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.
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I think comparing review for review score from site to site (or for that matter, between titles) doesn't make sense. The reviewer rates the title what HE OR SHE thinks is accurate in their OPINION. Aaron rated Halo the score he personally felt it deserved. The thing is, Aaron is not a rabid Halo fan, so his review is completely objective nd has no fanboy leanings at all. I'm sorry to say this, but I feel like a lot of the complaints levelled at the Halo review are because people felt it deserved a higher score. It's great that someone else thinks that, and you should write a review rating it that way on any one of thousands of sites that allow you to submit your own reviews. The 8.5 is the OPINION of Aaron. There is no fact in scoring a review - it's each writer's personal opinion, which is why it does not universally match yours or that of other websites.
For a Halo game to get an 8.5 from Linde is actually really good.
I'm really, really tired of arguing over this. If you're expectations for Halo 3 didn't really match mine, I can't help that -- I played the game, loved the multiplayer and thought the campaign needed a little more work. 8.5 is still a pretty damn good score.
And for the love of God, scores aren't meant to be relative to one another. I'm going to repeat that: Just because one game scores higher than another doesn't mean that I'm directly stating that the game is superior. When I score a game I judge it by my own expectations as shaped by its peers in the genre. I judge it based upon how it accomplishes what it sets out to do -- how well does the game achieve its objectives?
In the case of Halo 3, there were two main parts of the game: the campaign and the multiplayer. The multiplayer was damn near flawless and, as I stated, is a definite high mark to the game and a testament to Bungie's development chops. The campaign, on the other hand, had a somewhat weak story and hilariously stunted ending, pacing issues and some segments of gameplay that really interrupted what was an otherwise great experience.
I wasn't going to just say "oh well, single player isn't a big deal fuck it". Single player is a big deal. If Bungie is going to put that kind of effort into creating a campaign and they fall short of the mark, the game doesn't deserve a perfect score.
Fucking christ. Here's something to ask yourself: if I had given the game a 9, do you think you'd be all up in arms over it? Play the game for yourself before you piece together any more "theories" and get back to me.
But before you or any of your ilk decide to get pissy about Planet Puzzle League or Crush scoring higher, allow me to beat this into your brain: No professional reviewer has ever, EVER intended for their scores to facilitate direct comparison between radically different games.
Thanks a bunch for that wonderful professional response, Aaron. I understand that with the scoring it never correlates perfectly between different kinds of games. But, I still think that reviewers should either choose to generally rate games high, or to rate them on the low end. I know some reviewers who never give out 10s because they believe that there is no perfect game, while others give 10s out almost too liberally. Sorry for not clarifying better.