Un-Savage Digitally Downloaded Review (No Man's Sky)

[Angelus]

SWORDF1SH said:

Angelus said:
I love the good old "let's just judge it for what it is" line

Things do not exist in a vacuum, even from themselves. You can't open yourself up to insight about what one can expect your product to deliver, then fundamentally fail in many respects, and expect that to be critically ignored. That's not even getting into established quality standards from peers in your field that one would, and should hope are being met to at least a certain degree.

It's fine to still view the end result in a positive light, and enjoy it, even if it fails in many of those aspects, but to ignore them as a reviewer, and pretend that it's objectively acceptable to give something a perfect score in spite of these things is frankly shameful.

Out of interest, what do you think is worse, ignoring the good things to make a negative review or ignoring the bad things to make a positive review? How do you judge whats negative and positive and how much weight do you put on those negatives and positives when it's subjective?

Doing either of those is bad journalism. You can't just pick and choose whether you want to highlight the positive or the negative, and brush the other side under the carpet. The whole point of a review is to give you a more complete picture of what you're buying (potentially), before you buy it. Obviously it will be framed by your personal experience and opinions, but you don't build around those as facts, you build around the facts with your opinions, and let your readers/viewers decide if that's a viewpoint they might share, given those details. The score is the most subjective part, and in most cases irrelevant to me personally, but if you're going to score something PERFECT, it better at the very least be technically sound, nevermind not coming with the baggage that this game seems to packing.