Totally. That’s why Nintendo games always review poor- oh, wait
The reviews still have a strong focus on graphics, but based on the hardware limitations of the Switch.
Also, the aesthethic is not just about how photorealistic the game looks or what cutting edge technologies it uses. That’s why some games age differently than their peers, simply because their art style is not or less diminished by technological advances.
I don’t care very much about the cutting edge graphics, I rather have something with a round aesthethic than dry looks with ray tracing.
It’s kinda hard to talk about objective fun in reviews, it’s the most subjective thing about entertainment. Some people play brutally crushing, soul-destroying survival games for fun
Yeah, and e.g. I don’t have much fun with racing game. Doesn’t mean the games are bad and other people, who actually like the genre don’t have fun. This is why you should know the reviewer and their tastes and biases to make a better judgement whether a game is for you or not from a review.
It is fine that it is subjective, but this is why reviews from a major corporation don’t make any sense. You want reviews from a large number of individuals so that you can get to know some of their taste to see if it is similar to your own. Then you can make a decent guess if you will also find the thing fun.
Not to mention these major review sites rate on a 7-10 scale which is kind of worthless. They are also effectively bribed by game studios so it is actually worse than worthless. It is actively harmful to finding out the truth.
You want reviews from a large number of individuals
This isn’t that helpful either. I end up getting lost because of all the different opinions. For example Starfield as a recent example, professional reviews are mostly positive but individual opinions are all over the place. I am left confused.
Only game I’ve ever come back to this much. Unlocked everything, still fire it up every so often to have a run or two and it still somehow feels fresh each time
Into the Beach for much the same reasons, made by the same studio. Phenomenal gameplay trumps all.
Swap music with Graphics or Story and I’m with you on most games.
IGN’s review of Starfield has zero mention of the music, same with its Fallout 4 review.
Just checked The Verge - also not mentioning the music of Starfield at all.
In my opinion, music is what turns a good game into a great game.
Very true.
But then again, it’s a Bethesda game. You already know what the music going to be.
You also already know the quality of the story and gameplay. Seems they didn’t buck the trend this time.
Music has always been the part I’ve cared the least about. Out of the thousands of hours I’ve wasted on games, the only video game song I can think of out of the blue is the Mario theme song. (And Raphael’s battle song in bg3 because I just fought him; that shit was pretty cool.) It always surprises me when I see OSTs included in deluxe editions because I think, who’s going to listen to 2 hours of instrumentals from a game they played 5 years ago. To each their own I guess.
One of the reasons why I like Skill Up reviews is because he tends to focus on whether or not the game is a good time.
Personally I’ve stopped watching reviews for that reason. Too much of his review depend on whether he actually had fun with the game or not. If it’s a game he didn’t enjoy he’s going to review it much harshly while finding whatever positives to justify recommending a game he enjoyed.
For instance he didn’t enjoy the Outriders expansion and one of his big points of criticisms was that it’s too hard to play solo. Which is a pretty dumb criticism to have when the game has a world tier system with the sole purpose of letting you set the difficulty. It climbs with XP but you can always set it to a lower difficulty if something is too hard. He could’ve easily set it to world tier one and just shred through the game, he simply stubbornly chose to be on the highest difficulty that was unlocked for him. And he was at the difficulty level where builds start to matter, except from the video it’s pretty clear he doesn’t have an actual build in mind. His criticism was the equivalent of playing master difficulty (or beyond) in Diablo 3 as a monk without any consistent spirit generation, and then saying Diablo 3 is too hard. Anyone who has played Diablo 3 knows statement like that is complete BS but anyone trying to understand whether they’d actually want to play Diablo would instantly be dissuaded from giving it a shot.
And the flipside is Destiny’s Lightfall expansion review where he just decides to add everything “free” into the same expansion review pile because he loves Destiny. And of course then proceeds to downplay every glaring negative point about it such as “No new pvp maps. You shouldn’t expect it because Bungie isn’t focusing on PvP either” and “Nothing new about gambit, the players don’t care about gambit either.” or “One new strike and no real improvements to that core gameplay loop. Game development is hard you guys”. To give the expansion context, it’s the weakest expansion after Y1 (which was the lowest point of the entire series) and is complete filler in terms of the story. Yet Skillup still felt it was good enough to recommend it to people.
For me his reviews have become mostly worthless because I first have to intuit his experience with the game to understand which way his bias has swung, so that I could get context of his final verdict.
