Extra! Extra! Review System Fails Again!

[Nomanslander]

I never really understood the whole deal with "reviewers" and "critics" to be honest. Who cares? All that a reviewer or critic is doing is sharing their opinion on something. Again, who cares?

Because reviewers tend to leave behind the lasting impression on whether or not a game or any medium for that matter was good in a culture.

Sure there are such things such as cult classics or art that regains a new audience latter in years (my thoughts are on films right now)....But, since gaming is still young you're not going to see much of this for years to come.

 

[Eggsnham]

Ok, it is a little petty to use a whole thread to air grievances against the game review system. We all know its an imperfect system. But it very nearly cost me recently.

The game: the 360 version of BloodBowl, an "under-the-radar" budget title about the classic tabletop strategy game.

The Review Score - 60% average.

The reasoning? - It's "too hard" and "doesn't look good".

I say this with all respect to my colleagues in Games Journalism. Uh, No. Don't be stupid. IGN, for instance claimed the game was confusing and took them three or four hours just to get the basics down and start winning games. Which only makes sense if IGN is using a chimp who taught itself to type random words into a text-box. A 5 minute flip through the manual, or one completed game and everything is apparent. I had a half-dozen guys over learning the game last night. It took exactly one game for everyone to start having fun.

The graphics? Yeah the graphics suck, but who gives a damn, this is a strategy game, as long as you can tell what's going on it can literally just be inanimate pieces on the board, and Bloodbowl does much better than that.

The reason for the rant is twofold. One, if you're a fan of in-depth strategy and you've dissuaded by the poor scores, jump in. I can't wait to see you on Live.

Secondly, reviewer's slamming games for having a tough learning curve? That is bad, bad news. Games are already too easy, too short, and offer a lot less satisfaction than they used to. If reviewers are knocking off points for games being too difficult, that's only going to get worse.

You realize that it got a bad review because the developers wouldn't pay money to get a good review, right?

 

[Geekmaster K]

This is why I don't trust Game Informer as my only source to find out if a game is good anymore. They gave Dissidia: Final Fantasy, which is now one of my favorite fighting games of all time, a 6.5 out of 10. The reason for this was because the guy who reviewed it is supposedly an expert on fighting games, but is biased against Final Fantasy and any fighting game that isn't a traditional 2D fighter. Honestly, he bashed some of the game's best features, which broke away from traditional fighting game mechanics. This same called Street Fighter 4 "the best thing to happen to fighting games since Street Fighter 2." Seriously? I played Street Fighter 4 and hated it, because it's like that game is designed to scare away anyone who isn't a Street Fighter veteran. The button presses to pull of combos are INCREDIBLY demanding. If you're not a Street Fighter veteran, then I can't recommend Street Fighter 4.

Anyway, after reading that biased review of Dissidia, I read some other reviews of it. Pretty much every review I read LOVED the game for a lot of the same reasons Game Informer didn't. This is why reviews should be unbiased, and anyone who knows they are going to have issues with a game before they play it shouldn't review it. Unfortunately, in the world of gaming journalism, this isn't always the case.

 

[Plurralbles]

well, difficulty is fine, but sometimes the game having shitty mechanics makes it unnecessarily hard.
I doubt that's hte case though, that's more like Resident Evil where you're fighting the camera all the time.

 

[Hobo Joe]

I've been looking for a new strategy game; I'll have to consider this. If only I knew what Blood Bowl was...

 

[johnman]

I stopped trusting reveiws when Games like Far Cry 2 and the various Halos got perfect reveiw scores despite being less than perfect games.
One current example. Stalker Call of Pripyat was marked down for having dated visuals in every reveiw I read. Wait.. What? Firstly its a game set in the grim depressing exclusion zone, and third (yes third!), it looks bloody gorgoues. Yet they marked it down for a purely aethestic thing, probaly as it didn't have millions of hype machine dollars behind it.

 

[Madaxeman101]

You said the review system has failed again. But surely a system based on personal opinion cant fail?

 

[Crunchy English]

You said the review system has failed again. But surely a system based on personal opinion cant fail?

Perhaps not. But if games are based on personal opinion, why are review scores so frequently uniform? Check a metacritic or gamerankings, they always line up. Seems to me that the fact that everybody gives perfect scores to Halo 3, but nobody likes strategy games like Culdcept Saga and Bloodbowl means there is either a slant in the review process that favours certain genres, or there isn't a wide enough spectrum of pro reviewers out there.

 

[crazyjay321]

This only has minimum relevance to the topic, but...

Am I the only one who finds Yahtzee unfunny and obnoxious?

Yes... yes you are

OT:I do'nt listen to "proffesional game reviewer's" Like IGN or Gamestop because they are fueled on game maker's saying "oh you want to play the game oh yea sure (1 week later) ok here is the game, also here is some alcohol and we met some lovely ladies that would love to go to a hotel room with you to "review the game" bye", then the next day they tell everyone how good the game was and a must buy. If a developer does not do this then IGN will look for anythung wrong with it and expand on that.

 

[MelasZepheos_v1legacy]

It's interesting that what I have always found is that while Yahtzee may ignore things in a game which are good, so many other reviewers that I read ignore all the massive flaws. Every so often someone might mention a 'slightly flawed control system' which I have learned to mean 'forward will only make you advance in a forward motion 30% of the time.' This is how much they are willing to ignore a popular games flaws.

By extension, lesser known games are being almost ignored, usually branded as not worth the money, and forgotten within a week.

Let me get something off my chest here (wall of text incoming.)

Spoiler

I loved Halo 3, in fact, I loved all the Halo games. But it should be noted that I by no means thought they were perfect, the story campaign was criminally short from 2 onwards, the controls were unintuitive in Halo 3, and disrupted the system that had worked fine until then, the animation was not perfect, so don't be stupid giving it perfect scores for that 360 magazine. All in all I found them enjoyable, but definitely bland and unimaginative, increasingly worse as the series progressed.

So why did Halo 3 get perfect scores? It wasn't perfect, it wasn't even as good as the first game in many ways. It just feels like a kick in the crotch hen reviewers start laying down perfect scores, you get overhyped, and then when you get the game, it's serviceable and playable, sure, but distinctly average.

The only games I've played that lives up to my expectations in the last few years have Portal, Tomb Raider Underworld, Left 4 Dead 1 and Mass Effect 2. Why?

Portal: actually managed to live up to the hype, but tempered by the knowledge that it was not an overly long game, I didn't go in expecting that, and so enjoyed myself thoroughly.

TR:U: I ignored the hype. I saw about three trailers, but read no reviews, saw no reviews, and ignored any magazine offering reviews or even comments on it. Thus it lived up to my expectations, which were pretty low after TR:Anniversary.

Left 4 Dead: I ignored the hype again. Didn't know anything about this game until I played it round a friend's house, so again, naturally I loved it for its atmosphere and control systems, as well as the characters. A good game.

Mass Effect 2: I was biased in favour of the game, and it would have needed some pretty serious flaws for me to have started caring. Again, I ignored most of the hype until I already owned it.

The only way to react to reviews is to ignore them. They are usually wrong, often biased, and never representative of what you really think. The only true litmus test for a game, is whether you play it, and you like it. Everything else is meaningless hype, and nothing ever lives up to the hype.