Why Game Reviews Don't Matter To Me Anymore

I think the reviews need to be take with a grain of salt. They are personal views on games and you can leran something form any point of view even if what you learn is the reviewer tends to drift into hyperbole. We all know this, or we say we do.

But, what is sad is that "group think" tends to occur after the fact. In six years, when you say Knack all people will remember is that it was TERRIBLE. They won't remember that most sites gave it average scores, and that their were people who liked it. The group think will be that Knack sucked to badly as to be embarrassing.

There are just games that get slammed because nobody really remembers the games they just remember the nasty end of the spectrum. In six years, the quote that will be remembered is someone said it was "Impossible to recommend", they won't remember the game got on the low side of average scores.

@animasta said:

I think the biggest pothole in Nier that players must avoid is the side/fetch quests. They are all terrible. Avoid those and minimize the open world traversal as much as possible and you'll have a great time with the game. That's what I did and I loved Nier to bits.

It's such a weird game, though. The open world is bland and uninteresting. The side content is bland and uninteresting. Yet those two things are given a healthy amount of focus when if all that was stripped out you'd have a great 20 hour RPG with pretty linear level progression. That's fine, I think. RPGs can have linear level progression. Not everything needs to be Skyrim or wide open. Nier had the benefit of being a game with strong characters and a plot you wanted to see through. And boy, does it deliver.

I know it's off topic but I need to gush about Nier whenever the opportunity presents itself. Also, the eternal question; what the fuck was with Nier wearing a thong on his face?

I agree with you to a certain degree. I also got Knack despite the bad reviews and found it to be an ok game, not mediocre/poor.

However, if it wasn't for the reviews and high praises, I wouldn't have found interest in Tearaway. I got it yesterday and the game is superb. Before this week I barely knew it existed.

@oldirtybearon: it's a depression thong!

honestly I think it's supposed to be that he injured his eye or something and they couldn't find an actual eye patch he settled on a leather thong.

There's nothing wrong with liking shitty games. Reviews are almost always just 1 dudes subjective opinion anyway, and metacritic is about as reliable as a crack whore.

I'm glad you're enjoying it, but man, I started it yesterday and it may be the most boring game I've ever played. I'll finish it since some of the scenery looks nice and I paid $45 to experience the next-gen, but it is just so damn mediocre.

I think you are making lots of assumptions, also what games are you talking about?

I agree with you Borderlands being hot over-rated garbage, specially its sad attempt to comedy. But jeeez dude there's gotta be a better way to spend your time than playing games you hate.

Fortunately I haven't played in over a year. All that play time was during the first 2 months of release, while I was unemployed.

No. There are 7 billion people on the planet, and in tune with the other comments of "not everybody liked it but it's okay if you do," I'm okay with one or two humans saying that they liked that game. However, in no language is "okay" in any way synonymous with what Kane & Lynch 2 ended up being, except possibly in the phrase "Kane & Lynch 2 is okay at not being okay at anything." I've woken up in jail in a puddle of my own vomit, and I value that experience more than a single second I got out of Kane & Lynch 2.

I enjoyed my playthrough of Knack, you just can't marathon it like I'm sure many reviewers had to. Still I'd only give it like 3/5 stars. It felt like they had more interesting things they wanted to do with the character but ran out of time.

Yep, I've made sure to not play it for more than forty minutes at a time.It's a solid foundation of gameplay, but I can see why it could get so tedious very easily since you are doing the same thing over and over for six hours like Alex did.

That's real weird.

@donpixel: Well the director of Knack, Mark Cerny, had major roles in Sonic 2, Crash Bandicoot, Spyro, Jak series, Ratchet and Clank, among many others.

The review is accurate and for 90% it shy's them away from disappointment. Your part of the smaller group that are not disappointed.

Reviews arnt "This game is terrible dont pick it up!" or "This game is awsome pick it up!" reviews are "ok this is all the info, to most of you these are all bad. This is the good. To most of you I would advice not picking it, if you are still interested make up your own mind."

I disagree with reviews ALL the time but I do value the opinions of various reviewers. That said, I'm enjoying the hell out of Ryse.

Many people have a problem separating opinion from the person....including themselves. You are not your opinions any more than reviews are their reviews. It is fine to like a game that reviews poorly. You can still like a reviewer who didn't like a game you like.

I find reviews to be generally in concordance with my enjoyment of games, though I have needed to add a star in a couple cases when it came to things like Transformers: War for Cybertron that were near and dear to my heart.

I'm aware of who Mark Cerny is, but Knack doesn't resemble anything of those vid games really.

I'm kinda enjoying Knack, too. I don't really know why. There's not a lot to it and it's cheap and unnecessarily hard throughout with some awful checkpointing. That said, I find the core mechanics to be satisfying in small doses and I like the art design. They should've injected some humor into the story, though, because it really lacks any sort of personality. I will likely trade it in for Need for Speed once I finish it because I can't see myself ever wanting to come back to it after that.

@brodehouse: You can sort of avoid all the stupid stuff in Alpha Protocol by playing on easy with a shotgun.

Even if there were no frustrating roadblocks in the gameplay, the gameplay is still not enjoyable enough to deserve a strong recommendation, or at least not a qualified recommendation. That game is the perfect counterpoint to something like Call of Duty when it comes to ideas-vs-execution.

I find your kind soul-less, no offense. You don't have a kind of genre that just appeals to you regardless of quality? I love my hack and slash as well as my horror games regardless of their quality. I hate shooters regardless of their quality. Unless it's something new and fresh like Halo (and I mean Halo 1 specifically when I say this, because it's not so fresh anymore but you get the idea) but otherwise...argh get that away from me. I also have a soft spot for chilling out and playing some crappy point and click adventure game while sipping some coffee. Oh yeah and add arcade racers to the games that I just can't stand (NFS, Burnout etc). + there are things like awesome soundtracks or beautiful settings that can win me over sometimes. Perhaps there also certain IPs that gain your interest more than most people as well?

Reviews are a fantastic way to find new games you otherwise would of skipped but I don't think people should let them be the sole decider of whether they buy a game or not.

@donpixel: yeah I understand that. And yes at first glance it really doesn't have much in common with most of those. But the sensibilities that allowed Crash and Spyro to come into existence feel very well represented here. That's all I was getting at.

@juzie: No, you're right. I totally have genre preferences. I won't play horror games regardless of their rating. But I think that's sort of a necessary component of reading reviews, right? A reviewer doesn't get to play favorites with genres, so you have to know which games you're even in the audience for.

Man, I just got up to chapter 4 in one sitting. And I'm enjoying Knack far more than I apparently should.

The problem with many critics... Well, A problem among many, anyway, but the one you're talking about is that many critics see games only as GREATEST GAME EVAR or CRAP.

Why is that? Well, part of it is the effective 7-10 scale currently used by many of them. Now we can argue until we're blue in the face as to why, but the result is clear. There has become less room to articulate a game simply being OK without the editor looking at the reviewer funny. This is going to be an issue so long as long as review scores exist, which is sad to say, a very long time.

Secondly, most of these guys are jaded as all fuck. They've played so many games and issued so many reviews, and yes, they've gone through so much shovel-ware that we get to dismiss sight unseen, that they've lost the basic joy for the medium that we all have. Unless something comes along that is absolutely groundbreaking, you're more likely to hear them grumble about it. That has especially been felt on this site with Ryan's loss. That man was immune to all that shit, it seemed, and he died without passing along the antibodies.

Lastly, and this is perhaps most damning, is that there's no real click-bait value in saying that something's simply all right. Praise or damnation starts forum threads, ignites fan wars. Saying that something is just fun and all right for people so inclined doesn't bring all the boys to the yard, as it were. In the sunsetting PS3/X360 era, we've seen media degenerate into the Kotaku model; spread any rumor, stir any controversy, kick any beehive, just get people clicking! Unfortunately, games like Knack that are simply OK tend to get caught in the crossfire.

While there obviously must be an accounting for taste as reviews are inherently subjective, the current situation of tired, old reviewers, smaller room for nuance and an environment that thrives on hostility is chiefly to blame for the current situation, and I don't see it getting better any time soon.

I never read reviews anymore. And even when I did, I usually ignored them.

Jedi Power Battles was dope no matter what the 6.8 review on Gamespot said!

Opinions are like assholes, and I don't like assholes so stick your opinion in your asshole.

BURN THE WITCH

Reviews don't work well as a scoring mechanism. If you know a few reviewers (not sites) that generally share your tastes, it can be much more accurate. But reviews can only put forth the opinion of the writer, and these aren't always shared by readers.

Because of this, the most important thing a developer can do, is release a demo of their game.

If you want to see definitive proof that views don't matter then here is the UK charts for this week

LW		TW			Title	Developer	Label	Publisher
2		1			CALL OF DUTY: GHOSTS	INFINITY WARD	ACTIVISION	ACTIVISION BLIZZARD
1		2			FIFA 14	EA CANADA	EA SPORTS	ELECTRONIC ARTS
3		3			BATTLEFIELD 4	DIGITAL ILLUSIONS	EA GAMES	ELECTRONIC ARTS
-		4			KILLZONE: SHADOW FALL	GUERRILLA GAMES	SONY COMPUTER ENT.	SONY COMPUTER ENT.
4		5			ASSASSIN'S CREED IV: BLACK FLAG	UBISOFT (MONTREAL)	UBISOFT	UBISOFT
6		6			LEGO MARVEL SUPER HEROES	TRAVELLER'S TALES	WARNER BROS. INTERACTIVE	WARNER BROS. INTERACTIVE
8		7			GRAND THEFT AUTO V	ROCKSTAR NORTH	ROCKSTAR	TAKE 2
13		8			NEED FOR SPEED: RIVALS	GHOST GAMES	EA GAMES	ELECTRONIC ARTS
14		9			JUST DANCE 2014	UBISOFT (FRANCE)	UBISOFT	UBISOFT
16		10			BATMAN: ARKHAM ORIGINS	WB GAMES MONTREAL	WARNER BROS. INTERACTIVE	WARNER BROS. INTERACTIVE
12		11			SKYLANDERS SWAP FORCE	BEENOX	SKYLANDERS	ACTIVISION BLIZZARD
11		12			MINECRAFT: XBOX 360 EDITION	4J STUDIOS	MICROSOFT	MICROSOFT
-		13			KNACK	SONY COMPUTER ENT.	SONY COMPUTER ENT.	SONY COMPUTER ENT.
-		14			SUPER MARIO 3D WORLD	NINTENDO	NINTENDO	NINTENDO

Knack outsells Super Mario 3D world.

*Shakes head slowly*