@bloodbornelore: "Jesus, I’m not saying you attacked me. Talk about making a mountain out of a mole hill."

Well that's what "ad hominem" means, FYI, if you're going to keep using that term.

Saying that not talking about the AI is an omission from this review is totally fair. Saying the reviewer is being dishonest because he didn't include it ascribes motive you can't possibly know and verged away from fair into an ad hominem against the reviewer, especially when there are any number of perfectly mundane reasons why it may not have come up that I already provided.

As for my bugs, one of them is sometimes when I alt-tab out of the game and tab back I can't click the menu unless I hit alt-enter first. No, I probably would not devote a chunk of my word limit to something trivial like that if I didn't think anyone had reason to care.

I have not attacked you, but I am pointing the problems with your position. But you say I'm mischaracterizing you when I say that you thought the reviewer was lying or hiding something?

Yeah, no clue where I got that idea...

I'll try to say this again as plainly as possible, knowing full well it'll make no difference. If he didn't encounter bugs, I wouldn't expect him to talk about bugs in his review (again, PS5 version versus the much maligned PC version). If he thought the AI was fine or not significant in any way he might not have mentioned it, and he didn't.

As for me, I've actually played the game. As I said before, the AI didn't exactly set my hair on fire but it didn't strike me as gamebreakingly bad, either. Is it on the level of The Forest? No, but The Forest is also a very different kind of game based heavily on melee combat and the NPCs have to deal with traps and barricades that you build. Is the game buggy? I've encountered exactly two noticeable bugs and both of them are related to UI and they haven't had any impact on the actual gameplay and I could work around both of them.

@bloodbornelore:"Yo, pal, don’t lump me in with everyone else. I never said that."

I lumped in all of the assorted reasons that the comments are saying the review is "wrong" together because they are all equally ridiculous, but you literally said the reviewer isn't being honest in the same comment where you said "I never said that". You didn't even finish the comment before you contradicted that statement. You say you're no conspiracy theorist, but then you spend the final paragraph of your comment laying out a conspiracy theory that Tamoor must have encountered the same issues as other reviewers but chose to hide that information because... conspiracy.

Or, here's a crazy thought but bear with me, he didn't mention the AI because he didn't think there was anything about the AI significant enough in one direction or the other that it needed to be called out. Perhaps Tamoor isn't the fine level 4 Sommelier that you are when it comes to AI. Or he didn't mention technically issues because (as I already said) he played the PS5 version and most of the issues appear to be on the PC version (GS article link).

At the end of the day, the review is the opinion of the reviewer. I've played the game on PC and I think it's fun as hell. Is it perfect? No, but no game is and a 10 doesn't mean a game is perfect. Do I think it's a 10? I have no idea. I haven't beaten it yet but even if I thought it were a 1 I'd be telling you the same thing. A review that doesn't agree with another review is not wrong, it's an opinion. It's up to you as the reader to collect multiple opinions and form your own. It's a reasonable statement to say "based on the reviews I'm seeing it seems like a lot of people are having technical issues with the game that weren't in Tamoor's review" or "from what I'm reading I suspect I'll find the AI disappointing even though it's not mentioned as a negative in the GS review". What's not reasonable is to say "WHY IS TAMOOR HIDING THE TRUTH FROM US?" because that's just silly.

So in regards to this game that you apparently have never played, the thing you read on the internet doesn't agree with the other thing you read on the internet so clearly the thing you read is lying/ignorant/paid off/whatever?

You guys crack me up.

But you're right about one thing. You, as the consumer of game reviews/journalism, absolutely should read reports from multiple sources to make your own informed decision. That's why sites like Metacritic exist. Hell, Gamespot even does "review roundup" articles for you with links to the reviews of other sits. But if you're implying that Tamoor should have read other reviews and adjusted his review to more closely align to those for "perspective", then you are wrong because that would be plagiarism. Look up former IGN reviewer Filip Miucin if you want an example of what happens when you base your reviews off of other people's reviews.

@bloodbornelore: I think most people understand that the review is based on the reviewer's playthrough(s) of the game without them having to literally write that out in every review.

@bloodbornelore: He reviewed the PS5 version (it says at the top of the review) so many of the issues PC users appear to be having he may not have encountered. I'm playing on PC and with the exception of an exclusive fullscreen glitch right at the initial load (that might be influenced by my ultrawide Neo G9) the game runs great for me. The AI isn't the smartest I've ever seen but I wouldn't call it game-ruiningly bad either. You seem to be assuming he had lots of issues and is just choosing not to tell you about them, but the review is likely an accurate account of his experience with it. If you want to make an informed decision, read multiple reviews and make up your own mind but if you find one or more that don't seem to agree with the consensus that doesn't automatically mean the reviewer isn't being honest.

@Barighm: Case in point.

@Utnayan: Sure, there are data points you can use to support and those can be factual and quantifiable. You can also as a reviewer try to exclude personal biases to the best of your ability and try to look at the game from the perspective of what you think your audience would think about it. A reviewer should do both of these things but that doesn't make a review an inherently objective. It's subjective by its very nature. Yes, you can measure the resolution of textures but does that make the game bad? Does it even mean the game looks bad if the textures aren't the same resolution as other current gen games? Texture resolution is just one aspect of a game's overall graphical quality but it doesn't solely determine whether a game looks good or not. A game with lower resolution textures could be better looking in most people's opinion because of its artistic merit. Even whether AI is good or bad is subjective based on the expectations of the person playing because it's measured in nuance and degrees. What's even worse is there's an element of randomness to it. One reviewer might watch enemies blindly walk off a cliff and write the AI off as garbage while another reviewer playing the same part of the game might never see that happen and think it's OK.

Any time the thing being reviewed is artistic in nature, the review is subjective. If it weren't all review sites would score everything exactly the same based on quantifiable data, but everyone is always going to come at it from a slightly (or even not so slightly) different angle. I'll give you another example: Movies, TV shows, music, paintings, etc. These are examples of artistic creations where the random elements of video games do not apply so every reviewer's experience should be 100% consistent, but still people will disagree wildly about what's good and what isn't. Movies as a medium have been around for over 100 years. Music and painting have been throughout most of human history. You'd think that if it were possible to objectively evaluate whether they are good or not is something we would have figured out at some point, but it's not because at the end of the day it's about what the experience means to the person on the receiving end. Usually the goal of that is enjoyment or something equivalent, but not always. Requiem for a Dream is an amazing movie and I'd rate it highly, but I wouldn't say I "enjoyed" watching it but that's not what it was going for. So is it bad because it wasn't enjoyable or is it good because it made me deeply uncomfortable and I'm pretty sure it was trying to do that on purpose?

Whether a game, and interactive experience, is good or not is more than the sum of its parts.

@Barighm: He might have but people try to make the argument that a review they don't agree with is objectively wrong in pretty much every review this site publishes.

All very good points. Well said.

@dondontheclown: There's no such thing as an "objective" review. Objective information about a game would be information like what platform is it released on, what specs it requires, etc. As soon as you start talking about how "fun" or "good" something is, that's always going to be subjective.