The Friday Debate – Good Reviews?

And also

People, Please please please . . .

Stop reviewing games on places like Amazon 6 months before even the freakin demo comes out.

It’s not big and it’s most certainly not clever.

For me, most games I really want I pre-order and don’t really care about the reviews so much, but if I’m on the fence about a game I tend to visit metacritic and read the top 3 and the bottom 2 reviews to try and get a balanced opinion.

Have to say though, I really don’t trust certain reviews to an extent, there’s too much or lack of money riding on some website’s to give an honest review.

If it’s a game I know I’ll love, only ridiculously terrible reviews will stop me. But that’s never happened – i.e. the Uncharteds, God of War III, MGS4, Peace Walker etc.

If it’s a game that I’ve heard has got lots good reviews, I’ll look around, read reviews, try and play the demo etc. This is for games like LBP, inFamous, ACII. I’ve managed to play this at a mates place/downlaod the demo. I also agree that scores aren’t that great. For more, giving stars is better 4 or 5 stars, it’s a good quality game, but somehting like 9.75 –> Who cares? This is why I love reading Kotaku, they don’t have scores, Only what they loved about the game and what they hated.

oh reviews matter all right. they tell u how glitchy a game is, length, are the gameplay mechanics working as advertised. so if a game i like from trailers gets below 85/100 on metacritic i dont buy it. that 85 means that several things failed mildly. if its below 85 by another 10 or more points that game should be avoided by all costs

the only reviews i take into account are the normal gamers reviews. i don’t really listen to the “professional” reviewers a lot, because most of the time their reviews are just unfair. and/or they never actually talk about the important things…

Sometimes reviews push me in the right direction, but most of the times I’ve made up my mind about a game before the reviews come up, and if it seems fun in gameplay videos and such, then I buy it.

Toy Story 3 is a game that I bought cause it got fairly good reviews considering what it’s based upon (and how such games usually are). (Bit off-topic: ) Only thing that annoyed me with that game was that I was forced to have it in either Norwegian, Swedish, Danish or Finnish, and I really wanted to play it in English, but from what I understand to be able to do so you have to buy it from a English speaking country.

Reviews? Ha! One mans trash is another mans treasure.

However, I am careful around overhyped games. Case in point: GTA IV. Most reviewers came over its perceived greatness and heralded it as a gaming god. However, when the greater gaming public flocked to buy it, the reaction was that it was an alright game plagued with problems.

The only person you can trust to make a judgment is yourself. I do not care if IGN, Kotaku, PSM3 etc; hail or slate a game (Especially in todays gaming environment where incessant fanboyism can warp a reviewers judgment eg; CoD MW2, GTA IV, MGS4) I’ll rent a game and if I like it, i’ll buy it. If not, i’ll forget about it.

People need to make their own judgments more, not rely on a faceless mook behind a computer screen (Irony FTFW)

i dont regard reviews as crucial to my game buying process, although i will steer clear if the general score is below 70%, magazines have almost zero impact on my game buying since MW2 when i realized that i probably have nothing in common with the game reviewers .

i will say though that when i was into PC gaming i would always trust PC Zone, they never ever steered me wrong and i cant think of another mag,site,blog etc that i could say that about.

@smoggyphil, now im older and wiser i completely agree

I like to think Ive been gaming long enough now to tell when a games going to be bad or not lol. I usually just watch a few gameplay videos and base my desicion on that. I dont really pay attention to reviews anymore.

For reviews, I only read them fully in a few magasines I’ve selected : I trust them (Gamekult, CanardPC), and I know they won’t spoil the story.

However, some games with pretty bad reviews are sometimes greater than you may think, like NIER, or Alpha Protocol. For those, reading the comment of the player is a good way to have a opinion.

Finally, when there is a demo, as soon as it is long enough, I can make my decision alone. For me, demos are very important in my choices, and I (almost) never buy a game without playing a demo first.

Bad game, bad review, good game, good review……

I used to read the Official Playstation Magazine a lot, when I had a PS2, partly because back then you couldn’t get demos any other way really, what with no PS Store. Nowadays I’ve switched to a wider viewpoint and regularly buy EDGE, I find it to be a bit more mature and in depth, as well as lacking the bias you see in any official magazine.

Up until Teletext got turned off I used to try and read GameCentral everyday as they really knew what they were on about and had a good mix of a fun letters page and more serious, but personal, reviews. After that went off air, they still continue online I believe, I’ve stopped following them as I mainly look through other sites online.

I read Kotaku a lot, but don’t really use them for their reviews, although they do have nice pros/cons sections in the write ups. As several other people have mentioned, seeing how the game plays and what the graphics are like is important too (especially if there’s no demo available) so I watch the generally decent GameTrailers reviews, as they cover set topics within each video, rather than with some written pieces where they might ramble on about on niggling issue and not mention if the story is any good or how challenging it is.

Reviewers are persons, persons have opinions and opinions differ.
I like Metal Gear Solid 4 for it’s amazing graphics, story and gameplay, but my friend hates it. so i’d give it a 10 and he would give a 3.

So i don’t care about reviews. Although they are fun to read sometimes.

I definitely take them into account, but it’s always me who makes the final decision and as long as I enjoy the game, nothing else really matters.

I don’t tend to put too much weight on any one individual review, but I do check out Metacritic before I buy a game.

Seeing an aggregated score from multiple sources is good to get an overall feel for a game and takes away the extremely low/high scores that can come from extreme reactions.

It’s good that they have metascores for “professional” and user reviews as well. You get a real sense of the difference between people who are paid to review games and the people who part with their hard earned cash to buy the thing themselves.

I keep a games related blog that reviews, muses and looks ahead to games and related bits and bobs that gets sent out via facebook for friends to see… (asgamesgoby.blogspot.com) however I know that this is just my opinion and in essence its up to people to try something for themselves.

Typically, badly reviewed games get put in bargain bins before long, and if I have been hanging off on a game I had looked forward to but avoided due to its review I might be tempted to pick it up at that point (sorry dev’s).

I find that the best reviews online at the moment come from zeropuncuation on escapistmagazine… they mock, complain, point out annoyances… but in all fairness its a good illustration of why games reviews are entirely subjective and should be taken lightly… except legendary of course… that cannot be excused.

im not really too concerned with reviews because each gamer has their own tastes

@James Gallagher

Protip: I will never again click on a link when I don’t know where it’s leading. There are far worse things out there than Rick Astley videos ( http://bit.ly/arKHfg ), and once you’ve seen something you cannot unsee it. As far as I know bit.ly doesn’t provide any way to “lengthen” an url before I decide if I should follow it.

Allowing simple html or bbcode or similar links would enable short/pretty links in tekst while still allowing our browsers to show us where the link actually leads.

Bit.ly, tinyurl and similar services are a solution to a problem that shouldn’t apply to blog comments/posts in the first place.