Tip of the Week: Game Recommendations

Game fans enjoy hearing about other people's game recommendations. Some people ask questions in the forums while others heavily rely on critic scores. Then there are also people who check into how many people purchased the games, while others simply have no idea where to go to find game recommendations.

Below you will find five tips about how you can get the best game recommendations by using GameSpot as a resourceful tool.

Tip 1: The first stop should be GameSpot’s gamespace, because the related games page does a pretty good job of finding games that are very close to the same in-game experience.

1. Do a search for Age of Empires III (or your favorite game) and make sure you choose the appropriate platform.

2. The left navigation will display the Summary link already open for you. Click on the Related Games link.

3. The Related Games page allows you to see similar games, like Age of Empires, and you can also click on two other areas to change your results: Same Universe and Same Developer. These two pages include
- Same Universe link, which will take you to the related game series
- Same Developer link, which will take you to the game developer games related to Age of Empires III.

4. Also, if you have been adding games to your game collection, you won’t even have to do a search for each gamespace. Just drop by your game collection page in your profile and click each game to check the Related Games links.

Tip 2: The second stop would be the genre pages that are easily accessible on the gamespaces. Here’s how.

1. Do a search for Age of Empires III (or your favorite game) and make sure you choose the appropriate platform.

2. Below the game’s box art you will notice details related to the game, such as the publisher, developer, release date, and more. Click on the genre link. For an example, if you searched for Age of Empires, there will be a genre link called Historic Real-Time Strategy.

3. The page will display many related popular games for the game genre. Consider checking into the gamespaces for each of your favorite games. Don’t forget to read and view all the content for each page to determine if this is the best game for you.

Tip 3: Another place you might want to consider is the Most Popular section found on the front page of GameSpot. Also consider the GameSpot Rating System page, because not everything below 8.0 is a bad game. On a related note, we also have the Best Of feature and other features like the Holiday or Getting Started guides, which will share even more game recommendations. The front page sometimes hightlights these features, but you'll want to drop by the features page for the latest.

Tip 4: Read about the professional and not-so-professional critic buzz! Professional critics, like the GameSpot editors, are a wonderful resource for prereleased and released games. Near GameSpot’s official review score located on the gamespace for most games, you’ll notice another score based on what the consumers think about the game. You might want to consider the user review score along with our sister site, Metacritic, to get a broader look at what the world thinks about each game. Also, don’t forget to read GameSpot User Reviews located on each gamespace. Some user reviews have recommendations about purchasing or renting games.

Tip 5: The last tip involves mingling with others by posting in the General Games Discussion forum. This forum has a dedicated thread just for questions like these. Why not check to see what other GameSpot members have to say?

That is it for my list of five tips for game recommendations. You are welcome to share your game recommendation strategies in the comments!