After reading Aaron Linde's recent review of Halo 3, I was left with a bad taste in my mouth. The written review seemed pretty solid, if perhaps a little too negative in my opinion. The score that he gave the game, though, really stood out to me. Now, keep in mind that earlier that day I took a little visit to metacritic and had been hopping around from review to review to see what they thought of it.

Here is a sample of some of the scores:

IGN 9.5/10
Gamespy 5/5
1Up 10/10
Gamespot 9.5/10

Basically, almost all the scores are above 9/10. OK, so maybe Aaron is just trying not to over-inflate his 8.5/10 score as many people claim game critics often do. This lower-than-average score got me curious. I thought to myself that maybe hes just a reviewer who likes to keep his scores down in general. So I looked through some of his past scores and found the following:

Bioshock 10/10
Planet Puzzle League 9/10
Crush 9/10
Grim Gringoire 8.5/10
Bomberman Live 8.5/10

At this point, I became a bit bewildered. Is Halo 3 really at the same level as Grim Gringoire and Bomberman Live? One has to ask themselves, though, if one can even compare Halo 3 to these games. However, since they were reviewed by the same person you'd have to assume that he values them the same.

I have a couple theories as to why Halo 3 received an 8.5. However, the one that I firmly believe to be the most true is that Aaron was influenced too much by all the hype the game received. Lets face it, Halo 3 was pretty much the most hyped game of all time. I found Aaron's review to focus on many of the flawed aspects of the game, perhaps in order to justify his argument that Halo 3 is not the perfect game that everyone expected. His 8.5 score is the icing on the anti-hype cake. Theories aside, there is a more important aspect of the review that deserves more discussion.

Consistency is very important when reviewing games. I personally don't look at a website's review scores as a whole because I realize that not one, but many reviewers are responsible for them. When I question a reviewer's score, I look to see what other games they have reviewed to see if they are consistent. If they are, I respect and admire the reviewer greatly. If they aren't, then I have a difficult time taking anything the reviewer scores seriously.

Aaron is not the only one reviewer I have seen who I think could work on consistency. There are many of them all over the internet. If you're reading this Aaron, I would love to hear what you think about consistency in game reviews.