Aliens Vs Predator Studio Complains About 3 Bad Reviews

[Playbahnosh]

We've had three totally shit reviews by some Americans, which is a bit odd.

Oh yeah? Well, you should read some of the non-American reviews. You'd be surprised how ultimately shit they think your game really is, including the magazine I work at.

The last thing you can afford to do is ***** about reviews and dismiss them as coincidental. NOT! Every single one of the bad reviews (including mine) was talking about how shitty and unresponsive the controls are, which is the main aspect why this new AvP failed.

You can read one of my short reviews on IGN (the English one), if you are interested.

 

[TOGSolid]

You don't need a game to score 90% for it to be good. Plenty of games have gotten middling scores and still have been plenty fun. Hell, Republic Commando didn't get super reviews, and I played the shit out of that game. If anything, I'm more wary of games that get glowing reviews like Far Cry 2 than I am of games that pull 60-80 percent range scores.

Funny though, some of the things people hated about Republic Commando, everyone ended up eating up and loving in Rainbow Six: Vegas 1/2. Oh well.

well i just read the review on x-play, and basically their main complaint was :

"Aliens vs. Predator isn?t an awful game, but it is incredibly disappointing since Rebellion appears to have done so little with the source material . It?s a hard sell when there are significantly better shooters available, both online and offline. While the game isn?t a total loss, there?s just not enough here to make the game recommendable. As it is now, AvP is mostly a visually updated version of an eleven year-old game, and that?s not what fans of the franchises or first-person shooters deserve.

Read more: http://g4tv.com/games/xbox-360/62191/Aliens-vs-Predator/review/#ixzz0gM53Z1ci"

if thats the case then i can understand the complaints

As a fan of the franchise, having an updated version of an eleven year old game is exactly why I play AVP an hour or two every day and have a good time with it. What were they expecting, the marines to play as a tac shooter and the aliens/predator to play like a first person fighting game with no real stealth?

EDIT: After reading the review, that kinda sounds exactly like what they were hoping for. Of note was them complaining about how the predator has to use external power sources to recharge. In AVP2, the Predator was pretty much immortal since he could regen both health and energy whenever he had a down moment. Taking the ability to regen energy quickly away, (it does regen on its own in MP slowly depending on what you're doing i.e. cloak on/off, moving or not) was actually a great balancing idea, especially for MP since now that their energy pool operates more like a marine stimpack supply.

It's AVP 2.5, not AVP 3, and yanno what, I love the shit out of it for it. Sure it's got some balancing flaws atm (discs everywhere, oh god the discs), but for the most part, it's good times. I've certainly gotten my money's worth out of it.

 

[Doug]

Ergh... why do review scores even remotely enter into contract negilotations? Surely sales should be the deciding factor.

 

[Onyx Oblivion]

I still thought the demo was kinda shitty.

 

[Katana314]

This is gonna sound pretty weird, especially coming from someone who thought the demo wasn't that great...but I kinda agree with them.

This is a fallacy of the game industry's "grading system" sort of reviews. We all know how it goes; 90-100 = stellar GOTY candidates. 80-90 = very good game. 70-80 = some faults, may still appeal well to specific people.

0 - 69 = ABSOLUTELY SUCKS

The fact that such a wide range is given means that if I were a mentally handicapped reviewer at mentallyhandicappedreviewer.com (who somehow found his way onto the metacritic ranking) and didn't even bother playing Heavy Rain, and then decided "DURR 2/100 FOR HEFY RAYN" that would REALLY affect the aggregate reviews; assuming 10 reviews made it a 90, that alone would take it down to an 82; essentially meaning the whole industry calls it unremarkable.

This does NOT happen in the film industry, when the scale is usually 1-3 stars for everyday movies, and SOMEtimes a 4 for a good movie. Then 5-stars are landmarks that don't happen every year, since there's nothing higher. If some idiot gave a 1-star to Citizen Kane, it would not strongly affect the average.

Also, to respond to the guy who said the bad reviews came from promenant reviewers, maybe YOU respect them more, I don't necessarily. I actually like my reviews coming from the lesser-known, unpaid people who have little to gain by giving it a perfect 100.

 

[Byers]

People who are fans of either the Alien or Predator franchise will find stuff to be excited about in this game.
However, deemed on its own merits, it's an average game and should get average scores from a non-fan reviewer.

There's nothing that justifies it getting abysmal reviews though. It's simply not that bad a game, which the majority of scores confirm. So disregarding those scores is totally justifiable as being something done in statistical analysis already.

Presumably the reason for these extremely bad reviews are a need for the reviewer to occasionally be sensationalistic in his bad reviews when he comes across a game he's not terribly excited about. Either to get attention to his writing or the site he's working for, or to simply build cred as someone who's willing to "speak up against the man". Or simply because he's watched too much Zero Punctuation.

You can see a lot of this on various gaming sites. Especially in regard to smaller developers tackling already established franchises, where there's no risk of "pissing off the wrong people", nor for the journalist to lose cred by being perceived as missing the point of a hip underdog title, since we're talking about an established franchise with a few stinkers attached to it.

You rarely see horrid reviews for games that are huge productions by mammoths in the industry, even if they are blatantly mediocre. Nor for experimental indie titles, even if the end result turned out to just not work. This is also pretty commonplace on The Escapist, unfortunately.

 

[SW9]

they must of spent a packet on advertising because every nite theres at least 2 or 3 adds for it before and after release on most channels in the uk...and people are like sheep sometimes see something and go buy it even if its a polished turd

 

[TJ rock 101]

Well maybe if the online matchmaking system was not the worst one ever made...

 

[bjj hero]

AllI know is that trying the demo was enough to make me not buy it. I had no fun with the demo.

 

[DTWolfwood]

so i want to read these bad reviews and see if i totally agree or not.

The matchmaking in the demo and constant drops pissed me off about that game. which is y i lost interest.

 

[sbose22]

I remember the 1up review for the game was ABYSMAL. I couldn't get any matches on the multiplayer demo, which stopped me from purchasing the game even though I originally intended to.

 

[Rathy]

I actually looked at the reviews, and this was after 2 of my friends complaining about control schemes for non marines. Seems a lot of the negative reviews touched on this a bit more. I've also heard it described as a conga line of kills, while everyones too busy with their insta kill animations.

I haven't played it myself, but I've heard enough from friends who are huge PC FPS people to understand that this is not a great game as they want to make it out to be, and not one I'd be interested in trying. Not a bad game either, but negative reviews are not unwarranted.

 

[smithy1234]

There's always going to be bad reviews for anything, no matter how AMAZING (which AVP certainly isn't). Learn to take a little criticism.

 

[uppitycracker]

If you discount those poor reviews AvP is averaging high for us.

ya don't say....

that's probably the dumbest statement i've ever read.

To be frank, if these are the reviews I'm thinking of, they complained that the Predator relied too much on stealth and the Alien was too fast.

If these reviewers think that makes a game about fast Aliens fighting stealthy Predators BAD, then they probably need complaining about, especially if they're making a significant dent in review averages.

If people think there are fundamental problems with the gameplay, such as those things you mentioned, then it's an accurate review. Problems somebody else had with the game. To discount those reviews is just ridiculous. As someone else said, it's like taking a math exam, and saying "Well I passed, if you don't count the answers I got wrong."

 

[Orcus The Ultimate]

bad conceptualization of a game / bad reviews ; what did they want? a freakin trophy?

 

[Aura Guardian]

I see the problem... it was published by Sega... wheres my Phantasy Star Portable 2 and Phantasy Star on ps3! >.<

I want a Phantasy Star on the Wii SEGA! But if they do give us (PS3 and Wii) a PSO. Let's HOPE it's not Phantasy Star Universe. That one was awful.

I know the X-play was one of the bashers but they can't review games anyway. If I recall they along with the other bashers complained about the Predators relies on stealth and I was like..."uhh duh."

 

[Mr C]

The Atari Jaguar AVP was also an FPS, the scrolling fighters you recall was either AVP for the SNES (which was shit and never released in Europe) or Capcom's arcade scroller, which was awesome. I think the arcade was a CPS-II game (yes/no?) and it was never ported to a home console.

 

[squid5580]

What an idiotic thing to say.

You can't just exclude the review you don't like and still talk about "average"

What you could do if you had literally hundreds of reviews is exclude a few outliers but that would go both ways, the odd extremely high score would be as likely to excluded as a very low score. There is a mathematical way of determining what is an outlier.

I disagree. There are reviews and then there is stupidity taking up bandwidth. When a supposed review site uses thier scores to draw in traffic there is a problem. OMG they gave GTA4 a 5 quick to thier forums so we can tell them what dicks they are. When a game gets bashed for being linear and yet another linear game gets praised to the high heavens it isn't a review. It is an ad promoting the site which reported it. These critics are supposed to be our voice. Unfortunately this power has seem to have gone to some heads.