Savage Ghost Recon review from Destructiod

[springheeljack]

I don't understand why people continue to be upset by review scores.
If you are reviewing a game and don't like it then why can't you give it any kind of score that you think it deserves? Did people give Ebert this much shit about his reviews while he was alive?

 

[chrissx2]

Eh, I'm having way more fun playing this game than MGSV or GTA5. Giving it 2.5/10 seems like emotional/anger issues of the reviewer (or click bait).

That's fine that you're enjoying the game, not everyone else does though. I played the beta and the game was horrible IMO. I hate Rockstar games and it's not just because I just want to be different or bait people, I just think they're bad games. Every game should have it's share of negative reviews IMO. If a reviewer at Destructoid feels a game is below average, then they have to give it at best a 4/10 because a 5 is average there, not 7. The fact that 7 has become average is extremely problematic. When a game scores 80 or higher on Metacritic that means nothing because that's what almost every AAA release does score. It's quite an "accomplishment" for a AAA release to get below an 80 at Metacritic, which Wildlands succeeded in doing. Whereas going to RottenTomatoes and seeing a movie got an 80+% fresh rating means something because 9 out of 10 movies don't get that. Plus, the fresh rating is not the average score even. For example, Logan is 92% fresh but has an average score of 7.8, which is considered a bad average score for a game. If there was a Fresh/Rotten rating for games, just about every game would be 98+% fresh. Even No Man's Sky would have a 99% fresh rating because it only has 1 negative review.

Personally, I wish there was no such thing as numerical rating - the whole system is broken. It's bad for gamers, it's bad for comapnies and it's bad for people who make those games. I also bet that the general score of Wildlands would be different if it didn't have "Ghost Recon" and "Ubisoft" names attached to it.
Now, I don't know Destructoid and if this is their normal rating system, but if not, are they going to stick to it from now on? Do you think the game deserves score that is very close to something like "The Slaughtering Grounds"? 2.5/10 for an OK game is equally bd as giving it 8.9/10 (wich was the case for most of the games in the past generation). We're here on the opposite side of idiocity. Also giving low score to counter-weight the good ones is not what reviews are for.

May I know why You found Beta horrible? My fist hour with the game wasn't that good either, but I ended up enjoying the hell out of it after playing coop with my brother - game reminds me of good old Delta Force games.

 

[CritialGaming]

Regardless of how good or bad it is, the whole dudebro hero premise of the typical EA/Activision/Ubisoft game has gotten so ad-nauseum that I think I'd end up like this if I played any of them anymore -

 

[Trunkage]

Wildlands is just like every other Ubisoft game. People are getting sick of seeing the same thing. Personally, since I finished Watch Dogs 2 a few weeks ago, I'm in that camp. (so for, its not as good as Watch Dogs 2). While I don't think it scores should be that low, they can say what they want

 

[somonels]

That's an app store game score on the PC. Luckily it's just a score and a game i give no thought about, maybe the review is interestingly written.

 

[Phoenixmgs_v1legacy]

Personally, I wish there was no such thing as numerical rating - the whole system is broken. It's bad for gamers, it's bad for comapnies and it's bad for people who make those games. I also bet that the general score of Wildlands would be different if it didn't have "Ghost Recon" and "Ubisoft" names attached to it.
Now, I don't know Destructoid and if this is their normal rating system, but if not, are they going to stick to it from now on? Do you think the game deserves score that is very close to something like "The Slaughtering Grounds"? 2.5/10 for an OK game is equally bd as giving it 8.9/10 (wich was the case for most of the games in the past generation). We're here on the opposite side of idiocity. Also giving low score to counter-weight the good ones is not what reviews are for.

May I know why You found Beta horrible? My fist hour with the game wasn't that good either, but I ended up enjoying the hell out of it after playing coop with my brother - game reminds me of good old Delta Force games.

I don't have a problem with numbers at all, I love numbers in fact. When the scale is used properly and with variance like Jim Sterling, you know how Jim felt about each game just by the number. You know Jim ENJOYED Horizon and Nioh more than Zelda just by the scores. I put "enjoyed" in caps because to me, the core problem with game reviews is that games are attempted to be scored objectively and lose points based on "objective" flaws or perhaps less features instead of how much enjoyment was had from the game. How else do you explain the bulk of reviews for any game usually being within 1.0 of each other? Or any game getting a freaking AVERAGE score in the mid-upper 90s? For example, where's the negative reviews for MGS4 where the reviewer hated the writing and cutscenes? I'm one of the biggest MGS fans but no way MGS4 (even among fans) would garner a 94 average score. There has to be "professional" critics that don't like Kojima's style and thus MGS4 would be less enjoyable than the average game to them, thus where's those reviews? I eat up MGS4's B-movie style and cheese but a lot of people don't, and that's perfectly fine. Same thing with a game like FFXIII, but only Jim Sterling put out a negative review for the game. I personally don't even care for Jim as a reviewer because our tastes don't match up, but he at least reviews games properly, which shouldn't be such a hard concept.

I guess horrible was a touch of hyperbole, but I definitely felt Wildlands was below average, thus being a game under 5/10 for me. I found the controls as basic as possible and bad at times. Your character moves around without much fluidity to where it feels clunky more due to the animations than the controls themselves. I really dislike contextual cover systems when you enter cover by getting close to a wall vs pressing a button as far more often than not I want to stand behind a wall vs sticking to it (especially in PvP), I want to decide to use the cover system not the game. Wildlands has by far the worst version of that I've ever seen (Tomb Raider and MGS5 do it better). It was probably a quarter of the time when I would aim from cover that my character would aim at the piece of cover I'm on instead of aiming over or around the cover. Then X (on PS4) is totally wasted as something you press to jump over something, that's all it does, such a waste of a face button. Why can't X be used to take cover as well? The previous Ghost Recon used X to take cover, sprint, and vault while not causing your character to do something you didn't intend. And believe me on that because I was a dedicated player of Ghost Recon Future Soldier, I played over 700 squad matches alone. I never died because X was used for too many things. GRFS did everything Wildlands does and it did it better as well like how it's cover cover swap mechanic innovated the genre. Wildlands went quite a bit backwards in just controls alone (there's not even a roll move in Wildlands), then there's the vehicle controls in Wildlands. How does the open world of Wildlands actually enhance the core gameplay? How is it better to rescue a HVT and fly a helicopter to the destination vs just having a short cutscene of that? It's like a movie not cutting to a character getting to say work and having to see his whole drive to work. The world just feels like space between actual content that wastes the player's time traveling to said actual content. The missions themselves are very same-y as well. Smaller issues like dead bodies disappearing in a tactical shooter, dead robot dinosaurs don't even disappear in Horizon. That just comes off as pretty lazy for game about tactics and stealth. The 1st Mercenaries on PS2/Xbox had more tactics and variety than Wildlands and had basically the same setup with each baddie being a card in a deck of cards and building up to take down the ace of each suit.