Seems unnecessarily vindictive, frankly.  The point of a review is to iterate the quality of a game.  If the quality of the game changes, especially if the game was marked down for issues that were fixed, it's a disservice to gamer's themselves to keep a review factually incorrect.

So you are basiclaly saying that reviews are only for the release of the game and shouldnt reflect changes or improvements or issues brought into the game through its lifecycle?  Me personally I think game review should be informative and tell the person reading the review what the current state of the game is.  Whether a score is actually required in a review is open to debate (i think there is a case for their removal) but their primary purpose should be to inform the consumer.

I agree with this. It was there mistake to release it before it completely finished.

I don't see the problem with updating the review.

When they reviewed it then and it had problems, people know it then.

Now if someone looks up the review and it talks about problems that are no longer there, it's kiiiiinda misleading :)

So they should definately update it if they care

Because that's less interesting in terms of page hits than writing a score down

But they've shown themselves to be highly inconsistent on this front. Look at SimCity. They gave it like a 9, down to a 3 when it didn't work, then a 6 when it worked a bit more and then finally a 7 when it did fully work

Now throughout all of this, I was able to play the game completely fine. I don't think review scores should be changed at all for a full release like DriveClub or SimCity. Write an article about the issues or about the patches, but I don't feel that there is a need to re-review

But in this case, they really should go back and re-re-review, since their latest review is wrong

I couldn't possibly disagree more with that proposal ...

No, critics shouldn't be re-reviewing games. In fact this is one of the few times I share with foodfather's thought so it really is better luck next time on the devs part.

At the same time I also believe changing scores early on is not acceptable either since it's the game reviewers responsibility to provide an accurate judgement.

Rather than re-review games, maybe developers and publishers should not release unplayable games?

That's the problem. They shouldn't have put the servers in stables in the first place.

Unless Gamer's make said games tank at retail, there's no reason to believe they will.

I dont think Evolution would have knowingly released an unplayable game.  Yip issues at launch but they have fixed nearly all of these and added a tonne to the game too.

My issue is that If John Doe  came along wanting to find out about DC and looks on the main game review sites he will read poor reviews written a couple of months ago with none of them saying what the actual game today is like.  John Doe will in all honesty stay away.  Its a shame because the game today is working, is good, incredibly beautiful to watch (esp with the weather pack) and is pretty much stable.  So why should developers put in all the hard work fixing these games making them right if the reviewers who pretty much advertise/market the games cant be bothered to actually tell the general public what the current state of the games are.  Yes the developers let themselves down at launch but If anything these reviewers are costing the company future sales dollars by not informing the public on what its currently like.

Personallly i think the review system is broken and needs a complete overhaul.  I think there is a case for getting rid of scores and replacing them with a more general description of the game and how it plays rather than saying GAME A is a 8/10, Game B is 5/10 etc.  Let the public draw their own conclusions from the review article.