We get these about once a week, but usually the person critisizing doesn't offer up their own solutions. I try to fix that.
People like to read reviews, they're an essential part of the research process before spending your well earned money. Someone else has already taken the time and money to try the product and see if it works for them, so you don't have to find out the hard way that you've made a stupid decision. In the game industry reviews play an integral part as fanboys use it for forum fodder, but more importantly they give guidance to people who may be on the edge about a particular title. However, reviews have become bloated and confusing with their value in helping people diminishing considerably. I would like state that I'm referring to sites that are targeting a broader audience, the IGNs and Gamespots of the world, many of the following issues don't apply to niche sites with a very well defined audience. Reviews still have a use to determine if a game is horribly awful and should be avoided at all costs, or if it's a landmark release in the industry that everybody should check out. In that gooey middle is where the difficulty comes into play where the game is pretty good, but has some flaws so it's difficult to outright recommend.
At this point I don't even read reviews anymore, people have just focused entirely on the 2-digit numbers, and maybe the bullet point quick notes. If it's a title I'm interested in then I'll usually go that extra step and read the opening and closing paragraphs. And honestly, that's usually enough to know everything I want to out of what the reviewer is trying to say.
In the course of this analysis I'm going to use a title that fits this mold very well, a newly released RPG by Ubisoft, and developed by From Software for the 360 titled Enchanted Arms. I'll be looking at 4 different website reviews.
Casual: Yahoo Games (3/5)
Platform Specific: TeamXbox (7.8/10)
The Standards: IGN (7.6/10) and Gamespot (7.1/10)
What the hell is a review anyway?
Are modern game reviews a recommendation? a fact sheet? a critique? In many cases it's all three, and that's why they're so long and confusing. Each one of these kinds of editorial content serves a very different purpose and should be split apart into separate pieces, with reviews taking on the recommendation role. Reviews should answer the question: Should I buy this game?
Now the problem for writers and why reviews have come to this state, is that a review is many times the only source of information a person has concerning a specific game. The writer can't assume the reader has been following the site's coverage, reading the previews, checking out the E3 hands-on etc. So the review has to become this definite piece of writing that encompasses almost all the site's written information about the title. However, for people that do know about the game all this superfluous information makes reading the review overly annoying.
If you look at any one of those four reviews you'll see a large portion of the text dedicated towards spelling out the game's storyline, and going through all the gameplay mechanics in excruciating detail. To this level, how the game plays is a very different question to is the game good. At maximum one paragraph, near the beginning, should be used to spell out what the game is about at a high level from both a presentation/story perspective and gameplay sense. Heck, you could probably do it in one sentence: Part Final Fantasy, part Pokemon, Enchanted Arms is a traditional turn-based RPG with the familiar story of saving the world. Is that an entirely accurate description? Of course not, but it doesn't matter, it gets the main points across, and the rest of the details should be spelled out in a separate piece, or even a sidebar; this has the effect of giving that extra information to interested parties without hindering the quality of the piece to folks already familiar with the game.
Reviews should be focused, specific, and at the end the reader should come away with the certain knowledge that the writer does or does not recommend purchasing the game.
6.8 by any other name
I'm not the first one to talk about game reviews and how to fix them. Review scores have always been a contentious point, with some publications doing away with them entirely, and then bringing them back after reader backlash. Every site and magazine has their own point system, maybe it's base 10, maybe it goes up to a 100, maybe they divide that score by 100 so it becomes a percent, and some of these things go to 3 significant digits! I mean is there really a difference between a 75.6 title and 75.7? This inconsistency is precisely why metareview sites like Gamerankings and Metacritic have been created, to give a standardized and cohesive number for the quality of a game.
The other problem with scores is that every publication has their own policy regarding the number scheme. In the past IGN was faulted for reviewing too easily, platform specific sites like TeamXbox usually skew higher as well. Then you have magazines like Edge which are notorious for having relatively low scores simply because how they assign scores is a completely different way than most places. And this comes down to the basic question, what does a review score really mean? In the case of Enchanted ArmsWhat does it mean when IGN gives a game 7.6? Or Gamespot gives a 7.1? All of the scores are similar to one another so that makes things a bit easier, the worst is when scores are widely divergent even among the same publication which often happens in EGM, but we're in that middle range so I haven't really gained anything. It's not horrible, and it's not AAA, so should I pick up the game or not? I'm still firmly on that fence! In this case the score is almost entirely useless, and this is true for every score between the 6-8 range. In the 6s the game probably has some big problems, but maybe I'll like the positives so much I can overlook them, and vice versa for an 8 game. This has happened to me many times before with games like GunValkyrie.
The other question arises which is related to the previous section, does the review score represent how Good a game is, or how much the reviewer recommends the game? A game could be very good or very bad, but since the reviewer hates or loves that genre or style of game will modify the score accordingly. Again, it's only in the extreme cases where a game transcends a reviewer's bias and tastes that the score becomes a helpful guide.
Now I'm not suggesting that we do away with scores entirely. Too many people have too much fun arguing about them, and numbers to have a place in the game evaluating realm, but they should be used within the proper context. Recommendations should follow a simple thumbs-up, thumbs-down mechanic (maybe not that exactly as those jolly fellows in the balcony could have some IP protection there), a black and white line in the sand where the reviewer says "Yes I would buy this with my own money", not "I think you should buy this". Which brings me to my next point
Reviews should be personal
In this identity-crisis ridden society most people are still finding themselves, let alone knowing what other people are like. Don't write about what you think your audience will like because you just don't know, and trying to write for that elusive phantom audience is next to impossible. Add onto that your own tastes and bias into the mix and the result is a confused and befuddled mess. Write entirely from your own perspective, and what your own thoughts are about the game. Whenever a controversial review comes up the defense is always raised that it's an opinion, but when a niche game is given a lower score, the defense that they're writing for a mainstream audience is given. You can't have it both ways, and it confuses everyone. Stick to what you know, which is what you like and enjoy, each reviewer independent, not even a total editorial policy. What will happen is that people will start to gravitate towards those reviewers that they agree with and share similar tastes.
Two reviewers who are very good at this are Roger Ebert and Tommy Tallarico. In the movie space I know that I can't fully trust Ebert's opinions because he enjoys different movies than I do. We do have some similar tastes though, so if he recommends a movie I'm more likely to check it out. My knowledge of Ebert as a person affects how I read his reviews. Same goes for Tallarico. Tommy gets a lot of hate for his opinions, because he has a lot of them, and they're very strong, but the great thing about Tallarico is that you know exactly where he stands. He's not ashamed to admit that he loves action games, loves big sights and sounds and more mature themes and content, he's also not a big fan of Nintendo games. When I'm watching Reviews on the Run and a Nintendo game comes up then most of the time I know he's not going to think too highly of it. There are two consequences to this: 1. If you're a Nintendo fan, then why in the world would you ever listen to Tallarico? Your tastes are going to be very divergent, so you're not going to go to him for a recommendation, and 2. If Tallarico scores a Nintendo game very well then that raises my interest because it has to be something really special to overcome his taste.
Reviewers should be known people, they should be personalities that we're familiar with and can trust. The most important piece of information is what kind of games the reviewer usually likes. This can be easily done in a byline (you'll catch Jon playing Culdecept on his breaks). Website reviews should also have a link to the reviewers bio page, Yahoo and TeamXbox completely fail in this, IGN and Gamespot link to the reviewer's blog. Unfortunately, looking at the blogs there's not too much information about what kind of games those people like, I know it's available by looking at their lists, but it's still a bit too difficult to find. Front and Centre is what I'm talking about.
When a review becomes something personal, creating a recommendation becomes very easy. All you have to do is answer one question Would I buy this with my own money and play it? If the answer is a yes, then you recommend, easy as that. After we buy and play a game it's easy to feel happy we made the purchase, or feel the sting of buyer's regret. Reviewers have the luxury of not having to feel that second one since they usually don't pay for their games, for the ones that do, well it's really easy, and the ones that don't will know if they would have. If the reviewer won't have buyer's regret, and the reader has similar tastes to the reviewer, then it's very likely that the reader won't have buyer's regret either. It's a very simple but effective formula.
Make effective comparisons
In this world of recommendation reviewers have to remember that people's time and money are limited, so if a superior offering is available then that gives less of a reason to recommend a game. But where do you draw the line? Does it make sense to reference some classic title that was released 10 years ago on the Neo Geo? Does it make sense to reference games from another genre? what about another platform? This last one is particularly important in the case of Enchanted Arms. This title is the second RPG to be released for the 360, and the first eastern styled one. Being the first game of its kind for a particular platform is very important because there is no real competition to compare against. In the Yahoo review the writer starts referencing a host of PS2 rpgs, but for someone that doesn't have a PS2 this kind of comparison is entirely irrelevant. And if they do have a PS2, and are a fan of eastern RPGs it's pretty darn likely they're already aware of those other titles, and probably own or plan to own them. Making comparisons to illustrate a point or idea is fine (as long as they're not too esoteric and obscure) but when the comparison starts affecting the recommendation is where you have to be careful.
My proposal: comparisons that affect a recommendation should be limited to games that are available on the same platform as the reviewed title, in the same genre, and released within a two month timespan, before or after the review date.
I've already outlined why comparisons between platforms should not be made, they're not useful to the reader and they only serve to flame useless arguments that pollute discussion boards around the net. Genre should be pretty self-explanatory, it's a matter of keeping things to an apples-apples level, because as soon as you start referencing different kinds of games it introduces too many possibilities to consider, which is not what you want to do when guiding your readers. Timespan is the important one that I want to focus one. The influence of a game's existence from a recommendation standpoint decreases over time as more time passes, more people will have picked up the game and already played it. This doesn't happen in any of the Enchanted Arms reviews, but I've read more than my fair share of times "stay way from X and pick up Y instead." Well you know what, I've already picked up Y, played the hell out of it and looking for something else now. However, when the review is written if there's another game that is incredible that's on the same platform and in the same genre is just released it can be very difficult to recommend the review title. I'm sure this was the case with Ghost Recon 2 and Halo 2, both released in November 2004. Ghost Recon 2 is probably a pretty good game, but with a title like Halo 2 coming out at the same time, it's very difficult for a reviewer to recommend it.
Gamers aren't Reviewers
I know I just said that reviewers should write for themselves, but it's writing for themselves as a gamer and not as an industry professional. The way a person plays a game when it's done for leisurely enjoyment is very different from how you play when it's your job and you have a deadline. There are some significant ways that a reviewer plays a game different than the average gamer which they must keep in mind when forming their opinion
Reviewers have very long play sessions - so that the review can come out in time reviewers, who actually play a game to completion, usually just grind away through a game as quickly as possible. The process and mindset of playing the game revolves entirely around how to finish it in the shortest way possible, it's extremely difficult for someone in this situation to sit back and actually enjoy what they're playing. For most linear games this isn't a big deal, but for adventure games this has a strong impact on the reviewer's opinion since a majority of the game experience revolves around taking your time and exploring the game world. Even with action games, a large part of the enjoyment factor can come about when playing the game on higher difficulty levels and playing the game in a more hardcore, perfectionist way. With the introduction of Xbox Achievements, and PS3's Entitlements this kind of experimental gaming is become more prevalent, and these things that reviewers currently don't have the time to fully explore and flesh out.
The other thing that often gets overlooked by game reviewers is the way games guide the player. Because reviewers play in long sessions they never really have to remember what they're doing since there's no big breaks between sessions. With normal people with lives and jobs, there can be days, or even weeks before you can get back into a game, and at that point the way the game reminds you of what you were doing, and how easy it is to get back into things is extremely important. In every Enchanted Arms review example there's not a single one that address this point, and in an RPG it's incredibly important. They all state how there's a Save Anywhere feature but that's it, no mention of objective system, or reminders or anything.
Gimped multiplayer - oftentimes reviewers have access to games before their release, so that they can publish the review on the game's release date so people know if it's something they should pick up. This is even more true with magazine publications as the lead times are much longer. For multiplayer games this results in reviewers having access to a special preview area of multiplayer games where they can get a feel for the experience. The problem with this approach is that the pre-release multiplayer is usually vastly different from post-release multiplayer, for a number of reasons. One of the big reasons is that there's not a lot of people playing. When a lot of people are playing a game there's an optimization process that occurs very rapidly where imbalances in the game are exposed and spread incredibly quickly. This results in everybody using the same characters, or the same weapons over and over which can make the multiplayer very boring. These imbalances can't be exposed pre-release due to the limited number of people playing, so reviews usually miss them.
The other aspect of multiplayer that is woefully underrepresented in reviews is in the act of matchmaking itself. Writers will usually setup a multiplayer session, maybe with another publication, maybe with the publisher or developer themselves to test out and play the multiplayer portion of the game. The problem with this approach is that the reviewer never experiences what can be a large source of time and frustration for gamers and that's in the act of finding a game itself. Most of the Enchanted Arms reviews mentioned the multiplayer side of the game, but none of them talked about how easy it was to find a game. Are you going to spend a lot of time waiting? Is it easy to get into a game? Can you join games in progress, or do you have to keep waiting after you've joined a game? All of these answers matter because they can translate into minutes and hours of boringness for the player when they try to get into a game. Games that make it easy to find and get in quick, or at least give you something to do other than looking at some stupid text on the screen while you wait, should be rewarded with games that handle the process poorly suffering for it.
Focus on the whole experience
People sense the world in parallel, simultaneously. They don't see, and then hear, and then play. If the user experience is a holistic one, then don't artificially segment and pick apart a game into arbitrary classifications like Sound, Graphics, Presentation, Gameplay. It's silly, unsophisticated and doesn't provide much use to readers. What writers should be focusing on is the emotional experience of the game. What emotions do you feel when you're playing the game? Is it frustration? Excitement? Amusement? Competition? Games are about creating emotional responses in the player, hopefully more positive than negative, and it's this criteria that games should be judged upon, not stupid techno-babble about lighting and textures. IGN is pretty notorious for this kind of segmentation, so I'll pick on them a bit here. This is an excerpt from their Enchanted Arms review: "The graphics in Enchanted Arms are, for the most part, beautiful. Most notable are the use of lighting, particle effects and golem style. Nearly everything in the game is infused with some shifting lights, making for unique world flair. The real impressive visuals come during the battles. The small animations each character has look great in high definition, and the particle effects during fights are quite impressive. EX attacks, the equivalent of summon spells, are the most spectacular of all with swirling lights and well directed camera work."
We get a lot of talk about visual effects, particle effects, etc, but not a single statement about the emotional qualities those things induce. This kind of talk extends into the next paragraph with only one sentence between the two referencing an emotion of any kind. It's ridiculous. Visual effects can fill you with a sense of beauty, wonder or excitement, audio can shake your bones and creep you out, gameplay can get you determined and involved. All of these things work together, and should be taken together. They do deserve mentioning, but in the context of how they affect the emotional experience. If the music is extremely well done and is very uplifting, go ahead and mention that, if there are some beautiful vistas that are just great to look at, make a note of it. On the other end, if the sound effects are poorly done and take away from the experience, let the reader know as well. But don't just say things for the sake of saying them. Don't talk about graphics just because you have to, and because it's in every other review. It makes the reviews come off as so sterile and forced and unenjoyable to read.
Original article here
People like to read reviews, they're an essential part of the research process before spending your well earned money. Someone else has already taken the time and money to try the product and see if it works for them, so you don't have to find out the hard way that you've made a stupid decision. In the game industry reviews play an integral part as fanboys use it for forum fodder, but more importantly they give guidance to people who may be on the edge about a particular title. However, reviews have become bloated and confusing with their value in helping people diminishing considerably. I would like state that I'm referring to sites that are targeting a broader audience, the IGNs and Gamespots of the world, many of the following issues don't apply to niche sites with a very well defined audience. Reviews still have a use to determine if a game is horribly awful and should be avoided at all costs, or if it's a landmark release in the industry that everybody should check out. In that gooey middle is where the difficulty comes into play where the game is pretty good, but has some flaws so it's difficult to outright recommend.
At this point I don't even read reviews anymore, people have just focused entirely on the 2-digit numbers, and maybe the bullet point quick notes. If it's a title I'm interested in then I'll usually go that extra step and read the opening and closing paragraphs. And honestly, that's usually enough to know everything I want to out of what the reviewer is trying to say.
In the course of this analysis I'm going to use a title that fits this mold very well, a newly released RPG by Ubisoft, and developed by From Software for the 360 titled Enchanted Arms. I'll be looking at 4 different website reviews.
Casual: Yahoo Games (3/5)
Platform Specific: TeamXbox (7.8/10)
The Standards: IGN (7.6/10) and Gamespot (7.1/10)
What the hell is a review anyway?
Are modern game reviews a recommendation? a fact sheet? a critique? In many cases it's all three, and that's why they're so long and confusing. Each one of these kinds of editorial content serves a very different purpose and should be split apart into separate pieces, with reviews taking on the recommendation role. Reviews should answer the question: Should I buy this game?
Now the problem for writers and why reviews have come to this state, is that a review is many times the only source of information a person has concerning a specific game. The writer can't assume the reader has been following the site's coverage, reading the previews, checking out the E3 hands-on etc. So the review has to become this definite piece of writing that encompasses almost all the site's written information about the title. However, for people that do know about the game all this superfluous information makes reading the review overly annoying.
If you look at any one of those four reviews you'll see a large portion of the text dedicated towards spelling out the game's storyline, and going through all the gameplay mechanics in excruciating detail. To this level, how the game plays is a very different question to is the game good. At maximum one paragraph, near the beginning, should be used to spell out what the game is about at a high level from both a presentation/story perspective and gameplay sense. Heck, you could probably do it in one sentence: Part Final Fantasy, part Pokemon, Enchanted Arms is a traditional turn-based RPG with the familiar story of saving the world. Is that an entirely accurate description? Of course not, but it doesn't matter, it gets the main points across, and the rest of the details should be spelled out in a separate piece, or even a sidebar; this has the effect of giving that extra information to interested parties without hindering the quality of the piece to folks already familiar with the game.
Reviews should be focused, specific, and at the end the reader should come away with the certain knowledge that the writer does or does not recommend purchasing the game.
6.8 by any other name
I'm not the first one to talk about game reviews and how to fix them. Review scores have always been a contentious point, with some publications doing away with them entirely, and then bringing them back after reader backlash. Every site and magazine has their own point system, maybe it's base 10, maybe it goes up to a 100, maybe they divide that score by 100 so it becomes a percent, and some of these things go to 3 significant digits! I mean is there really a difference between a 75.6 title and 75.7? This inconsistency is precisely why metareview sites like Gamerankings and Metacritic have been created, to give a standardized and cohesive number for the quality of a game.
The other problem with scores is that every publication has their own policy regarding the number scheme. In the past IGN was faulted for reviewing too easily, platform specific sites like TeamXbox usually skew higher as well. Then you have magazines like Edge which are notorious for having relatively low scores simply because how they assign scores is a completely different way than most places. And this comes down to the basic question, what does a review score really mean? In the case of Enchanted ArmsWhat does it mean when IGN gives a game 7.6? Or Gamespot gives a 7.1? All of the scores are similar to one another so that makes things a bit easier, the worst is when scores are widely divergent even among the same publication which often happens in EGM, but we're in that middle range so I haven't really gained anything. It's not horrible, and it's not AAA, so should I pick up the game or not? I'm still firmly on that fence! In this case the score is almost entirely useless, and this is true for every score between the 6-8 range. In the 6s the game probably has some big problems, but maybe I'll like the positives so much I can overlook them, and vice versa for an 8 game. This has happened to me many times before with games like GunValkyrie.
The other question arises which is related to the previous section, does the review score represent how Good a game is, or how much the reviewer recommends the game? A game could be very good or very bad, but since the reviewer hates or loves that genre or style of game will modify the score accordingly. Again, it's only in the extreme cases where a game transcends a reviewer's bias and tastes that the score becomes a helpful guide.
Now I'm not suggesting that we do away with scores entirely. Too many people have too much fun arguing about them, and numbers to have a place in the game evaluating realm, but they should be used within the proper context. Recommendations should follow a simple thumbs-up, thumbs-down mechanic (maybe not that exactly as those jolly fellows in the balcony could have some IP protection there), a black and white line in the sand where the reviewer says "Yes I would buy this with my own money", not "I think you should buy this". Which brings me to my next point
Reviews should be personal
In this identity-crisis ridden society most people are still finding themselves, let alone knowing what other people are like. Don't write about what you think your audience will like because you just don't know, and trying to write for that elusive phantom audience is next to impossible. Add onto that your own tastes and bias into the mix and the result is a confused and befuddled mess. Write entirely from your own perspective, and what your own thoughts are about the game. Whenever a controversial review comes up the defense is always raised that it's an opinion, but when a niche game is given a lower score, the defense that they're writing for a mainstream audience is given. You can't have it both ways, and it confuses everyone. Stick to what you know, which is what you like and enjoy, each reviewer independent, not even a total editorial policy. What will happen is that people will start to gravitate towards those reviewers that they agree with and share similar tastes.
Two reviewers who are very good at this are Roger Ebert and Tommy Tallarico. In the movie space I know that I can't fully trust Ebert's opinions because he enjoys different movies than I do. We do have some similar tastes though, so if he recommends a movie I'm more likely to check it out. My knowledge of Ebert as a person affects how I read his reviews. Same goes for Tallarico. Tommy gets a lot of hate for his opinions, because he has a lot of them, and they're very strong, but the great thing about Tallarico is that you know exactly where he stands. He's not ashamed to admit that he loves action games, loves big sights and sounds and more mature themes and content, he's also not a big fan of Nintendo games. When I'm watching Reviews on the Run and a Nintendo game comes up then most of the time I know he's not going to think too highly of it. There are two consequences to this: 1. If you're a Nintendo fan, then why in the world would you ever listen to Tallarico? Your tastes are going to be very divergent, so you're not going to go to him for a recommendation, and 2. If Tallarico scores a Nintendo game very well then that raises my interest because it has to be something really special to overcome his taste.
Reviewers should be known people, they should be personalities that we're familiar with and can trust. The most important piece of information is what kind of games the reviewer usually likes. This can be easily done in a byline (you'll catch Jon playing Culdecept on his breaks). Website reviews should also have a link to the reviewers bio page, Yahoo and TeamXbox completely fail in this, IGN and Gamespot link to the reviewer's blog. Unfortunately, looking at the blogs there's not too much information about what kind of games those people like, I know it's available by looking at their lists, but it's still a bit too difficult to find. Front and Centre is what I'm talking about.
When a review becomes something personal, creating a recommendation becomes very easy. All you have to do is answer one question Would I buy this with my own money and play it? If the answer is a yes, then you recommend, easy as that. After we buy and play a game it's easy to feel happy we made the purchase, or feel the sting of buyer's regret. Reviewers have the luxury of not having to feel that second one since they usually don't pay for their games, for the ones that do, well it's really easy, and the ones that don't will know if they would have. If the reviewer won't have buyer's regret, and the reader has similar tastes to the reviewer, then it's very likely that the reader won't have buyer's regret either. It's a very simple but effective formula.
Make effective comparisons
In this world of recommendation reviewers have to remember that people's time and money are limited, so if a superior offering is available then that gives less of a reason to recommend a game. But where do you draw the line? Does it make sense to reference some classic title that was released 10 years ago on the Neo Geo? Does it make sense to reference games from another genre? what about another platform? This last one is particularly important in the case of Enchanted Arms. This title is the second RPG to be released for the 360, and the first eastern styled one. Being the first game of its kind for a particular platform is very important because there is no real competition to compare against. In the Yahoo review the writer starts referencing a host of PS2 rpgs, but for someone that doesn't have a PS2 this kind of comparison is entirely irrelevant. And if they do have a PS2, and are a fan of eastern RPGs it's pretty darn likely they're already aware of those other titles, and probably own or plan to own them. Making comparisons to illustrate a point or idea is fine (as long as they're not too esoteric and obscure) but when the comparison starts affecting the recommendation is where you have to be careful.
My proposal: comparisons that affect a recommendation should be limited to games that are available on the same platform as the reviewed title, in the same genre, and released within a two month timespan, before or after the review date.
I've already outlined why comparisons between platforms should not be made, they're not useful to the reader and they only serve to flame useless arguments that pollute discussion boards around the net. Genre should be pretty self-explanatory, it's a matter of keeping things to an apples-apples level, because as soon as you start referencing different kinds of games it introduces too many possibilities to consider, which is not what you want to do when guiding your readers. Timespan is the important one that I want to focus one. The influence of a game's existence from a recommendation standpoint decreases over time as more time passes, more people will have picked up the game and already played it. This doesn't happen in any of the Enchanted Arms reviews, but I've read more than my fair share of times "stay way from X and pick up Y instead." Well you know what, I've already picked up Y, played the hell out of it and looking for something else now. However, when the review is written if there's another game that is incredible that's on the same platform and in the same genre is just released it can be very difficult to recommend the review title. I'm sure this was the case with Ghost Recon 2 and Halo 2, both released in November 2004. Ghost Recon 2 is probably a pretty good game, but with a title like Halo 2 coming out at the same time, it's very difficult for a reviewer to recommend it.
Gamers aren't Reviewers
I know I just said that reviewers should write for themselves, but it's writing for themselves as a gamer and not as an industry professional. The way a person plays a game when it's done for leisurely enjoyment is very different from how you play when it's your job and you have a deadline. There are some significant ways that a reviewer plays a game different than the average gamer which they must keep in mind when forming their opinion
Reviewers have very long play sessions - so that the review can come out in time reviewers, who actually play a game to completion, usually just grind away through a game as quickly as possible. The process and mindset of playing the game revolves entirely around how to finish it in the shortest way possible, it's extremely difficult for someone in this situation to sit back and actually enjoy what they're playing. For most linear games this isn't a big deal, but for adventure games this has a strong impact on the reviewer's opinion since a majority of the game experience revolves around taking your time and exploring the game world. Even with action games, a large part of the enjoyment factor can come about when playing the game on higher difficulty levels and playing the game in a more hardcore, perfectionist way. With the introduction of Xbox Achievements, and PS3's Entitlements this kind of experimental gaming is become more prevalent, and these things that reviewers currently don't have the time to fully explore and flesh out.
The other thing that often gets overlooked by game reviewers is the way games guide the player. Because reviewers play in long sessions they never really have to remember what they're doing since there's no big breaks between sessions. With normal people with lives and jobs, there can be days, or even weeks before you can get back into a game, and at that point the way the game reminds you of what you were doing, and how easy it is to get back into things is extremely important. In every Enchanted Arms review example there's not a single one that address this point, and in an RPG it's incredibly important. They all state how there's a Save Anywhere feature but that's it, no mention of objective system, or reminders or anything.
Gimped multiplayer - oftentimes reviewers have access to games before their release, so that they can publish the review on the game's release date so people know if it's something they should pick up. This is even more true with magazine publications as the lead times are much longer. For multiplayer games this results in reviewers having access to a special preview area of multiplayer games where they can get a feel for the experience. The problem with this approach is that the pre-release multiplayer is usually vastly different from post-release multiplayer, for a number of reasons. One of the big reasons is that there's not a lot of people playing. When a lot of people are playing a game there's an optimization process that occurs very rapidly where imbalances in the game are exposed and spread incredibly quickly. This results in everybody using the same characters, or the same weapons over and over which can make the multiplayer very boring. These imbalances can't be exposed pre-release due to the limited number of people playing, so reviews usually miss them.
The other aspect of multiplayer that is woefully underrepresented in reviews is in the act of matchmaking itself. Writers will usually setup a multiplayer session, maybe with another publication, maybe with the publisher or developer themselves to test out and play the multiplayer portion of the game. The problem with this approach is that the reviewer never experiences what can be a large source of time and frustration for gamers and that's in the act of finding a game itself. Most of the Enchanted Arms reviews mentioned the multiplayer side of the game, but none of them talked about how easy it was to find a game. Are you going to spend a lot of time waiting? Is it easy to get into a game? Can you join games in progress, or do you have to keep waiting after you've joined a game? All of these answers matter because they can translate into minutes and hours of boringness for the player when they try to get into a game. Games that make it easy to find and get in quick, or at least give you something to do other than looking at some stupid text on the screen while you wait, should be rewarded with games that handle the process poorly suffering for it.
Focus on the whole experience
People sense the world in parallel, simultaneously. They don't see, and then hear, and then play. If the user experience is a holistic one, then don't artificially segment and pick apart a game into arbitrary classifications like Sound, Graphics, Presentation, Gameplay. It's silly, unsophisticated and doesn't provide much use to readers. What writers should be focusing on is the emotional experience of the game. What emotions do you feel when you're playing the game? Is it frustration? Excitement? Amusement? Competition? Games are about creating emotional responses in the player, hopefully more positive than negative, and it's this criteria that games should be judged upon, not stupid techno-babble about lighting and textures. IGN is pretty notorious for this kind of segmentation, so I'll pick on them a bit here. This is an excerpt from their Enchanted Arms review: "The graphics in Enchanted Arms are, for the most part, beautiful. Most notable are the use of lighting, particle effects and golem style. Nearly everything in the game is infused with some shifting lights, making for unique world flair. The real impressive visuals come during the battles. The small animations each character has look great in high definition, and the particle effects during fights are quite impressive. EX attacks, the equivalent of summon spells, are the most spectacular of all with swirling lights and well directed camera work."
We get a lot of talk about visual effects, particle effects, etc, but not a single statement about the emotional qualities those things induce. This kind of talk extends into the next paragraph with only one sentence between the two referencing an emotion of any kind. It's ridiculous. Visual effects can fill you with a sense of beauty, wonder or excitement, audio can shake your bones and creep you out, gameplay can get you determined and involved. All of these things work together, and should be taken together. They do deserve mentioning, but in the context of how they affect the emotional experience. If the music is extremely well done and is very uplifting, go ahead and mention that, if there are some beautiful vistas that are just great to look at, make a note of it. On the other end, if the sound effects are poorly done and take away from the experience, let the reader know as well. But don't just say things for the sake of saying them. Don't talk about graphics just because you have to, and because it's in every other review. It makes the reviews come off as so sterile and forced and unenjoyable to read.
Original article here
