Reviews- do you listen to them?

acatfrommars

acatfrommars

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    • Seen Feb 5, 2023
    The dream job for many of us would be:

    a.) Get paid to play games
    b.) Get paid to make games
    c.) Get paid to review games

    So do you take reviews into account when looking for a game to get, or do you believe that the writers are nimwitted jargonists who'll give out high ratings for the top dollar?

    I don't buy many games, but I do admit to let reviews bias my opinion when I look for a game to buy. If its a game in a series and I loved its predecessors then I normally will buy the game even if the reviews are bad for the game.
     
    If its a franchise I love, no. I'll get the game anyway and make my own mind up.

    If its a game ive never played but I think sounds interesting, i'll read reviews for it and if they are completely terrible across the board i'd probably avoid.

    If they are great I still tend watch the first few parts of a lets play or something to see it in action so I can get a proper feel for it and make my own judgement because while they an be reviewed as great (and possibly deservedly so) it might turn out that its not really my thing.
     
    More or less. I highly prefer making my own mind about my games. I use them mostly to check if it runs well or if the "drawbacks" are worth it. It's not because a game has a high rating that I'll enjoy it, and it's not because someone told me it was utter crap that I won't enjoy it either.

    When I want game recs, I just tend to look for like-minded people.
     
    The problem with professional reviewers is that they're generally paid and given pre-release access by the publisher of a given game, generally more for the purpose of promotion than actual scrutinisation. By way of not biting the hand that feeds, most reviewers are... simply not critical. One should generally read a 6/10 score as 3/10.

    The only vidya critic I value is Yahtzee. He does more than Zero Punctuation, you see, but even ZP itself is as much the man's honest opinion as it is loquacious entertainment, and his take on matters tends to coincide with mine. Still, I don't ultimately refer to him for my own decision-making; there are some games I love that pretty much no one else does, so I don't take after anyone's word. If I look at something for only a minute and think I'd probably like it, it's almost always the case that I do. I think most people are capable of making this kind of judgement call for themselves, if they actually try.
     
    Reviews usually don't affect my purchases, no... unless I see that the game got really low averages across most review sites.

    With that said, I do still enjoy reading game reviews as a hobby. It's cool to play a game and then compare my opinions with someone else's.
     
    Eh... I can't say I do. If the fan reviews and the actual review matches up then it's worth taking into consideration but oftentimes the critics will hold a game higher than it actually is, or call it worse than it is. Maybe a good example of each phenomeon is CoD: Ghosts, which had a high critical review but low player reviews, and Pokemon Super Mystery Dungeon which has a normal review of 6.5 and fan reviews of around 8.75.
     
    Sometimes I do and sometimes I don't. It usually depends on the game I'm looking at.
     
    Sometimes they can be quite fun to read but I'll usually just buy a game without looking at them most of the time. I'm sure there are some good reviewers out there though so I don't completely ignore them.
     
    Nowadays, game reviews cannot be trusted, especially with the whole Zoe Quinn controversy. You've got AAA titles getting high review scores from critics only to get low scores from the gamers who played it due to how underwhelming and buggy they are (see the critic score and user score for Fallout 4 on Metacritic as an example), and it's the result of game companies paying reviewers to give these games high scores. The only game reviews we could trust are from Famitsu, but even they at one point were paid to give a game a high score. And the only company, according to one critic source, who never pays reviewers is Nintendo, because they just only care about how much fun the players are having with their games and have reviewers to do whatever they want with the score.
     
    Not very often.

    I tend to favor the "funny" reviews on Steam.
     
    Pinkie-Dawn said:
    And the only company, according to one critic source, who never pays reviewers is Nintendo,
    Click to expand...
    While I definitely agree with this, I would say the reasoning is different.
    It would be pointless. Nintendo has a solid fanbase that will buy their games no matter what. Nintendo does not need to appeal to casual players who are the most trusty towards reviews since they will obviously pick up some generic AAA game rather than something Nintendo does.
    So paying to get better reviews would be a waste of money.
     
    Nope. If anything I'll follow it's word of mouth by people who put some decent time into the game. Though if it's something like a weeb game, or anything else that's niche, I'll just ignore reviews altogether (since you essentially know what you're getting at that point.)
     
    No. I prefer youtube videos and advices my friends for me for that games which i never play. But sometimes i watch youtube reviaws ign gamespot and others.
     
    If I'm really unsure of a game, I'll watch a video first to get a better idea of what it is. That's usually all I need.

    I don't put a whole lot of weight on reviews. They just feel empty. Like, most of the popular franchises just get poo'd on for being "the same as every other game in the series," yet if it strays from that same old tried-and-true formula, it's "trying too hard to be different."
    And a lot of times reviews just don't match up with what I'm looking for. Take Sims 4 as an example; I read so many complaints that they removed several staple career tracks, that they removed toddlers, so on and so forth. But they all failed to mention the positives in those changes! There's a ton of stuff to unlock by advancing through in each individual career track. Sims 3 didn't have anything like that; Sims 2 did, but certainly not as many as 4 does. And skipping the toddler stage? Am I really the only one that was stoked to hear that my child could evolve into a self-maintaining 8-year-old on the very same day we came home from the hospital?! That was good news!


    All that said, lol, when I do look through reviews, there are a few specific things I'm looking for:

    If it's considered a bad PC port, I want to know why. Especially with how often "bad port" is thrown around. I can live with "PC controls are terrible, you need a gamepad." I cannot live with something like (unmodded; at least the community fixed this) DMC3 where the game is literally unplayable (framerate constantly tanks) unless you delete all the sound files.

    How many hours you'll average on it; if it's within my price preference of at least 1 hour playtime per $1. I can wait for a sale if a $60 game is only going to last me 20 hours. It's not just AAA titles, either. A lot of Indie devs are guilty of this, too, like making a 3-hour long game and charging $15.

    And specific to Early Access titles on Steam -- how long has it been out, are the devs actually giving it consistent updates, and do the devs acknowledge/respond to bug reports. Further, are the devs treating their customers well or are they assholes when they reply to forum posts and negative reviews.
     
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