How do you feel about reviews and review sites?

[Scarlet]

I'm old school I'd like to see reviews rated out of 100

I mean we basically rate out of 100 anyway since we use decimals lol, it's all the same.

 

[Social_Outlaw]

I loved Borderlands 1, especially with the DLC, and 2 was more than playable but was going downhill fast. After Pre Sequel was allowed to bear the Borderlands name... yeah.

Borderlands 3 could still surprise but to assume it will be a GOTY contender sight unseen... that is more optimism than I care for.

I hope it is GOTY but watching the gameplay (I know it's not finished) they really need to upgrade how enemies react to bullets. It seems to me that the only way to for an enemies to react damaged is if you have a really powerful weapon. you can have a pistol and while it could kill a person instantly I still want to feel like I did some damage instead of them being bullet sponges.

 

[Deleted User]

i think they are poorly paid people who have a bias, play the game very little, complain the game is too hard, and giving it a shitty review because it doesnt have journalist difficulty. not only that, but it seems they just repeat what others say, and they dont value the game. sometimes their criticism isnt even correct either. for example polygon (lol) made an article about persona 5's "terrible translation" imo the script is okay but they where acting like it was the worst thing ever, you can read and understand it quite well tbh. also some of the examples they gave didnt support their opinion. they probably don't even know that the game was being translated while the game was still being developed in japanese, even if there was a few hiccups its understandable. they seem to complain about "it can't be helped" in the script and say it should be "looks like we dont have a choice". because that matters so much. what they dont seem to understand is a game like fire emblem might have one of the worst translations as they completely remove or change some things that would be weird in the west.

 

[skullskullskull]

I think it was Roger Ebert that described reviewing a movie as more than just criticizing its flaws and reporting on if you liked it. Ebert's movie reviews (usually) took the form of identifying the type of movie (action/drama/etc) and then comparing it to other movies in that genre, which is something that can't really happen when you give a movie a score out of 100, because then you're comparing it to every other move. Action movies should be held to a different standard than a RomCom, for example. And just because Titanic gets a higher score than X-men, it doesn't mean that you're going to like Titanic if you like X-men. There are lots of silly examples where a small indie game gets rated higher than a triple A game and kind of makes the ranking system useless.

So generally when I read a review I ignore the numbers altogether and I also try not to pay attention to stuff like "I like ...". The best thing would be to say "if you like GAME1 and GAME2, then you might like this game because ...". First 10 or 20 minutes of gameplay on youtube is good too.

 

[Tarmfot]

I just read reader reviews in gamefaqs.

 

[Stwert]

I’ve been reading reviews since the days when computer/gaming magazines were walls of tightly packed text, with no images and I doubt I’ll stop.

I’ve learned to find reviewers who’s opinions are close to my own. What I hate is when reviewers seem to review publishers, rather than games. By which I mean, games that are riddled with bugs and problems getting great reviews because it’ll probably be fixed somewhere down the road. Eh, no!

I don’t give a flying fig if a game looks great and has potential once it’s fixed. I don’t want to buy it when it’s bad, then wait for it to get better.

Nor do I care for reviews which seem to get lost in a games technical merit, with only a small amount of space relating to the gameplay. You know, the actual important bit.

That could be because I’m ancient and I’ve been playing games since they were just a couple of blocks on the screen. But for me, gameplay is the single most important aspect of a game.

I’d rather have a game such as Super Metroid, looks naff by today’s standards, but plays amazingly. Than something like, oh I don’t know, Heavy Rain. Which has a cumbersome control scheme, a clichéd plot, so-so voice acting but looks great. (Personal opinions of course).

I also don’t like it when there’s no comparison drawn in a review. There’s very few truly original games any more if we’re honest. They are, for the most part, an amalgam of ideas drawn from the past 40 years.
So tell me at least one game that is similar, it’s easier to make my decision if I know that. Even if it’s just, Oceanhorn is in many ways similar to classic Zelda games. Or Guacamelee is a good example of the Metroidvania style of games. Then I can compare it to games I know I like.

At the end of the day we need to remember that a review is just an opinion. And just one persons opinion at that. Even if it’s a reviewer whose views you trust, don’t take it as gospel. Do your research, read a lot of material on the game, then make your own informed decision.

 

[Veho]

Most reviews these days are bogus and I don't set much store by them. My take is to read a few reviews of games you've played, and if you agree with the reviewer, keep reading their future reviews.

Reviews are mostly subjective, so find someone with the same biases as you.

 

[Superbronx]

Unfortunately, no disrespect to the fine reviewers here at gbatemp, I rarely look at reviews.

 

[Skelletonike]

I write reviews from time to time for a website website that a friend of mine owns. I get games to review and I end up spending too much time trying out the game to it's fullest. Sadly, that does end up killing the fun out of the games for me.

As for reading reviews, I usually only read them to see what the game is about. I don't care much about the opinion of the person about the quality of the game, I care about the game itself is.

 

[Deleted member 377734]

I review books for other authors, and have built a reputation as an on-demand reviewer. Honest, in-depth, fair reviews. I don't sugar coat, but neither am I an asshole. I like reviewing, and reading other's reviews.

Video game reviews on the other hand? I used to be a big reader of those, but i place no stock in them anymore from the glaring flaws i often find in them. In my opinion, a GOOD reviewer should be fair and objective, even with content they don't like. Most reviewing sites aren't. I started falling of years ago, when i played games like Growlanser: Wayfarer of Time, a game a professional reviewing site had labeled as awful. I VERY much enjoyed it, with multiple playthroughs. I then went back and started playing games that i'd previously skipped over from because of reviewing sites. before long, i abandoned those sites altogether.

Just my short opinion.

 

[leon315]

Well for what it's worth, we aren't paid off here for our reviews (or at least I'm not lol). Funnily enough though, I rarely read reviews for games. Might be bad to say as somebody who writes them but most of the time I already know whether I will or won't like the game I'm buying, having a reviewer confirm it doesn't really do me any good. If it's absolutely below what I was expecting, I can still enjoy it as the disappointment it is.

Honestly i never trusted any reviews, and always looked on youtube. BUT gbatemp indeed receives regularly FREE items to review, in other words so some of reviews here are indeed ''paid'' ones.

 

[Scarlet]

Honestly i never trusted any reviews, and always looked on youtube. BUT gbatemp indeed receives regularly FREE items to review, in other words so some of reviews here are indeed ''paid'' ones.

Yeah most of the games we get are from the publishers too but y'know, if a game's bad it's bad lol, same with hardware.

 

[Tom Bombadildo]

As a reviewer, I almost never use reviews alone as a criteria for whether I buy a game or not, simply because I find almost no reviewer has the same tastes as I do. If I'm hesitant on buying a game, I check gameplay videos (not shitty Lets Plays, actual gameplay videos), play a demo (if available), I'll read about the premise of the game on Wikipedia or whatever, if it's from a series or is commonly compared to another game I might check those as well. Reviews are usually the last thing I look at, if I do at all, and I usually read multiple ones if the game has a pretty varied score from multiple sites.

Though I often simply do the "try before I buy" approach, and just pirate the game to see if I like it. If I like it, great, I buy it. If I don't, no harm done, all I wasted was a couple hours of my time because I wasn't going to buy the game anyways. If more games had proper demos or if digital storefronts had better refund policies, then I probably wouldn't need to pirate them, but they don't so meh.

 

[PapaJohn2019]

hi, thanks for information

 

[Ryccardo]

A review, ie a subjective opinion piece on something, is perhaps one of the most pure applications of Free Speech - nobody forces you to read anyone's review, but if there's a sufficient number of them and you choose to read a randomly-picked large amount of them, you can get a fair idea of what it's going to be...

...now, pretending that said opinions can be reduced to numbers (on an inherently subjective scale), and even worse averaging said numbers - that ought to be made a crime like "abetting false advertising" or stuff like that

 

[Condarkness_XY]

I disregard completely. I play the game myself and form my own opinion.