5 Things Wrong With Game Reviews
This is a letter to all review sites (which this is not one…):
1. Give all games the same amount of attention. Why do reviews of big market games get three to four time as much content as a more obscure game? Is this fair to the smaller game, will the scores be more accurate when it’s obvious who gets the most attention? Is this fair to an industry?
2. Get some experience making games. Most writers are just people who play games with an opinion. There is no reason to respect one writers opinion over another, or even over a buddy of yours. I’d value more opinions if i knew that this writer has spent some time behind the scenes, especially when most writers will make comments about “how long the game was in development…” or “the developers were lazy…” as if they had a clue. Get some credentials.
3. Prove to me that you really played the game. Some games don’t blossom off of the first two seconds of playing, some games have an amazing 2 seconds then peter off. There have been several cases where games would get reviewed that weren’t even finishable because of a fatal crash bug. Should this game recieve the same score as a game that is playable? Think about it from a consumer stand point, when comparing what to buy, i’d guess you’d want to buy something you could complete.
We feel reviewers should place their scores, their play times what ever meteric is needed to show us how much time they have put into a game. Games are not like movies, they are meant to be interacted with.
4. Focus your review on gameplay! Why does story garner the same attention that gameplay does. Why isn’t gameplay broken down into sub categories, like: player mechanics, enemy mechanics, level mechanics, ramp-up? Art should be broken up as well: Art and Graphics. They are two different things. How many review sites even have a section on Tech?
5. Cross Reviews. What happened to the cross review? Isn’t it somewhat inaccurate to have one person review a game? Isn’t it somewhat risky? Think about this: people want cross reviews - that’s why sites like gameranking and metacritic are so popular. If you had cross reviews on your site you’d get higher audience retention. I see a review of a game on one site, i check gamerankings to get an overall metric. People want cross reviews.
- SixtyHertz!
