BS, if anything the reviews were soft.

First of all like many traditional fans, some reviewers thought the gameplay was shit and that the series was ruined. Small cities, lack of transportation options like subways or highways, no options for density zoning, and the list goes on for a mile. The game is shit for many of us and that's without the drm/online issues.

Second, there are no excuses for game breaking bugs. None. Even if the game itself wasn't garbage, you don't release a game so freaking broken. It is even worse that for an entire year between the game's announcement and release, the fan community was pleading with maxis not to make a traditionally single player game online only, and to add in all the things that were missing. For an entire year EA and Maxis' spin team says they're listening to the fans and they hear our concerns and then this garbage comes out.

So no, the reviewers have not been unfair or irresponsible, EA and Maxis have been.

You mean to tell me that the games journalism scene is a bunch of immature pricks who like to gang up on the current target of the cool kids club? I am outraged. 

I liked the part where reviews got corrected downwards because the online part didn't work properly at the beginning but nobody could be bothered to correct the score upwards when those problems where rectified. That's because the work was done,the territory has been marked and everybody moved on to the next target to plant some nice steaming pile of shit on.

I'm not very familiar with the SimCity fiasco, but I certainly believe that games should receive lower score for glitches, bugs, and otherwise unplayable sections. I suppose critics could issue a second or third score after the game has been fixed, or maybe note in the original review that patches are forthcoming. Or they could even leave the score blank and write instead "incomplete."

But, honestly, it's the job of a developer/published to deliver a game to its audience in a complete, playable form.

It was heavily flawed and deserved to get poor reviews. The reviewers couldn't even play it, as there was no offline mode and the maps were extremely small. If you force DRM on to people, at least be prepared for it

Even ignoring DRM it's not that good of a game.

Also games should most certainly be reviewed for what they are on launch day. Why should they just unfairly assume everything will be fixed?

Then again I don't even bother with traditional reviewers anymore. Now I use YouTube.

For example here is a review of Defience. The guy spent days trying to download the game and eventually had it hand delevired to him on USB. Regardless of that huge issue his final score is all about the game itself.

Sorry I’m with the reviewers on this.

Yes the game itself is decent but as someone who attempted to play on the first day I can honestly say it deserves bad scores. I haven’t bought a new PC game In years so wasn’t expecting anything like the issues which occurred. It’s one thing to have to patch a game but the technology behind SimCity is flawed, it’s like building a house on unstable ground. It will fail eventually – plus the real killer here is that it’s totally unnecessary.

Its intersting that while games like this and Diablo 3 have had tons of criticism, they have also had record-breaking sales beyond those for the previous entries in those franchises. Clearly those gamers talking with their mouths (and keyboards) arent walking away from these games in spite of what they say. So these DRM systems will likely continue.

I think every DRM enabled game should automatically be scored a 0. Seriously.