The Ghost of RubangB said:
Your own opinion. Nothing else. Nobody else. |
Not really practical, since most people want to know whether they will enjoy a game before they make the investment of time and money required to make a judgment on their own. Screenshots, feature lists, and videos are good information, but opinions from people who have experienced the full scope of a game offer a deeper understanding than you can glean from images.
I'd suggest a combination of curiosity and skepticism. Get opinions from both professional reviewers and users or friends. Read a review which loved the game and a review which hated it and try to sort out how much particular pros and cons matter to you. Look for contradictions which indicate how valid a reviewer's opinion are, because a reviewer who misses a key game feature or doesn't understand the controls will have a flawed game experience. Start a thread on a gaming forum inviting actual gamers who tried the game to share their opinions.
In short, dig deeper than just a metascore. The real value of metacritic isn't the weighted average review score at the top, it's the aggregated links to various reviews on the internet.
"The worst part about these reviews is they are [subjective]--and their scores often depend on how drunk you got the media at a Street Fighter event." — Mona Hamilton, Capcom Senior VP of Marketing
*Image indefinitely borrowed from BrainBoxLtd without his consent.
