Sotimes, a professional review IS better than a fan one.

[Vrach]

I don't know why people look into the reviewers judgement of the game rather than his comments. You know all those "Do you actually value Yahtzee's reviews as reviews" threads popping up every once in a while? I always respond with yes. You know why? Because you can look past his jokes and shit and often get a lot of comments on the game itself.

If you're looking at the score or something - you're doing it wrong. A score is just the overall sentiment and it's often "wrong", whether because it's actually wrong or because it was reviewed by a person with completely different tastes than you, who might appreciate things you don't give a toss about and have a huge issue with some things that don't phase you in the slightest.

Take Alpha Protocol - you look at any overall mark on the review, they're gonna tell you "this game sucks". But look at the comments - the issue is lack of polish. To a lot of people, that lack of polish is not a deal-breaker - certainly wasn't for me. On the other hand, looking into what's positive about the game tells you it has a fantastic and very unique (to the best of my knowledge) conversation system. One that alone makes the game worth playing (although the actual combat is also quite fun - not brilliant, but more than fun enough for me).

So TLDR, stop looking at the scores and look for descriptive reviews. If someone is either trashing or complimenting the game while not giving you any real info on what's good/bad about it - it's a useless review. But if someone is describing what's good or bad about the game, you can look into that and decide for yourself if you think the game is worth playing, regardless of the reviewers own sentiment about the game.

 

[Kahunaburger]

=
Take Alpha Protocol - you look at any overall mark on the review, they're gonna tell you "this game sucks". But look at the comments - the issue is lack of polish. To a lot of people, that lack of polish is not a deal-breaker - certainly wasn't for me. On the other hand, looking into what's positive about the game tells you it has a fantastic and very unique (to the best of my knowledge) conversation system. One that alone makes the game worth playing (although the actual combat is also quite fun - not brilliant, but more than fun enough for me).

I think this is a good point - for whatever reason, numerical scores seem to rate safe, mediocre games above flawed gems.

 

[tin_man_B5]

In my opinion, if you want to judge a game in a (probably) unbiased way, you should watch a let's play, may be not the best way but it's only my opinion.

 

[Netrigan]

With reviews, it's less about what a person said as looking for a consensus on its good and bad points. It's strange but a good and bad review will often agree on a game's good/bad points, the difference being the importance they place on those points.

Take the original Assassin's Creed game which was a nicely original game with a very fun core mechanic, but with really repetitive gameplay. Almost every review about the game agrees on these points. Or the low end of the review spectrum are the Transformers movies, in which they're derided for being an action-packed mess of a movie with paper-thin characters, while many people love the movie for exactly the same reasons. Halo game reviews can pretty much be summed up with "if you're not already a Halo fan, this game won't change your opinion", which is pretty much saying "it's the same game you either love or hate".

I always look for passionate positive responses to something. It's not enough for someone to give a game a 10 if they're not positively gushing about how frakkin' cool it was, then I doubt it's a particularly great game. It's probably nicely playable, but if people aren't going around saying "you must play this game", then it's easily skippable.

 

[gigastar]

I usually go to Metacritic first to check the professional reviews, then i see if The Escapist has a review up, then i make a rounds of reviewers who work for broadsheet newspapers, then i go to other review sites and finally whether or not i got the game by then ill watch Zero Punctuation.

This plan has rarely failed me.

 

[AbstractStream]

I think I do see your point OP. Although, if you're really gonna go on reviews to decide whether to buy a game or not, use more than one. Even then, I still don't trust it 100%.

To be honest, I might trust user reviews more than I do professional ones.

 

[Pearwood]

In my opinion, if you want to judge a game in a (probably) unbiased way, you should watch a let's play, may be not the best way but it's only my opinion.

Yeah I do that for games where I know the story isn't the reason I'm interested but it's a bit spoiler-y and long for an RPG. I just don't get why people can't make their own judgement calls and use reviews for stuff they aren't sure about.

 

[BloatedGuppy]

Both user reviews and professional reviews are, by and large, fairly useless when taken in aggregate. The professional reviews can't really be trusted, for obvious and well substantiated reasons, and user reviews, as Zhukov states, tend to be even less objective.

However, for gods sake, you're all rational human beings. You should be able to read these things critically. You should know within seconds whether a user review is worth the time it took to write it, and you should be able to pick through professional reviews for revelatory nuggets sandwiched between bought and paid for praise.

Reviews are a tool, not scripture handed down by God. Use the tool sensibly.

 

[Smeatza]

I lost all faith in professional critics when on the release of Black Ops I was greeted with sentences such as "Black Ops does nothing different to the previous titles" and it still got 99% scores.
Yet when each new release of Dynasty Warriors comes out it always gets like 60% for "being the same as previous titles in the series."

It's this kind of double standard that makes me not trust anything professional reviewers say.

 

[GoaThief]

I tend to agree more with them then user reviewers, Dragon Age 2 being a prime example(I actually liked that game, which reviewers gave an 7-8/10

I detect some cognitive dissonance.

IGN personally for me lost a lot of credibility for their sparkling near flawless review of ME3 while at the same time their website background was -riddled- with ME3 commercial, and some of their staff followed up making some remarkable statements about the fanbase in uproar about ME3s ending.

And I also find 10/10 reviews of ME3 to be...unreliable.

Dragon Age 2 received a perfect score on this very website, why are you not speaking about a big loss of the Escapist's credibility?

I don't know why people look into the reviewers judgement of the game rather than his comments. You know all those "Do you actually value Yahtzee's reviews as reviews" threads popping up every once in a while? I always respond with yes. You know why? Because you can look past his jokes and shit and often get a lot of comments on the game itself.

I will contradict myself somewhat and mostly agree with the overall tone of your post, the reason I chose 60% as a cutoff (as a secondary method if unsure) is due to the very big problem you mentioned of applying numbers to a gaming review. You can be fairly sure a game scoring more than that in a professional review will be playable, anything less might be but it's certainly worthy of a deeper look.

However, the part of your post I quoted is an interesting point but not necessarily correct. To be a good and humorous cynic there has to be a basis in truth, so of course valid criticisms can be taken from his videos. However, the vitriol and extent of the complaints can and often are massively exaggerated; the identical problem user reviews have. Does this stop them being as valid as "proper" reviews? I'd say so, although if you're applying common sense you can sort the wheat from the chaff. It's the same with nearly anything a person says or does, nuggets of truth, but that does not a reviewer make...

I think one thing that's been so understated in this thread is that reviews are always framed by the status quo. Not only in game design but fashion and opinion trends. Always worth keeping in mind...

 

[Something Amyss]

Pair reviewers aren't going to give a bad score to a game that has this much promotion behind it.

Then again, fans are often outraged by little details, so I ignore them, too.

Really, in a world of youtube and streams and demos and unprecedented access to content to determine game quality, there's no excuse to not form your own opinion.

 

[Yopaz]

THE DISAPPOINTING ENDING AND DAY 1 DLC DOES NOT = BAD GAME.

No it does not, but it hasto be mentioned and considered which all of the "professionals" fail to do, I wonder why that might be...

No. It doesn't have to be mentioned. The fact that the game has DLC doesn't reflect the quality of the main game one bit. Reviews shouldn't cover anything other than the game and its quality. If a review said Batman Arkham City was a bad game because Rocksteady uses third world slaves then that's politics and criticism of the company, not the game.

OT: I usually trust the judgment of my friends rather than any user or professional reviews. There are some professional reviewers that I have similar taste to so I tend to listen to them. Whenever Yahtzee gives a game praise I check it out granted it's not on PS3 because I like what he likes msot of the time.

 

[Smooth Operator]

No. It doesn't have to be mentioned. The fact that the game has DLC doesn't reflect the quality of the main game one bit. Reviews shouldn't cover anything other than the game and its quality. If a review said Batman Arkham City was a bad game because Rocksteady uses third world slaves then that's politics and criticism of the company, not the game.

You are comparing apples and oranges.
Cuts of game content is a package quality question and yes it should be mentioned, obviously the fans wouldn't want anything bad to be said about the game.
And that is the major difference between reviewers, can you tell the full truth about the product or will you omit faults to make it look better.

 

[Yopaz]

No. It doesn't have to be mentioned. The fact that the game has DLC doesn't reflect the quality of the main game one bit. Reviews shouldn't cover anything other than the game and its quality. If a review said Batman Arkham City was a bad game because Rocksteady uses third world slaves then that's politics and criticism of the company, not the game.

You are comparing apples and oranges.
Cuts of game content is a package quality question and yes it should be mentioned, obviously the fans wouldn't want anything bad to be said about the game.
And that is the major difference between reviewers, can you tell the full truth about the product or will you omit faults to make it look better.

Day 1 DLC is a part of a company's business, not a part of the game. I wont go into the matter of day 1 DLC because that is not the topic here. A game should be judged by its quality, not for the tactics the publishers use. You are saying a game made by a developer should be judged by the choices done by a publisher.

You are right that I am comparing apples and oranges here, but both are fruits. I simply compare a petty company tactic to one that is illegal. I am simply saying that a company's policy should not be reflected in what I think off a game. A review of a product's quality should only reflect on its quality, if we wrote articles about games they should include such details, bit not in reviews. Also what you might not be aware of is that day 1 DLC doesn't affect reviewers.

 

[Vrach]

I don't know why people look into the reviewers judgement of the game rather than his comments. You know all those "Do you actually value Yahtzee's reviews as reviews" threads popping up every once in a while? I always respond with yes. You know why? Because you can look past his jokes and shit and often get a lot of comments on the game itself.

However, the part of your post I quoted is an interesting point but not necessarily correct. To be a good and humorous cynic there has to be a basis in truth, so of course valid criticisms can be taken from his videos. However, the vitriol and extent of the complaints can and often are massively exaggerated; the identical problem user reviews have. Does this stop them being as valid as "proper" reviews? I'd say so, although if you're applying common sense you can sort the wheat from the chaff. It's the same with nearly anything a person says or does, nuggets of truth, but that does not a reviewer make...

Exaggerations are irrelevant (imo), for two reasons:
1) If you know the reviewer (and after a few reviews, you should), you can gauge the actual review despite them
2) As I've said in my post, it's about a descriptive review, not the quantification.

The mere existence of some problems or gems in the game is a lot of information to go on already - and once you know the reviewer a bit and can tell actual information from jokes, you can get even more out of it. Bottom line is, look for descriptions to tell you what is and isn't there, not quantifiers to tell you how much something may suck or rock.

 

[idarkphoenixi]

You can't really blame people for not trusting massive review sites. I saw the IGN video review of Mass Effect 3 and was pretty stunned how they praised it for being next to perfect with little to no flaws. They never even mentioned the ending, same with Gamespot.

Now when people say paid off, it gives the impression that some guy dressed in black drops off a suitcase full of cash...That's just comical but it's not THAT far from the truth.

Critics are "paid off" in the same way the massive news corporations are paid off by the Government. Polititians only do interviews with those who know the game, the ones who ask softball questions and let them spew their propaganda without questioning it at all. If they are critical, then they don't get the exclusive interviews etc... The same goes with big review sites. If they want first access exclusive interviews and such, then they need to do what the big publishers say. Sometimes it's a lot more obvious, like offering to pay for advertising space on the reviewers website (i.e. Kane and Lynch with Gamespot).

It's not some crazy theory, it's just a mutual system that's beneficial to both parties. User reviews arn't exactly "accurate" since they usually go to the extremes (either its AMAZING!!!1 or it SUCKS BAWLZ!), however you can at least find one or two that actually list all the major flaws instead of glazing over them. Metacritic is a good place to go since it just averages out what either party say.