Are professional reviews legit any more?

Any time there's a deviation or outlier from a review, they are attacked, sometimes very aggressively. Like the TLoU2 review here, like what's happening with Angry Joe right now, like Stevivor who gave RDR2 a 7, or the famous streaming personality who gave BotW a 7.

Do any of you guys really want a hive mind mentality in professional reviews? Would absolute conformity really make you happy in that regard?

Also, who do you think is wrong: the one who stands out or the unified majority?

I don't think a reviewer should be harrassed but I do think people have a right to criticize a review. Bad reviews definitively exist, whether scored high or low.

All i'll say is IGN reviews better stay forever because they bring us many memes. Reviewing for that site must be a hell hole.

They slap 10/10 to any mainstream AAA game. they were never legit to begin with.

youtubers are more legit.

That's the heart of what I'm asking: are they "bad" because they differ, and if so, what's the point in a review system?

Shouldn't opposing views be celebrated instead of vilified?

I don't trust professional reviews one bit. They have strict NDAs, can't talk about certain parts of the game (if that part is unfinished, buggy or just plain bet, they are under contract not to talk about it). They gave COD games 9 for the longest time. They get spoonfed what to say by publishers and worst of all: review events that take place in fancy hotels or resorts.

Reviewers that go off the beaten path too far will see themselves blacklisted. Publishers have waaaaay too much control over what is written, and what doesn't get written in reviews.

On the other hand we have irrational fanboys that just outright attack any score that doesn't fit into the hype they have been having for years for a certain game.

All that sounds like a strong case for removing scores and just discussing impressions and thoughts.

"Anymore” implies they ever were.

It depends if the review is good. When Gamespot gave The Wonderful 101 a 4/10, I called bullshit. I read the review and got the sense this person wasn't the core gamer for this game and that they rushed themselves to do the review and let their frustration skew their score. I played the game myself and while they did have some legit criticism, the overall score was way too low. I wrote my dissent in the comments and moved on.

Fully agree. Often, the outlier reviewer is factually incorrect, as you just said with that specific review. On the other hand, Stevivior's RDR2 review was spot on with his criticisms of the game. I wonder why more people didn't subscribe to those view points, and it makes me concerned that people are just afraid to express dissenting view points in the profession.

When video games were a fledgling form of entertainment, reviews were, for the most part, for the consumer and intended to garner interest in the new format. They used to be informative and to the point.

I have always argue that reviews should not be based on what the reviewer like or dislike,you rate a game based on innovation,gameplay,sound visuals,story not on ""oh this character die"" or "the game is to violent "" or any shit like that because that is freancly stupid,as the game may not really have sonething bad,the reviewer simply didnt like it,objetivity is what reviewers should use not personal taste.

If over scoring a game is bad underscoring it is worse as you spit on the hours and hours of some one else good job and probably without a valid reason but the reviewer stupidity.

Make up my own mind on my games, with the very in depth analytical thought process of "is this fun?"

Wither people fapping their hearts out to it or proclaiming it is shit is irrelevant. Paying for an entertainment product and wither you can articulate it or not you'll know one way or another. Can argue about it's merits and what not, but that's what it boils down to.

When it comes to being informed, I'll generally check Steam reviews as a quick indicator, and if it's shit refund it.

Steam has it's issues, but for the most part it's gelled better than your typical websites.

@briguyb13:

Due you think here you can discuss impressions and thoughts here? For real?

Those are opinions they are as skew as user generated scores.

See, this is the problem I'm seeing; people putting way too much importance and authority into reviews; sorting them in "legit" and not, talking about how they "trust" or "don't trust" them, and obsessing over arbitrary numerical scores and one-line blurbs with no context.

What I see instead is merely subjective opinions, each from a different perspective, none of them meant to be taken in isolation, but analysed together into something resembling a consensus, which ultimately still should never supersede simply making up own mind. Scores mean jack to me.

But I get it. It's 2020. It's the age of social media and YouTube. Your opinions matter more if you shout it louder and back it up with emotions and colourful thumbnails, and people have trouble absorbing ideas that can't be conveyed in 280 characters or less.

If Halo: Infinite, gets a 11/10 everywhere then they're legit. lol :P

Yeah, I think there might be too much pressure for reviewers to be objective sometimes, even (or especially?) on final scores, which I don't think is either entirely possible or very fair on customers. If a reviewer's not *really* enjoying the whole actual playing bit of a game, I don't need to know how much they appreciate it in the abstract.

Then I imagine in a lot of cases, where there's an "important" release, games might end up assigned to the reviewer most likely to enjoy a particular title, which also isn't going to give a balanced final impression on aggregate sites.

To be honest, I'm not a big fan of scores anyway. Given enough gameplay footage, I can generally tell if I'm going to like something or not. Maybe if review opinions were distributed across a whole panel of reviewers at each outlet, you'd have more diversity of opinion and an averaged score or whatever would feel more relevant. Could generate more visitor loyalty too, to have the same team of regulars, as they do over at Giant Bomb. But then it's no doubt impractical to conduct reviews like that for every single new release.

In short, I don't know, but yes, absolutely to whatever the question was again.

Professional reviews are not perfect but the alternative is "this game has too many women 0/10".

No, but you know it's better than user reviews.

The salt with this game keeps getting bigger. Oh, Jim's BOTW review was right on the nail. Want a tissue?

As opposed to the "professional" reviews that say the exact opposite?

I would say prof reviews are as legit as they have ever been. Which is to say they are largely opinion-based and not immune to hype and other forces either.

My issue is they no longer go into detail on the things I want to read about. I enjoyed a lot of technical detail about gameplay mechanics, and graphical comparisons (across platforms, against prior installments or comparable games, etc), and information about the sound direction and so on. Now, even for less story-heavy games they focus tends to be vaguely on the overall progression of the game and how it "communicates its ideas"

I've also long advocated against scores. I think the numbers cause more problems their their ability to summarize general feels solves. 99% of the shit flinging in the review articles is around the numbers, and often a more basic failure of the reader to take the content of the review and simply decide how the game appears to fit their own tastes. Often times pros arent pros for everyone, just as cons are often not universally cons. We have to use our own heads, and I see the numbers getting in the way of that time and time again. As someone whose livelihood is based on statistics, there are more issues with treating those numbers as meaningful than I can count.

I would also answer yes - I think many gamers would love a hive mind. It's evident through their actions - mob harassment and review bombing being recent examples. The funny thing is, when a dev "censors" something naughty, gamers flip a shit and proclaim devs should be free and unconstrained in their expression, but when devs go uncensored and really gritty on things that arent busty women and masculine manliness then gamers try to censor it or push their personal agenda on it (by claiming it's pushing its agenda on them. Which is totally insane, hypocritical, and backwards. Don't buy it, play it, watch the movie, look at the art, etc. Rather than trying to tell the creator what their vision should be).

Whatever - I don't see gamer attitudes changing or reviewer legitimacy changing. It's an imperfect world and at the end of the day these are just games, meant to entertain in some way. No point in overanalyzing them

Yeah, the main things that interest me about games I buy these days:

How many bugs did the reviewer encounter?

Is it optimized well? How well does it run?

Is there ultrawide support? Or just 16:9?

All of that matters more to me than a score.

I think all reviews exist as a suggestion...

If you don't give the review absolute power over your own interest it simply becomes a suggestion. To that end I don't worry too much about what reviews say, but I have also read bad reviews or played games that felt way off from what I read in the review.

@KungfuKitten: um, that's backwards in so many ways. Firstly, the analogy between old racist or sexist tweets/comments/actions surfacing would be the gamers engaging in racist or sexist tweets/comments/actions. Aka, by your own logic, if it's ok to go after one group of people for doing it then gamers should be hunted down too. Pretty sure that's not the angle you were driving at

You know the rules,when you only have One system and have real emotional attachments to it(hah)and it’s games(hah)then every good reviews or score is gospel but any low score is bollox and that reviewers opinion ain’t worth shit HAH

It's not just game reviews but modern culture in general. There are so many entitled crybaby snowflakes out there who want to cancel everyone and everything they disagree with, and for some unknown f*cking reason it actually works for them most of the time.

So take TLOU2 for example which has been been received very poorly by actual gamers. I'm supposed to believe that there's that much disconnect between what gamers and critics want out of this game?

What really happened here is critics wanted to stay on Sony's good side. They want the free review copies to keep coming in and the eventual free PS5 they'll get. They are also scared to give a low score to a game that features "progressive" characters regardless if the story and writing are awful.

halo gets a 10 awesome gamespot scores are dead on.

tlou 2 gets a 8 omg gamespot you suck at reviews because your not aloud to like this game.

Thing is, people change. And judging one by old comments is just wrong, especially when you take away their livelihood and damage them over a simple comment.

It's just wrong.

I don't trust any single reviews. You have to read multiple reviews to glean a true assessment of a game and that's how I always see it. There are some professional reviewers whose opinions I respect, but I'll still make up my own damn mind about the quality of a game as it applies to me personally and that's saying something. Remember this, reviewers are opinions and nothing more/less.

Let me say this. Very few journalists are anything less than activists masquerading as such, to the point finding people genuinely interested in reviewing games is harder and harder to find. There are a couple, but not many. When politics, gender representation, and other 'woke' criteria impact your review, your credibility is lost with me. The sad thing is, bonuses for developers are increasingly tied into critical scores. This means developers are becoming more and more beholden to people in games journalism who will view a game more negatively for not being political enough for their tastes. All integrity, IMO, is seemingly lost. I view trailers and videos of gameplay on youtube, then go from there. There are plenty of resources at one's disposal to make an informed decision, without becoming subjected to biases unrelated to actual gaming.

I give professional reviewers more weight than I do user reviews personally. Last of Us 2 proved that again. It wasn't even released long enough to play and user reviews where giving it 1's, killing any weight they would have had. People scream "paid reviews" on every new game but sit back and look who's complaining everytime: the person who A: doesn't like the platform or game anyway, or B: is angry the review was too low. Both examples are biased anyway.

It's just like the news.. You don't get your news from one source anymore. You get multiple sources and gather information to form your own educated opinion. Same thing goes for game reviews. A concept that is clearly too difficult for some.

they never were to begin with

@briguyb13: that's one of the other reasons why his comment was backwards. Because it appears he shares your argument, but instead of advocating for things to be different, following the logic you described, he went with "well I should be able to ruin reviewers' lives then" which is just... doesn't make any sense

Maybe he just meant something else or misspoke? I dunno.

@briguyb13: eh, he can respond if he wants/if that's the case. I don't really care, just noting a "fair is fair" argument is pretty mixed up and random

What is this referring to, out of curiosity? What bigotry and insults and lies and unfair play? I feel like I've missed some major event

I think there's always going to be a place for critical reviews. Sometimes I'm on the fence with a game and I'm unsure if I'd want to buy it: I'd "wait for the reviews." I'm sure most of us have done that.

The problem is the kind of meta game nonsense fanboys get into and how people lean on numbers more than reading the contents of a review. Fanboys need to quit leaning so hefty on critic reviews and stop acting like critic reviews are definitive language towards the quality of a game.

I don't believe it's a question of legitimacy a review is an opinion piece, that opinion is going to be influenced by personal taste, the political context in which the title is releasing, not to mention commercial considerations/behind the scenes interactions between publishers and media outlets.

I look for a reviewer who is chiefly concerned with does this entertainment product entertain? as in a reviewer who can put aside the fact that they are being paid for their opinion and take a step back and say "if I'm the average consumer did I come away from this product fulfilled? was the experience enjoyable? was it worth the price of entry?"

FWIW based on my own tastes usually when there is a disparity between user reception and critic reception, I find the user reception more often than not is what winds up being a more accurate guide.

^_^ I'm sure it's nothing.

It depends who you choose to follow. Angry Joe for me is an annoying fat neckbeard hack, so I don't even view him. If you were angry at TLOU2 and he gave it a bad score, then it fits your narrative, of course you're going to side with him.

I read more sites like this one and IGN. However, ultimetly I form my OWN OPINION, which is what people don't usually do. Reviews are opinions, after all.

I find reviews from people who are not metacritic accredited to be far more relatable to my taste.

People are still allowed to have a personal opinion.

Actually you're simply judging him on his appearance alone. He has some very valid criticisms of TLoU2 that correlates with the series' biggest fans: how they shit on established and well-loved characters.

They haven't been trustworthy for a long time. Certain publishers get a more generous review as 'favour' for providing an early review copy. If a website gives bad reviews and pisses off a publisher then that publisher might be reluctant to give a review copy in the future and the website looses out on early review content. Id always suspected it right back to before the internet when all we had was magazines but it was the whole K&L fiasco that sealed it for me.

I leave this here

I think the only way to extract any real value from so called "professional" reviews is to follow specific reviewers and learn how their taste lines up with your own.

Websites don't really matter unless they do some kind of weird score by committee. If you follow a particular reviewer for long enough and learn what they like and don't like in games eg. how important they consider gameplay mechanics, polish, story, atmosphere etc. that can be extremely informative.

I know a 8/10 from some reviewers that is like a 9.5/10 from others. scores are kinda meaningless without that context.

I don't think 'professional 'reviewers opinions are necessarily more valid than anyone else, they are just generally able to better articulate their opinions and might have more context in terms of playing similar games to the one being reviewed to make comparisons (often but not always).

this comes from a former "professional" reviewer who received review copies and whose reviews appeared on metacritic (quit earlier this year)

EDIT: another thing to consider is that professional reviewers tend to rush through games which can often make them less enjoyable. A game that might work great in one-hour chunks here and there might become tedious if played for hours on end every day.

@KungfuKitten: okey dokey then.

Whenever a Sony exclusive is released you can always count on threads like this popping up.