Consider the following scenario: A game is announced that gets you really excited. From then on you’re checking your favorite site for the latest previews, news and trailers of the said game. For months you anxiously await its arrival and in the meantime pre-order the special edition at your local gaming retail outlet. The game finally drops and you’re first in line to pick it up. You drive home, pop in the disc, and enjoy every second as it was everything you hoped for. To you the game is flawless with excellent voice acting, a fulfilling story, and superb gameplay. But then you check that favorite site of yours to see what they have to say about it. Your shocked to see that the reviewer has given it a 5 out of 10. Mediocre, average, run of the mill. You hastily rush to other secondary sites you frequent to check the score there, only to find 6 out of 10. Furious, you run to metacritc and/or gamerankings to check the cumulative review average. 62.7. Because of this you’re outraged. You get into debates and flame wars on how all these reviewers are wrong and you’re simply right. Hell, you even write your own review. If you’ve ever experienced this before, you’re going through what is known as Cognitive Dissonance, or more commonly referred to as Buyers Remorse. You may have not gone through this scenario to the T, but I’m sure you can relate. You’re simply looking for justification of your purchase. And if you have experienced this, you’re probably missing the point on game reviews.

At Koku Gamer, our approach to reviews is as simple as it gets. Instead of simply agreeing with other sites or “going with the flow of traffic” if you will, we review a game based on our personal experience with it. There has been a lot of controversy with game reviews as of late. When a high score is given people always like to call foul and make ridiculous assumptions that a reviewer was bribed or paid off. While I don’t doubt that some shady business has gone on before, it’s really not as often as you’d like to believe. It seems that nobody actually reads the text itself but rather look at the number or grade it’s been given. I’ve heard people say “If it’s not at least a 9 I’m not getting it”, and that’s just absurd. I get that people do need a bit of justification when buying a game. Maybe the game needs a good story, or a multiplayer aspect that you can really sink your teeth into. But using review scores may not always be the best way of finding out if Game A is more to your taste than Game B. Reading the actual text however, can get you a long way into finding out what a game is all about. A number or grade doesn’t tell you how the game controls, how the frame rate holds up, what the story is like, and the depth of its multiplayer, should it have one.

GR Score: 97.31...Do you agree now that you've played it?

There are a lot of things you need to know when considering a favorable review. One of those things may be what the pre-release hype was like. Games like Halo 3 and Grand Theft Auto 4 were crazy hyped before they were released. I shamefully admit that I bought into the hype for GTA4. At a time when it seemed that every major review outlet was handing out perfect scores, I bought into it and actually forgot to read the actual text. While I certainly thought GTA4 was a good game, to me it wasn’t what it was cracked up to be and I felt a bit let down. Consider how much attention a game has been getting and if that game could affect the review score. In turn, hype can have negative impact on a game. Consider Spore, a game from the legendary Will Wright that reached extensive pre-release hype. Once the game finally came out, a lot of reviewers cited how it “didn’t live up to the hype”. As a reader of reviews, this is something that would turn me off about a game instantly, but despite that Spore was still an excellent game. You may have not played it, maybe because you too bought into the hype.

Gamerankings and Metacritc are certainly useful but unfortunately its just a cumulative number. The number itself doesn’t tell you what the game is about at all. Think of what the point of a review is. It simply to tell you whether a game is for you or not giving a breakdown of the games attributes. There is no possible way that anyone would be able to acquire all that information with just a number. It seems as if we’re obsessed with these numbers. Visit a video game message board after a controversial review and all you get are constant debates and arguments on how a game that was rated a 89.9 was not a 90. I suppose some of these people forget that even 7 and 8’s are good scores too.

It seems that nobody takes the time to read anymore. Everyone wants to know whatever it is they need to know as quickly as possible, and I supposed they feel that the score itself does that for them. While a score can quickly help someone gauge what the reviewer thought of the game, the real meat of the review is in the text itself. Some other sites provide video reviews which is a nice way of getting to the quick points of the review. But the point is not to put as much weight into the number itself and more importantly, know your own preference and understand that not everyone is like you. Think of all the games you’ve missed out on just because of a number. I know there that are probably a few games that you liked that didn’t review well. Go into every review with that same feeling. Know that even though a game may have not been received well, it shouldn’t stop you from enjoying it.

Yousif Alshaker – A word In

A review score is based off a games technical merit, graphics, game play etc, however sometimes this does not reflect the amount of enjoyment a game produces. While a reviewer should always give a score critically and professionally, within the text of the article they can express the way the game felt to them despite the pros or cons of the games design. All of us have a game that they love that hardly anyone else does and a much loved title that we despise, being entertained is not something that can be predetermined by a ‘numerical value, each to their own’. Of course the number at the end is likely to hold many of the clues to how the game was received but not all; some gamers require high quality graphics which if lacking will affect the score, others are quite entertained by simple on screen effects (a lot of us grew up without anything else) and yet the score would have to remain the same. Some would argue a reviewer’s enjoyment should come through in the ‘gameplay’ section of the score, however a number of games have great quality gameplay (controls, mission layout, etc) and yet miss that fun factor which is by no means a negative to the gameplays result.

Unfortunately part of being a journalist is to be objective when reviewing, if personal opinion creeps into the score to heavily (because it will get in no matter how much you try) your creditability is flawed, I personally disliked Halo 3, but it was a good game and many people enjoyed it and when it comes to a score I would have to rate it highly. I’m not saying give a game a high score because it was popular (lowest common denominator anyone?), but just because you personally didn’t enjoy it, doesn’t make a game bad, in the same way just because everyone enjoyed it doesn’t make it a good game. If a writer wants to take apart a loved game, they had best come armed to the party, because the chances are the people will slam them for it. However it would be worse if the writer lied to get on with the crowd. My point is that Joey hit the nail on the head here; the score is a good judge but not the be all and end all of the review. Read the text, we journalists (we like to pretend anyway) write all this stuff for a reason!

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