There is hardly a greater fervor than the mad frothing at the mouth fanboys will have if their coveted games get lower than expected review scores. Message boards will be full gnashing teeth and long exposes about the great injustices society has thrown against their favorite games. Trolls ensure that their narrow views get heard during these times by fueling the fight. A Metal Gear Solid game with an 80! Zut alor! A Grand Theft Auto with less than a 10! Stop the presses!

Before the rise of the internet, it used to be the magazine scores that people would pay attention to. They were no less potent, but the lack of a common forum did not allow people to retort. Now, with aggregating sites such as Metacritic and Gamerankings, all hell breaks loose if the combined score of a highly anticipated game is less than predicted. Besides the obvious issues about how those sites calculate the overall scores, there are rumors and murmurs that Metacritic scores affect the job situation for some game developers. What has the world come to that so much rests on a silly number that an individual has assigned to represent his feelings about a particular game? I believe that the gaming community and industry has lost its way, and the current system of game reviews needs a revolution.



Let me say that I was a huge fan of CGW/GFW’s attempt to print game reviews without scores. I thought it was a bold and inventive move that could have changed the industry if other outlets had embraced the concept. I believe that the “no review score” policy should be revived and encouraged. This is not to say that review scores are worthless, because they are good at providing a quick look at which media outlets liked or disliked a game. Pay attention to my wording. Review scores do not represent what a game is worth, or its value to any particular consumer. Rather, the review scores provide us with insight into what a particular reviewer thought of the game.

Look at Spore as an example. The game’s reviews have been very good, with almost all above 80 according to Metacritic’s conversion system. Both negative and positive reviews state the lack of depth in the games earlier stages (Cell, Creature, Tribe, Civ) as the main detractor of the score. For a review, one must decide how to even assign a score to a game like Spore? Do you take each of the stages and asses how deep and fun each one is? Or do you look at the big picture and determine how much fun you had growing from Cell to Space phase? Or do you look at the accomplishment of having a massively single player universe where the game content is populated by millions of player created objects? Or do you see how much versatile and fun the editors are and factor that heavily into your review? Do you see the problem here? A spore review should go along like this “Spore is an ambitious game with great tools for displaying creativity, but some of the stages are not as deep as once advertised.” That’s that, plain and simple. Assigning a score will only allow gamers like us to shout atop our soapbox blogs.

Some read reviews to determine whether they should buy a game or not. Studying reviews for an economic decision is not a bad idea and often results with good games becoming popular. People read reviews, people buy the games that have the best reviews, and then those developers get to make more games. Now that we have sites like Metacritic and Gamerankings, customize their use to for your own good. Pretend like the review score is not there, and you will see each review in a new light. The review becomes something more personal and moves away from just being another number in the aggregate score. So, take my advice, ignore the numbers and concentrate on the experiences. Find some reviewers you particularly like or relate to and trust their judgment. If you want to play a game even though it has low scores, go right on ahead! Who can tell what a game will be worth to you.