpha Protocol).

Read more than one review. Look at aggregates such as Metacritic's for critics (and if there's any stronger evidence for ignoring user reviews than the Metacritic user review scores, I havent' seen it. The scores run on the absolute extremes and will often say nothing but "PS3 ftw!! Screw fagBox!!").