The relevance of the traditional launch review

Good points, thanks for your blog!

Btw, I played & liked The Order, too, and wrote my own user review "at launch" ( http://www.gamespot.com/the-order-1886/user-reviews/2200-12637274/ )

I think one point that many people oversee (is that a word? In this context?) that claim that reviews are practically useless; It manages your expectations before you start playing. When you first got into gaming for real and started watching previews and reading reviews: how many times have we been burned on being hyped up for a game and it letting us down? How many times have we only heard years afterwards that a certain game you didn't know was ridiculously good?

I have certain reviewers I 'trust'. Not in the sense that I'll agree with them, but in the sense that I know their writing style and their personal preferences. If they describe they liked something and why, I'll know what that means for me. This has proven to be incredibly useful for managing my expectations before I start playing a game. When my expectations are more in line, I found I enjoy the game better as a result.

Reviews are nothing but personal opinion anymore (well, the ones that matter, anyways). If someone is reading way too much into a reviewer saying something is "bad," that seems like a problem on the reviewer end. Admittedly, reviewers shouldn't be using shorthand like "bad" to describe something they don't like, so there is also that problem. Personally, I do my best to explain just exactly why I don't like something when I mention it in a review. The only things I come right out and say are "bad" are things like voice acting or camera control, broader points on a game that are less about taste and more about quality in general. As you mentioned, too many reviewers jump to shorthands when they run out of things to say.

Reviews are dead, at least in a broad sense. I've bought more games (or avoided games like The Order) from video content like Quick Looks than I ever did from written reviews, even when those were in their heyday. It's a blindingly fast way for me to get about 90% of the information I want about a game--barring how it plays, pretty much. I do still think there is a place for well-written reviews, as they can bring interesting critiques about a game, but there aren't many places to get this kind of reviews anymore.

Good blog.

The traditional launch review from establishment sources with access is just not what I want before. As you've hinted at in your post, it often becomes less a bunch of subjective impressions and seems more like building narratives around the reviews. I do disagree regarding the critical analysis; most reviewers aren't doing that to begin with. They're making product guides. Nothing wrong with that, that's a valuable service when it's done right.

Personally, I don't want launch day reviews anymore. I'm so tired of all the rumor and innuendo around who is getting access to publishers the right way, who is getting review copies and doing reviews the right way... At this point, I don't even want to have to consider it and I just want the reviewer to buy the game at launch and give me the review when he or she is done. If I'm prepared to buy at launch because I liked the last one or I want to be part of the 'launch experience', I wouldn't be reading reviews for anything other than to gauge my experience against others.

A review on Friday that has no uncertainty is better than a review the Monday before where I know they're plied with access and pressured to review well.

Great blog!

I hope that the move to more literary and cultural criticism in games hurries up a little bit. I'm getting quite tired of reading good to great reviews of games that are technically competent, feature rich, and thematically bland. Many of the big AAA franchises can put out variations of the same game for years without any mainstream critical fallout. I can't wait until reviewers start taking technical competency as a given. That small change would save so many paragraphs for deeper analysis (assuming people actually want to write deeper analysis)!

Launch reviews still serve a purpose in my opinion. They aren't as interchangeable as they once were which is the big difference. While in years past, as you say, reviews centered more around the technical rather than the subjective, it was a lot easier to read any one review to get a good sense of the product. These days we have steadily moved towards a more personal approach and as such you need to be a lot more personal when choosing your author. You find a reviewer who most closely resembles your own sensibilities and read their launch day thoughts, which hopefully mirror your own. In this sense Driveclub can still be a "bad" game with "poor" A.I. as long as you count on the fact that you will most likely approach that opinion from the same perspective as the author, and ultimately come to the same conclusion.

At the end of the day The Order could be panned as a million different things and a million different people will agree. To think that we are reviewing games improperly now as opposed to how we were reviewing them a decade ago because too much person-specific subjectivity is floating up to the surface isn't really the problem. That is actually a good thing because it allows us to better gauge a product based on past past experiences, helping us get the most out of the subjectivity. These days knowing if it was Jeff or Brad that gave the game a 5/5 is already very telling before you've read a single word - because you know them, and you know yourself, and that relationship can be very informative on it's own.

I've been pretty disinterested in launch reviews for a while now. I find that I can get the sort of information provided in those pieces of writing better by watching a video or listening to a podcast. There's not much point to have a text description of a game when it's so much easier to find in-depth discussion of the game somewhere else. Don't get me wrong, I love to read. But the people writing reviews at launch aren't concerned with coming up with interesting ideas or creating a quality piece of writing. The only point of these reviews is to hit exactly during the zeitgeist of the game, and because of that they make a lot of money. So it doesn't seem like they're going anywhere, because people love to argue on the internet.

Personally though, I prefer long post-release blog posts or discussions. I don't buy a bunch of new games, so I'm not necessarily looking for buying advice, but I do enjoy seeing how games fit into the medium and what the general trends are, even if I don't play much of the AAA stuff anymore. Your points about Drive Club are spot-on. The people in these communities don't need a review, they just need discussions within their community. The fly-by-night nature of game reviewer's relationships with games makes them great for speculating in a broad sense, but in terms of specific genres you will always find more and better information at sites dedicated to just that. So, the niche (as I see it) that reviews should fill (for me) is a more subjective critical analysis of the game, but these sorts of opinions and thoughts take time to develop, which means playing a single game for more than the week it takes to finish, and then sitting on that and thinking about that one game for at least a few weeks afterwards. No one is willing to do this. I don't think it would make money, either. Oh well.