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Callum_Alexander said: A game cannot be both a six and a ten, but outside of the review perhaps an opinion piece should be written detailing what the reviewers personal opinion of the game is. The two have merged over the years and that shouldn't be the case. |
Reviews are only ever the opinion of the reviewer. There's no objective standard for a good or bad videogame. As for comparing one game to other games within the genre, that's par for the course. The job of a games reviewer is to be informed about what one videogame might do that others don't, or where it falls behind other games. Whether or not you agree with those comparisons is up to you, but the reviewer has the right to make those comparisons in the first place. That's the job of the critic: to know the field they are criticising, and to place what they're criticising within that field.
A game CAN be both a 6 and a 10; one man's trash is another's treasure. Hell, major films almost always attract a wide range of reactions, as do many albums. Videogamers have adjusted expectations because the field of gaming criticism has been narrow for a long time. Certain major releases always released to universal acclaim, and increasingly, this is no longer the case in gaming.
If you like the sound of the game, go ahead and buy it. It doesn't matter that one person classified the game as a 6 and another a 10: what matters is what you know about the game and whether or not that's worth something to you. I bought Wonderful 101 despite mixed reviews because I knew I was going to enjoy it. I would have bought Bayonetta 2 regardless of what reviewers said because I knew I was going to buy it. Short of identifying crippling technical problems or performance issues, videogame reviews won't be and never have been some objective statement of fact. They have always been and will remain a subjective analysis of a videogame.
