Yeah, yeah I know, I’m currently writing an article lambasting reviews which is posted on a website that focuses heavily on reviews. However, it’s really important to note that I don’t care, and I still don’t like reviews, but that doesn’t mean I don’t appreciate how helpful they can be for other people. There are some of you out there who struggle to decide if you want a product before being told if it’s good or bad by someone you respect or admire, that’s fine if it works for you! I’m just here to say my piece on why I DON’T do that.
Back when I still used to frequently get gaming magazines, they would be chock full of reviews and previews of upcoming titles giving you valuable insight and understanding of a game before you bought it. They weren’t always right though, sometimes reviewers would eviscerate a game only to have it surprisingly find a market and do really well. Occasionally a reviewer would nit-pick and end up actually alienating fans and readers rather than inform anyone of anything (looking at you IGN review of Pokémon Ruby & Sapphire, too much water…)
This was one of the only ways my younger self was able to learn about upcoming games, so I took what I could get, but now that the internet is the place it is, I have way more options. I have trailers, gameplay streams, podcast discussions and yes still reviews, but as it’s written there, reviews are the bottom of the pile for what I’ll use to gauge my interest in a new title. Normally I’ll just watch a trailer or two and my mind will be made up nicely. If it’s great, fantastic, good call! If its bad? Well at least I enjoyed the journey! It’s been my way for years and has so far yielded nothing but positive results.
My biggest issue with the current state of video game reviews, is just how open ended it all is. There are hundreds of dedicated review sites and even more people online who just want to vent their opinion. This muddies the waters till everything just ends up looking…brown? It doesn’t draw me in or excite me the way that my usual process of discovery does. Plus, as I said above, all this comes down to people’s opinions, it’s hard when writing out a review to separate your personal feelings towards a series or franchise, while staying objective about the product.
Let’s take Elden Ring for example, the latest in a long line of seeming hits for developers From Software, Elden Ring does still have its fair share of naysayers who, while praising the game for its world and overall gameplay, still point out that it seems poorly optimised on certain consoles and runs quite sluggishly at times. Fair points that can be presented quite a while. HOWEVER, the real bugbear of reviewing rears its ugly head: Review bombing. The incels and scumbags of the internet come out of the woodwork en masse to negatively review a game into the ground all for the sake of their own issues and misery, there for making any review score average a minefield of true and false. This makes most scoring systems seem pointless to me.
You can agree or disagree with me on this, that’s sort of why I wrote it, I don’t care if me, or you the reader, share our opinion on this. It’s exactly that, an opinion, I’ll gladly keep ignoring reviews and picking what games I’d like based on what I see, and not what others say. I think people need to realise that reviews, really don’t work as well as they once did, at least not without a hefty handful of salt to be taken!