The standards for video game reviews need to be higher – Reader’s Feature

A reader speaks of his love of reading and writing video game reviews but complains that they focus too much on informing and not enough on entertaining.

I love video game reviews and as a game reviewer myself, for a handful of websites, I feel that there is a tremendous expressive power in writing them and sticking a score on the end; a score which may mean absolutely nothing or absolutely everything to the audience, depending on how much stock they put into them and the review given. However, I tend to find a litany of issues with game reviews.

I find modern video game reviews are largely plain, with the sole intention to inform. Now, there’s nothing wrong with informing your audience about what you think of a game, as a review’s central intent is to inform the reader, reviewer, or listener depending on the way the review is being broadcast, but good writing entertains as well as informs – and many reviews fail to do that. When I read a review, I want the writing to immerse me and sweep me into using my imagination to display what the reviewer is conveying through his/her/their writing.

Judging by the Metascores, I think many critics are too soft with modern games, and some games are held high up on a pedestal above others, even though they have issues nobody talks about. I appreciate Zelda: Breath Of The Wild and Tears Of The Kingdom, but I personally think they both contain many off-putting mechanics that make them more of a chore to play than they should be, such as the durability systems and needing to change your clothes in accordance with the climate.

However, you wouldn’t be able to tell there are flaws with these games when all the critics throw praise at them like they’re revolutionary, which they really aren’t. They’re just evolutions of games that came before and to me they’re more unwelcomingly complex than they should be. And yes, I expect the comments section to flame me.

Game critics themselves are a wildly mixed bag. Some of them are great at expressing themselves and do so in their own style, like Jim Stephanie Sterling, Videogame Dunkey, and Ben ‘Yahtzee’ Croshaw, yet too many are predictable. I know everyone is after different things regarding game reviews and coverage, but many critics recycle the same information, and the results become dry and stale.

One website that I used to love a lot back in the day was GameTrailers, not only because I believe Brandon Jones has the best voice of anybody in video game media, but because the way reviews were edited expressed the opinion given. So you’d have a character in a game who says something that illustrates exactly what the critic thinks of the game. This can be done to hilarious effect and thus it’s what I think made GameTrailers stand out from all the other video game websites.

I also find that too many gamers attach themselves to IGN. They’re either commending it for giving scores to games they deem worthy or blasting them for giving a low score to a very popular and well-liked game.

Personally, I look for critics who I agree with and what with IGN having a huge pool of reviewers, it’s very hard to care about who’s writing the review at all. IGN is junk food video game journalism, where the audience only cares about the score at the end and the written content doesn’t have much reason to exist.

If gamers don’t like the score IGN dole out, then instead of finding critics they agree with they crusade and meme them because they’d rather acknowledge that IGN have a spell cast over them than use their senses to find more agreeable critics to follow.

In all, video game reviews are always great to anticipate, because they drive discussion about our wonderful hobby, but it would be nice if greater enthusiasm was expressed. Seeing a bunch of banal reviews recycled with the same informative spiel and lack of crackle is monotonous and derivative. We should always be reading/watching reviews that have the same enthusiasm as the games they’re formed around.

By reader James Davie

The reader’s features do not necessarily represent the views of GameCentral or Metro.

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