RandomNPC – Video Game RPG Reviews, Editorials, and Features

Numerous would be the number of editorials written about the nature and purpose of reviewing video games; countless, the number of words. The token truism is that on the one hand, a factual breakdown of a game’s mechanics – its controls, its visual style and the quality of its presentation – is necessary to inform the reader, but on the other hand a reviewer’s own tilt can and usually does influence their opinion. Tiresome button-mashing in a fighting game, endless grinding in a role-playing game, constant shooting in, of all things, a first-person shooter; few are the games that don’t have a deal-breaker for somebody, and so even the best review is anything but the final word.

This isn’t about what constitutes a good review, so much as one way of looking at how reviews are still useful. And yet there is more to the argument, but let’s focus on this point first.

A review of anything is partially a gamble. The reviewer from Slotsformoney.com is banking that the game is going to be intuitive and relatively easy to get into; relative, of course, to its genre. The reviewer hopes that their review copy isn’t going to be fatally bugged, or their PC or console isn’t going to keel over at the wrong moment, because they may not know which was the true culprit. And so on, and so forth. And as with gambling, as with any kind of entertainment, one person’s experience is not going to be exactly like another’s. Similar, perhaps, but not exact.

However, reviews aren’t entirely chance. As with movies, television and books, with video games the product doesn’t change. We’re all playing the same game and we’ll all see the same things. So it is that a reviewer will mix the truth with a truth; the facts of the game with how those facts appeared to them. The wise player is one who doesn’t take any single reviewer’s word for gospel, though a reputable reviewer’s word may carry more weight than others.

For gauging subjective appeal, reviews become more useful collectively. Sources like Metacritic and Gamerankings provide an effective, if simplistic, overview of a game’s quality by combining those individual experiences. Obviously, these carry the flaw of averaging out different review scales (3 out of 5 versus 72% versus 7/10, for instance), as well as the problem of what each site considers ‘average’ (be it 3/5, 50%, or the school-inspired 7/10 or better). Still, if a single reviewer struggles with the controls, that may be balanced out by the vast majority managing just fine. Likewise, if several articles mention serious performance problems and framerate drops, it’s reasonable to assume there is objectively something wrong with the game.

One could go into greater detail, but the core point is that reviews, like the games they cover, are most useful in the context of other reviews. This is nice, safe, and logically sound position, and there’s little reason for a player not to take this to heart.

But, as was said earlier, there is more to the argument.

What isn’t always covered in a review is a game’s broader appeal; that is, how well a player not familiar with the genre will fare. What’s intuitive to someone born and raised on Quake deathmatches may have an RPG player struggling to keep the target in sight. Said Quakeworld veteran might get stomped on the easiest setting in a real-time strategy game because they don’t know how to stop a rush or protect worker units. The RTS fan, in turn, may be booed off the virtual stage of a rhythm game, and so on across the gaming spectrum.

In this respect even the entire body of reviews can become useless; that 93.2% for Halo 3 on Gamerankings is meaningless to someone that can’t get a handle on a shooters as a rule. Company of Heroes scored even higher on average, but the game’s controls can easily confound those not used to Relic’s Dawn of War games, to say nothing of non-RTS players. Even games which attempt to straddle genres – our Blurring the Line segments, for instance – will often be met with confusion and frustration by people not accustomed to either genre. System Shock 2 may well and truly deserve its 92% (and it does), but a few people might not enjoy being unable to pick up a rifle and start blasting from the get-go.

It can seem that an invidual reviewer is only as trustworthy as the degree to which they make their biases known. And yet there is merit in reviews; single reviews can truthfully tell of a game’s nuts and bolts, while collective reviews speak of the “average” experience. To study reviews is to engage in a statistics lesson, the theme of which is this: a game is almost never too good or too bad for a second opinion.