I got hired this morning to be a magazine game reviewer.

[Reasonable]

bugrimmar said:

My brother acquired a small, local gaming magazine's rights to publish (we're in the Philippines now doing business) and told me that he would like me to lead the reviews section. I don't know the details yet of which magazine this is, because he doesn't know himself (he bought it through a proxy, and doesn't know a thing about games.. just businesses).

Anyway I've posted a few reviews here, and I usually follow the format of +'s and -'s listed in bullet form, with a /10 score at the end. My priorities in scoring, listed from most important to least, are:

1.) Replay Value
2.) Gameplay
3.) Originality
4.) Polish
5.) Graphics and Sound

The reason I'm telling you guys this is that my reviews are actually going to be read by a mass of people now, and I'm going to have an actual "name" (meaning I can't just treat this as posting on the internet and not take it seriously). I'd like to get some suggestions, especially from the guys who do the reviews on this site. Wish me luck!

I'd advise you to find out the expected readership demographic and align your thoughts to that.  Chose a benchmark title from every genre if possible for you then review to that benchmark (and remember to consider over time you might have to move the benchmark).  That way you should be consistent and even in your scoring.  Also don't research other reviews, review for yourself based to your benchmarks and score guide.

 

I would, however, suggest you think carefully about your scoring guide.  It might work for the magazine in question (see my first point) but I think it has a few flaws IMHO.

For example, I'd never put replay value number 1 - in fact for me it doesn't come into the equation at all, particularly as it essentially skews away from any SP title to MP titles.

For me the four elements I'd judge equally are gameplay, innovation, stability and polish.  I'd then build an overall score from them.  And I'd score based on genre benchmarks.  If you feel there should be priorities then I'd say you're probably on the right track with 2, 3, 4 and 5 but I think having replay value at 1 is a huge error (sorry!  Please take the comment purely as my opinion meant only constructively).

I understand value has crept into reviews due to the cost of games vs volume of games to try and give a guide to where to spend your money - but in the end to me, if I can use an annalogy, it's like advising someone to see a decent 3 hour movie over an amazing 80 minute movie because the 3 hour movies gives you another 100 minutes of movie.  Clue - I think that's pretty poor advice.

Where to spend your money is in good titles that appeal to you.  So if you don't play online but love polished, narrative driven action titles you would likely see a title like Uncharted as vastly better value than say, for example, UT3, despite the fact UT3 offers almost unlimited replay value.

So, pretty please, drop replay value - if you want to have it I'd add it as a 'tilt' factor or keep it outside the core review scores and make it a seperate element - i.e. again taking Uncharted as an example, score it on its gameplay for the SP title it is, consider how innovative it is, how well polished, etc. and then note an opinion on replay value based on the game's SP elements and various 'hunt the maguffin' bits to keep you playing.