| Reasonable said: Their consistency across genres is a bit wobbly. An average FPS seems to be 7 for them and a decent FPS 8 and anything they think is very good (whether original or not) gets a 9 - for the most part, there are exceptions. I've noticed with RPGs they seem to be harsher for some reason (or at least based on the RGP reviews I've used them for. DA got a 5 which seemed low - I didn't think it was amazing but it seemed a solid 7 minimum - and now FFXIII gets a 5. It's just another view, of course, but assuming their is some form of consistency of standards reviews (professional ones at any rate) shouldn't vary that much. I mean you'll always get some outliers, but to take film as an analogy look at most professional reviews of The Hurt Locker and they're very consistent, because the criteria of what makes a 'great' film is fairly consistent. The reason I posted, given I normally bypass these kinds of topics, is that I'm increasingly of the view that the videogame industry, from a professional reviewing point of view, is possible leaning towards being a bit rubbish. Of course there will always be some films, books, games, etc that divide critics, but increasingly and specifically for videogames review consistency seems to be out the window. There are reviews that seem little more than adverts pushing the hype and passing out 10s like candy, reviews that can't seem to agree on whether a basic gameplay mechanic is good or bad and reviews which are just plain uninformed. Now it may be I'm out of sync with changing demands, and people want reviews as buying guides or based purely on an individual opinion of fun, but without some consistency I don't see how you can judge (and I suspect it's this very lack of consistency plus a desire to have a buying guide that's lead to the rise of sites like Metacritic) between one review and another. Are the EDGE 5 and another site's 9 simply two different opinions, not professional ones based on a common sense of criteria, but more like 2 guys in a pub giving you there view, or is one closer to the mark than the other? Anyway. I just thought it was an interesting score that seemed (even allowing for other scores in the 6/7/8 range) right on the edge (pardon the pun) of the spectrum of scores for the game.
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Based upon what I have seen of their scores posted up in various places. Games which rely on cinematic presentation get low scores from them. So pretty much any game which relies on extensive use of cutscenes, non interactive gameplay like quick time events get lower scores than the average on metacritic from them. This to me explains why Sony games in particular vs Microsoft games seem to get a bad rap there. Whereas on the other hand they tend to like games which are extremely polished on the gameplay side of things, so this explains their Gears of War, Halo 3 etc reviews because their mechanics are what set them apart from average games and this is also why they spent a bit of time praising the FFXIII battle system.
They are consistant within themselves for their reviews for the most part. You just need to figure out what kind of experiences in general they seem to value. My guess is they're a little old school in terms of their reviewing practices, to them they review as games and cinematics which get in the way of said gameplay tend to earn them a negative rap.
Do you know what its like to live on the far side of Uranus?
