I think that the lobbying system for reviews needs to end. No bribes, no freebies, no extra incentive to review a game. The incentive should be your own paycheck, or your passion for games, or the fact that you get paid to play games for a living.  Software should be critiqued based on its own merits, not how deep the pockets of the publisher/developer run. I also agree with Veknoid about honesty - giving a title like CoD a 9/10 simply because you expect other reviewers to do the same and don't want to be the odd one out, or you just assume a game will sell well and are reviewing a game with a bias towards its popularity is part of what's holding this industry back.

I also wish that games weren't scored negatively for breaking the mold on popular genres, or for instance, using an alternative/unusual control scheme. This serves as nothing more than to encourage smaller studios to copy/paste what should be a product of personality.

I like 1-10/1-100 scale and for me. Anything over 70 = good to take a look. Anything under 69 with some exceptions = no cares.

One thing is that I do compare frachise review scores from their last itteration. If say a franchise sequel scores the same as the last one, I won't care and probably buy it if I liked it in the past. If it scores 1-4 points lower in the 100 scale, then I won't care and etc. But if it scores lower than that, I will see exactly why that is.

Oh and I use meta for my scores. I once tried to go with the whole, "try it instead of worrying about the reviews nonsense" and I got burnt so I went with the looking at the review scores method and oh look, I rarely get burnt at all.

I don't care about the score, but I do like reviews to tell me what the game is. Currently with psvr it's very hard to find reviews and the psn store sometimes doesn't even bother to put up a description. Here's 5 screenshots to decided what the hell the game is about...

I do like metacritic as a easy place to find multiple reviews for games. The score doesn't matter, however since most reviews don't really bother with an objective breakdown, the easiest is to read a positive review next to a negative one and use that to get an idea what the game could be like.

Anyway my top 5 for last year
Rez Infinite, meta 89
The last guardian, meta 83
DC VR, meta 67
The way, meta 64
No man's sky, meta 71

No point in basing my decisions on meta score.


Most review sites are sponsored by the industry next to being add driven, so big games get 20 or more articles written about them while smaller games never get mentioned. I wish this would change and we would see more reviews again instead of clickbait titles, rumors and sponsored previews. But that's what generates the clicks. The amount of comments and views wild speculation of Neo, Switch and Scorpio drums up, together with outrage at censorship and other nonsense in big games and publishers, drowns out any actual review of a non AAA game.

That's the society we live in today. Content is all 'free', no more buying magazines etc, at the cost that journalism is now entirely driven by popularity. I find myself turning more to user reviews nowadays to get information than 'professional' sites.

I find user reviews more credible.

Great response! I feel the same way.

I treat reviews mainly as informative pieces of text that are also entertaining to read. I also take into account the opinion of the reviewer, depending on how well I think it reflects my own opinion. However, I don't generally make decisions based on reviews alone.

Also, I think a review scale ranging from 0 or 1 to 5 is the best, simply because the difference between a game that gets 89 and a game that gets 90 is not very meaningful, and a smaller scale hides that difference. Also, whenever I see these smaller scales, they usually seem to get utilized more thoroughly, meaning the lower range is not completely ignored like it usually is with the scale from 0 to 100.

I don't read reviews. Anymore.

If someone's giving his/her opinion on a forum or elsewhere, that's what I like to read/hear, but these professional reviews are crap anyways.

I prefer 5 star system, similar to what is used on AdventureGamers, I find it much more balanced then usual 100 points scale, since it translates to range, not just specific number when converted to 100 point system:

0-14: 1/2 star
15-24: 1 star
25-34: 1 1/2 stars
35 - 44: 2 stars
45 - 54: 2 1/2 stars
55 - 64: 3 stars
65 - 74: 3 1/2 stars
75 - 84: 4 stars
85 - 94: 4 1/2 stars
95 - 100: 5 stars

I tend to be at least interested in all games with 3 1/2 stars and above, though I don't shy away from 3 stars at times.

I'm not listening to reviewers. No review can ever tell me how much fun I would have with a game.

I mostly just look for the "summary" version of the game without spoiling myself. Iike I want to see what they found good and bad in the game which I might relate or have an opposite point of view.