Reviewers Should Finish Games, Says Zampella

[GideonB]

TO be honest I think that reviewers should either play a sizeable amount of the game to understand what they are playing, or if the game is short (CoDMW2 for instance) they should finish the campaign and play at least 5 or so hours for the multiplayer.
For MMO's they should play 30 hours at least.
None of this debug cheat code bullshit discs they get given.
Proper playthroughs or don't bother reviewing them. Simple as.

 

[Cartman2nd]

And if the game sucks you should finish it to? No, if the reviewers isn't compelled to play anymore he has the right, no, the duty to stop playing.

 

[kingcom]

Ya, I personally agree. I usually wait till I finish a game or know it in and out enough before I ever review it on here.

You can really tell when someone hasn't played the whole thing and makes up false statements like the tutorial being 10 hours long *cough*Yahtzee*cough* ...

You do know yahtzee isnt a reviewer right? Hes a comedian.

 

[Blue Musician]

yes I agree, but considerate how much time developers give reviewers to finish their games, which is not much for a huge game. Of course I am not talking about any COD game BTW.

 

[Sharkosauros]

well if we are talking about a FPS , i dont think its needed to play the whole game, nor a RTS, (unless its focus on the story line, not online gameplay/solo agaist bots [like demigod]), a MMO well i woud say try retail for a while then private server to check out some of the later stuff, now a game like RPG that usually focus on the story line, yes.. they shoud play from 0 to end. thats my opinion atleast

 

[ProfessorLayton]

I never write reviews until I'm finished with the game. I mean, there are some multiplayer heavy games that I understand not being able to beat, but they have to at least beat the single player and try out the multiplayer.

And if the game sucks you should finish it to? No, if the reviewers isn't compelled to play anymore he has the right, no, the duty to stop playing.

I don't get paid to talk about games (I wish I did...), so it's his duty to finish it. Take Mirror's Edge for example. What if I played the first hour or so of the game and then wrote a 5 star review for it and gushed all over the place about how great of a free running game it was... and then I went on to play it some more and realized that just the beginning was good. Or what if I wrote a review for Dark Void and never finished it? I would have gone on about how it was a rocky start but got really good and how much I recommend it and then played on to have it abruptly end? Or what if I wrote a review for BioShock 2 and went on about how bad it was and it was so bad that I just stopped playing, never to see the really good ending. You should review every aspect of a game if you get paid to do it. Otherwise you're not doing your job.

 

[Matthew_Walker]

"Zampella said that developers needed honest and complete feedback in order to make better games." Pity he didn't follow his own advice, and listen to the PC gaming community when we told him and his buddy West that iwnet was an unworkable POS for MW2 multiplayer.

 

[veloper]

I don't want to waste hours playing a shitty game in the hope it will get better, so there's absolutely no point in doing a long review session for a bad game either. Not going to play it.

If the game doesn't pick up after an hour of boring crap it is safe to dismiss the entire game.

Only if the first bit is good or average, then there's a good reason to do an indepth review to find out if it stays that way.

 

[Stabby Joe]

Game Critics is very open about only playing a reviewed game for a few hours sometimes... hence why they're the most harsh reviewer out there at the moment.

 

[ArmorArmadillo]

Zampella should design games people want to play all the way through. If a game is so bland and boring and badly designed that it makes someone stop playing it, it'll probably make me stop playing it and I don't care if really Demon's Souls is better once you fully consider the balance implications of its badly designed dodge maneuver.

Oh, and five minutes of playing Modern Warfare 2 gives an accurate depiction of the full experience. Add a recording of tortured narcissistic nerds screaming homophobic profanities and you've grasped multiplayer.

Oh, and Zampella's complaint isn't that people don't play games long enough, it's that people are negative. "You didn't play the game fully" really means "You don't like the game so I'm going to say it's because you didn't give FFXIII the time and attention and love it deserves"

 

[johnman]

I have read reviews ofgames that have been so broken and bad the reveiwer happily admits he didn't play the entire thing as it was so bad, and there are games that have no distinct end or are immense. But the reviewer should do their best to finish or at least have spent enough time in the game so they can form an accurate opinion.

 

[squid5580]

But what about a game as long as Fallout 3 or Oblivion...and it sucks? It's kinda nasty to say that a reviewer should have to stand the assault of that game for, say, 15 hours on end. That's mental. And besides, there are not enough game reviewers around so that every game could have a reviewer attached.

Dumb game revieweing should be out, but this...well...

That is their job. That is why they get a paycheck every week. If it sucks and is hard maybe it will start separating the wheat from the chaff.

This is one of the few positives about the achievement/trophy system. Find their gamertag and you can see how far they did play before the review and judge accordingly.

 

[veloper]

But what about a game as long as Fallout 3 or Oblivion...and it sucks? It's kinda nasty to say that a reviewer should have to stand the assault of that game for, say, 15 hours on end. That's mental. And besides, there are not enough game reviewers around so that every game could have a reviewer attached.

Dumb game revieweing should be out, but this...well...

That is their job. That is why they get a paycheck every week. If it sucks and is hard maybe it will start separating the wheat from the chaff.

This is one of the few positives about the achievement/trophy system. Find their gamertag and you can see how far they did play before the review and judge accordingly.

Good luck finding a reviewers gamertag. Some may use the same handle, many don't.

And what would you expect to gain anyway? If the first hour is shit, it's a sure bet the whole game is like that, and even if it got decent, that's still no reason to bite your lip for an hour.

 

[StriderShinryu]

I think a reviewer should do what they can to finish a game but I'm more concerned about an honest opinion. I also do realize that sometimes it's just not really possible to fully complete and review a title within the window reviewers are provided. If a reviewer really is putting lies into their reviews then they should be called out on it, whether they finished the entire game or not.

 

[The3rdEye]

Clear, short and concise. Nice article.

Even if a reviewer only has eight hours to play the game before writing their article, if the game can't sell itself as being a worthwhile activity in those eight hours then that pretty much writes the article in itself. If you leave the only worthwhile sequence to the very end, or it doesn't get fun until 20+ hours in (I'm looking at you 13) it's completely fair for the review to just omit it all together.

In regards to Zampella's statement regarding "...reviews that contained things that were untrue, or spoke about features that didn't exist, which he said made it obvious that the reviewer in question hadn't finished the game." This has more to do with poor journalism than review practices and is completely the fault of the individual reporter. If you can't prove it, you shouldn't say it.

 

[Ekonk]

Of course he's right, but they don't HAVE to. They can do what they damn well please. Zampella needs to stop whining and cry mich ein river.

 

[squid5580]

But what about a game as long as Fallout 3 or Oblivion...and it sucks? It's kinda nasty to say that a reviewer should have to stand the assault of that game for, say, 15 hours on end. That's mental. And besides, there are not enough game reviewers around so that every game could have a reviewer attached.

Dumb game revieweing should be out, but this...well...

That is their job. That is why they get a paycheck every week. If it sucks and is hard maybe it will start separating the wheat from the chaff.

This is one of the few positives about the achievement/trophy system. Find their gamertag and you can see how far they did play before the review and judge accordingly.

Good luck finding a reviewers gamertag. Some may use the same handle, many don't.

And what would you expect to gain anyway? If the first hour is shit, it's a sure bet the whole game is like that, and even if it got decent, that's still no reason to bite your lip for an hour.

I have played lots of games that sucked at first but got better. Magna Carta 2 off the top of my head. I almost shut it down during what I lovingly refer to as tutorial hell but after the first hour or so when the game opened up and let me play the way I wanted it was a different story.

How many games have you played that were solid gold from beginning to end?

 

[Korolev]

You don't need to finish a game to criticize it. If an album contains 14 tracks you despise, does it really matter if the 15th track is decent?

A good game must be good all the way through, or at least 90% of the way through. If a game is terrible or boring for the first 15 hours, the last 2, no matter how exciting, do not excuse the first 15.

I will state that a game reviewer should play MOST of a game before reviewing it. They must make a sincere effort to explore what the game has to offer and they should be willing to accommodate a game's style and way of doing things before harshly criticizing it.

But you don't need to see the ending to know if a game is good or bad.

Zampella is mostly complaining about inaccurate reviews. And that's something we can all get angry about. But that's a different complaint, and has nothing to do with finishing games.

I mean, almost no one finished Bomberman Zero. That game had 100 levels in it. That didn't prevent reviewers from rightly pointing out that the game sucked.