The Review System being broken has ben talked about numerous times, but as I read the reasons, I have started to get confused. I just ask this on a thread and I really wanted to get some serious discussions into why is it broken?

1. Is is that too many games are getting high scores ?

2. A game score less than a 9.5 is bad these days

3. Is it bias against certain consoles.

4. Reviewers only focus on graphics

5. Pressure from the fans

6. All of the above

There are many more I can think of, but I really want to know why and what can be done to fix it.

I believe a reviewing system should be as such:

Buy
Rent
Fans Only
Avoid.




It covers everything in the video game genre. With only 5 words you can sum up every score in the history of reviewing video games.

edit: and this way people couldn't bitch about .5 points off of a certain version because it would literally mean nothing in the categorization. This would also more often than naught remove any slight bias tward a late port.

The main problem with reviews these days is the audience.

It's no longer about "a score of 9 means it's a great game." Now, it's "a score of 9.5 is marginally better than a score of 9.4, although the biased reviewers over at Gamespot love the 360 more, so they gave that game an inflated score, which hurts its Metacritic ranking, bla bla bla..."

The review system would be a lot better if gamers didn't take it so fucking literally.

You forgot

7. A game someone liked didn't get high scores.

You want to get ride of scores, is that the problem with the reviews?

The review system is broken because more often than not gamers do not agree with review scores thus the system is obviously flawed and bias can only be perceived on one side of the coin.

I agree with Montana and i must add the following

1. Hype, When you hype a game you tend to think its better than it actually is.

2. System Wars- As Montana stated a simple score difference of 0.1 can result in numerious threads about how "X platform game" is better than "Y platform game"

There's no fix.

Reviews are about opinions and that can't be changed.

A review will never be the ultimate truth...

A good reviewer is someone who can put his opinion aside and who can see what's good or bad about a game.

yes get rid of scores, in a sense. I mean just get rid of definite scores. a game of 8-10 would represent a buy, in our current reviewing system. Definite scores only cause problems. Gamers can all agree that some games are good. We just disagree on what a numerical representation would be. 8-10 really isn't that big a difference anyway.

My main problem with the review system is the 7-10 scale opposed to the 1-10 scale. I've noticed that every game that is "worth getting" is from 7-10 and everything else goes somewhere under that. Because of this way of going about things, there is only like 3 areas you can go in. 7-7.9 8-8.9 and 9-10. So things start to get clumped together and games I would rate a 9 are in the same category as games I wouldn't and vice-versa. The games aren't actually rated from 1-10.