Why You Shouldn't Trust Game Reviews

[Drone]

I just play what I want and what I like. "Old hardcore fans" will always complain about something, "new fans" will always praise new shit, paid reviewers will always spread lies, I just happily let it all fly over my head. I enjoyed Tomb Raider Angel of Darkness, Duke Nukem Forever and Metroid: Other M while the rest of the world complained lol why should I care.

 

[skizzo]

Game reviews are a difficult thing because so many games released have a lot of bugs and sometimes are completely broken. The reviwer can't know what might get patched later on so the reviewer just reviews how the game is on release. Only occasionally is a game given a follow up review after it's been patched and polished.

That's why I like to see a game tested, patched and polished before release but so many Publishers just want to rush them out the door and let the gamers do the beta testing.

Your comment about publisher rushing release dates and basically having end user gamers do the beta testing hits home with me. I absolutely love the Commandos series (besides the first person shooter version I never played) and Commandos 2 got a remaster recently called Commandos 2 HD Remastered. I played the beta which was open for almost 2months prior to release and gave lots of feedback and bug reports. The official launch left many bugs intact still. 2 patches in the first like 3 or 4 days fixed up a lot, a 3rd patch a week later made things better, and some worse lol, 4th patch made things better. The game is still getting lots of work to get to that fully polished state, but right now the game is far from what I would think any developer could honestly say they are overly proud of because of the lackluster launch. They are working pretty fast I think but honestly feels like they should have just pushed the launch date back say like 2 or 3 months and deliver an immaculate game. I really hope this new scenerio of basically using end user gamers as quality control does not become a trend. I do think the idea of open betas are AWESOME to get feedback and bug reports from the gamers who actually will play it, but they should supplement their own in house testing and QA, rather than put what seems to be all of it on the gamers. I also thought about this because of the original post discussing reviews. The Steam reviews of the game are basically a 50/50 split right now with the negative reviews focusing either on the bugs present at the start, or complaining about swatisika imagery being removed. I'd prefer to have the game not have any censorship like that, but my opinion is the game is still enjoyable whether or not there is a Nazi symbol on a banner or a soldiers sleeve, it doesn't make the game more or less fun. So i think this is a good example of how you need to take reviews with a grain of salt and adapt them to your own opinions and expectations.

 

[Regeneration]

By the way, Terminator Resistance features sex scenes .

 

[bug]

By the way, Terminator Resistance features sex scenes .

I should hope so. I mean, when a terminator shows up on your door, you're pretty much screwed, aren't you?

 

[DeathtoGnomes]

I should hope so. I mean, when a terminator shows up on your door, you're pretty much screwed, aren't you?

what a funny sex scene.

 

[dirtyferret]

I perform a research everytime I see a movie or buy a game.

If I see something like this:

View attachment 144528
I just imagine the worst and avoid.

This is not fair for both consumers, developer, and publisher of the game. Which in this case, look like small businesses.

It is a decent FPS with RPG elements, similar to BioShock, with an authentic Terminator environment.

I'm not sure what your complaint is about. Those reviews are what the people think of the game not what you think of the game. If I have ten professional restaurant reviewers rate the McDonalds Big Mac, it's probably going to get mediocre to bad reviews. You may love the Big Mac and eat one every other day.

 

[bug]

I'm not sure what your complaint is about. Those reviews are what the people think of the game not what you think of the game. If I have ten professional restaurant reviewers rate the McDonalds Big Mac, it's probably going to get mediocre to bad reviews. You may love the Big Mac and eat one every other day.

The complaint is about the reviews not being about what people actually think of the game, but about what they're "suggested" to emphasize. For example, reviews almost never talk about DRM, yet that is one polarizing aspect and one that ruins the experience on its own (tried to play any XBLA titles lately?).

 

[rtwjunkie]

I'm not sure what your complaint is about. Those reviews are what the people think of the game not what you think of the game. If I have ten professional restaurant reviewers rate the McDonalds Big Mac, it's probably going to get mediocre to bad reviews. You may love the Big Mac and eat one every other day.

The problem isn’t that HE liked the game. The problem is that gamers OVERWHELMINGLY like the game, illustrating that reviewers don’t have a clue.

 

[dirtyferret]

The problem isn’t that HE liked the game. The problem is that gamers OVERWHELMINGLY like the game, illustrating that reviewers don’t have a clue.

I'm reading the reviews and they are not overwhelmingly negative in fact pretty much all of them have something positive to say with most beating the game up on older graphics. Of the 13 reviews only IGN clearly trashes the game.

Here are some quotes from those reviewers who gave the game it's lowest scores
While Terminator : Resistance can be of some interest for the most die-hard fan of the IP thanks to it's clever use of the Future War storyline,

Terminator Resistance is a mediocre title. Gunplay in not so bad, but the game looks old and never offers engaging or exciting moments. Fun for a couple of hours and nothing more.

An unexpected surprise: Even with its old-fashioned visuals and storytelling you‘ll encounter quite a few tense moments in this stealth-charged Sci-Fi-shooter.

Terminator: Resistance is a scrappy little game with a lot of heart, ambition, and genuinely great design in parts. It definitely could’ve benefited from a more compelling latter half

So obviously the game has something going for it if the four lowest scores (minus IGN) praise parts of it.

Maybe it's me but I don't place a major value in an aggregated score but rather try to find reviewers who have similar tastes as me and actually read the review to see the pros and cons.

There are plenty of examples where user reviews will also trash a game for petty reasons that critics will defend with good scores.

 

[lexluthermiester]

I remember the world before www and before a game was all about the opening week-end: reviews were only to be found in magazines and the main way to hear about a good title was after it was released, through word of mouth from those that actually played it (and not for money).
Good thing we "evolved" past that.

Yes, yes! Good times right?

 

[Keullo-e]

I remember the world before www and before a game was all about the opening week-end: reviews were only to be found in magazines and the main way to hear about a good title was after it was released, through word of mouth from those that actually played it (and not for money).
Good thing we "evolved" past that.

THIS! I remember that I used to "pre-play" some PS1 games since my friend had a mod-chip and his dad burned a hella lot of games for him. So we could play many games months before they were released here on PAL region.

And about that, waiting for a game usually to be first released in Japan, then in North America and then in Europe... that's something I don't miss at all. That sucked as a console kid back in the day.

 

[Blitzr]

I would stay away from MetaCritic, or at least ParseHub/scrapy.Spider those reviews to highlight terms, set rules, negate outliers, etc. (read site TOS first!). Scraping reddit works well also. There's a really cool concept called word cloud, which works on the popularity of specific words and the size they represent in the cloud. If one aspect of your game you like is very popular like "replayability" then the word cloud should reveal how popular that term was.

I tend to focus on the 2-4 star (mid)game reviews and ignore the hate or fanboi feedback. But yea, don't listen to one person's review of a game, no one's that important.

 

[Regeneration]

The problem isn’t that HE liked the game. The problem is that gamers OVERWHELMINGLY like the game, illustrating that reviewers don’t have a clue.

Exactly this.

4.5/5 PlayStation Store
4.1/5 GOG
4.5/5 Microsoft Store
93/100 Steam

And yet it got trashed in most reviews.

 

[lexluthermiester]

Exactly this.

4.5/5 PlayStation Store
4.1/5 GOG
4.5/5 Microsoft Store
93/100 Steam

And yet it got trashed in most reviews.

The reviews from verified owners on GOG are mostly positive. User reviews on GOG are generally worth reading.