I know there have been a lot of comments and posts bashing him, criticizng him and accusing him of many things, but honestly, he's one of my favorite reviewers of this era and he's bringing journalism in gaming in the right direction.
I like Tom because he gives his unique, personal and original opinion rather than just saying what people want to hear. It's always okay for gamer to say that they don't like or don't love a game that's extremely popular. It hasn't been very acceptable for a critic to do so. This could explain why GTA IV got a perfect 10 from most critics, yet lots players hate it. Kevin VanOrd said that the job of a critic isn't to be a mirror of the reader's opinions but rather a portal to the writer's perspective, and I wholeheartedly agree.
Basically, there's a mentality that just because a series is popular, or the game has a giant budget, that it's automatically entitled to a 9. It just seems to me that if someone were to give a game from the Halo or Half-Life series an 8 out of 10, the response would be "oh, why didn't you like it", but if someone were to give an 8 to an Indie game, the response would be "wow, you must love it". I don't understand the double standard.
This degree intolerance for scores under a 9 didn't exist back in the 90's. Gamespot gave Majora's Mask an 8.3 about 14 years ago. Had Majora's Mask been given that score now, there would have been a huge rage.
The fact that him assigning a score between 7 and 9 for a game that is loved by most other critics doesn't make him untrustworthy. In fact, I think it makes him more trustworthy. Though, if you believe he deliberately gives games lower scores just to attract views and the high scores he gives are simply token concessions from industry pressure, go ahead and believe that. If you want to believe he's a Microsoft fanboy, when he gave all 3 Uncharted games 9+ and constantly bashed the Xbox One on twitter, go ahead. If McShea just buffed all his scores to please you, would that make him more honest?
With The Last of Us, I agree that the video review was offensively curt, but the written review was excellent. I liked TLOU more than McShea did, but all of the flaws he mentioned were, in fact, spot-on. I have friends who say it was the best game they ever played and friends who totally agree with McShea's assesment as well. As a gamer, you have the liberty to express your opinions. As a critic, if you aren't a walking breathing boilerplate, you will get lots of hate mail.
Reviewers should try to look at things as objectively as possible, but should never strive for their reviews to be 100% objective. Why? Because that's impossible. Reviews are naturally subjective, no matter how much objectivity you can base your opinions on. There's nothing wrong with a review having a personal perspective, as long as you approach it with an open mind and put care and effort into your craft.
With Pikmin 3, there was nothing offensively wrong with his review other than the fact that people are angry it didn't get an 8.5+, its score was equal to TLOU, and the way he pronounced "Peekmin" made the video review seem like a troll (which I found funny). To be fair, the Pikmin fanbase was much more mature about it, but still.
With the Skyward Sword review, his score of 7.5 caught lots of controversy. He said he was a huge Zelda fan, and I believe it. I've talked to hardcore Zelda fans (not fanboys) and they all agreed with his assessments. As for the controls, my Wiimote Plus performed accurately 100% of the time, but once I went to a friend's house and the controls worked about 60% of the time(and after 20 minutes of trying to recalibrate it, it still didn't work, which is unacceptable), so it's more of a hardware problem than a software problem, but the controls are still a problem for some Wii's and even some is too many. While I thought it was a great game, I felt that McShea's review was much better than the reviews that gave it a perfect 10, not mentioning its significant flaws at all.
McShea would have gotten much less hate comments in the 90's, but now it seems gaming is saturated by entitlement and expectations as games have been undergoing an awkward transition from a fad and a pastime to something much more.
yeah, he is the best reviewer on the net... He blatantly takes his own issues with the games and overshadow on how the game actually is. His reviews are sloppy
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