Right now a lot of people are going on about The Last of Us declaring it as the most groundbreaking game of all time, but I'm not really seeing anything new it's done or brought to the table. At it's more basic level it's still a post-apocalyptic zombie survival game with a more dramatic story. The concept has been done to death already, the gameplay is similar to already existing games, and the story while strong is also something that has been done before or something similar in games like Walking Dead and Heavy Rain(in terms of having a dramatic story). Does it mean the game isn't good or that it doesn't deserve the praise and scores it's getting? No, but it does show that the game wasn't as groundbreaking as once thought and that people are very prone to getting caught up in things.
The reason TLOU got so many 10's. It was hyped. Review scores are equal to hype. There's very few exceptions to this, because the vidya industry and vidya "journalism" is an entity that feeds on itself.
>Company is about to release game >Sends reviewers an early copy and "swag" >Review sites have to receive early copies so they can review before it's publicly available in order to stay competitive >Reviewers gloss over all but the most glaring of flaws in an effort to remain on good terms with the company >Game gets good reviews everywhere, sells really well because of it + high degrees of advertising >Expectations of the consumers become built on hyped games/reviews, as larger companies get more hype since they don't need the exposure provided by review sites, thus granting them more leverage over what goes into the reviews >Smaller games get more critical and honest reviews since the companies making them can't afford to threaten reviewers by withholding copies >Consumers buy games exclusively because they're hyped >Reviewers now review games based exclusively off of hype in order to maintain mainstream credibility, slam niche games for not appealing to the mainstream >Producers maintain a stranglehold because of the competitive nature of pre-release reviews
Welcome to vidya reviews. And it's why all the legitimate reviews come out AFTER the game is released.
The reason people are so outraged by the score is because we've been dumbed down by AAA companies to ignore bad gameplay and only care about story and graphics. The lot of you are trained to get through a level as fast as you can and then as a reward you get a cutscene. Gameplay>Graphics/plot always and Tom McShea knows this.
@Sameerology @bansheespartan That's enough for you to have a full consensus on the game and automatically give it a perfect 10 without playing it? I bet you bought Aliens: Colonial Marines too...lol
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