We have all read the typical IGN and Gamespot review which everyone is copying. I know I find that review style extremely boring, just seems like some stuffy guy wearing a polyester suit writing a review on a game (sorry if I insulted anyone here.) In fact, most of the time I don't even read the review, I just skip to the closing comments and the scores. I know, you wondering what the h*ll am I getting at here. Some of you are already familiar with my site I run since it was a topic by Brad when we had a bad review of Gal Civ go up on it. I recently got into an argument with my guy who I had running a lot of the site because I thought our material was boring! We were too much like an IGN style but outdated and scaled down since let's face it, no one can do what those few big sites do since they have all the connections. I decided it was time to take a major turn in our style and format. I know there's a lot of people in the industry on this site. What do you think would be interesting in a review format? What do you think people who play your games are looking for in a review? Again, everyone does the typical graphics, sound, replay and you know the rest which half of us don't read. Yes, I'm looking to steal ideas. :) We came up with a few already but just looking for more. Thanks in advance for the suggestions!
One with complete sentences? Interesting ideas?Originally Posted by cyberock
Ratings that perfectly match their own views. The text is actually irrelevant, assuming there's a rating.What do you think people who play your games are looking for in a review?
Putting on my game consumer hat I can tell you what I most like about a game review and maybe it well help. I dont know anything about how game editors have to choose reviews or how they are written etc, I just make em I dont write about em, so this may all seem naive stuff to you.
I want a game review to be like a great sports commentator, it can enhance my experience of the title with knowledgable commentary, enthusiasm and an obvious love of the topic.
Nothing is worse to me than reading a game review and getting the sense that the reviewer is just jaded about games or not really interested in the game he is reviewing in the first place.
The same goes for game sites. If a site starts to post more and more nichey "in the biz" editorials or the reviews become cynical or even worse the writers dont seem to be enjoying themselves then I just move on. By enjoy themselves I dont mean giggling delight at any old crap that comes out, but an obvious love of the work whether they give the game a good review or not.
By the way its a shame you mentioned you didnt care for IGN, it recently published a review that kind of demonstrates what I like in terms of enthusiasm and commentary it made me get out and buy Patrician III and really added a lot to my enjoyment of the excellent game.
http://pc.ign.com/articles/455/455060p1.html
I probably wouldnt have enjoyed my purchase half as much without it.
Anyhow for whatever its worth there ya go.
Too often, I'm reading information in reviews that should be in press releases: it has these features, and you can do this, and it puts this many polygons on screen, and yadda yadda. Who cares? Who reads a review to find out this bullshit? I look for the same thing in a review I read as I try to put in a review I write: does the reviewer think this is a fun game? If so, why? If not, why? What am I likely to run into when I play this game? Why is it worth my money? What differentiates it from any other game like it?
There's a plague of 'empty text' in the review industry these days, it seems - using a whole lot of words to say absolutely nothing of value to the reader. I don't know what causes it - need to pad, maybe - although I always find that I have more to say than I do space to say it in - but it's really a shame. It makes the review harder to read by making it longer, yet contributes absolutely no value to it.
I've also noticed, as other posters before have mentioned, a real lack of talent at writing hooks. Seventy percent of all reviews I read have utterly boring introductory paragraphs. "From the team who brought you..." "Sucessor to the most poplular RPG of..." "The eagerly awaited..." The first paragraph should be drawing the reader into the review, exciting their imagination, and making them want to read everything else you have to say. Fer chrissakes, that's why the term for it is "hook".
Rod, I would have to retract my comment about IGN reviews after reading the one you pointed out. I do have to admit, it do start to lose my attention because of it's length. You mentioned that you don't know how game editor's choose what games to write. Most of these sites are ran by people just doing it for the hell of it. I decided one day to start a site and gathered a bunch of volunteers from different boards. We started off reviewing games we bought. Most of the time these games got good reviews because who really goes out and buys a game they don't like. Then as we grew, we started getting games for free. Then came the problem of getting games we didn't want to review and they started getting unfair reviews, the incident we had with the Gal Civ review that was discussed here would be a good example of that.
I have to agree about the comments about how many polygons the game has on screen and all that other tech crap (which isn't crap to all.) I am a gamer. I go home from work each day, turn on my PC or console and just play. I don't think about framerate, polygons, or any of that other tech stuff. In fact, most of it I don't even understand because I'm just a gamer. I grew to love video games so much, I decided to start a website because I wanted something different then IGN and Gamespot. Over time, we fell into the IGN format as I stated in my first post. I got so bored with it, I even went to IGN to get my info instead of my own site. Pretty sad! Then after months of pushing about being different than IGN, I got into an argument with the guy I had managing the content for the site. He left and took a bunch of the reviewers with him to a new site he plans on starting because he felt everything was fine. Now I'm back to square one again, finding new writers and finding that little something different to make it a site people would want to come to in addition to IGN and all the other big ones.
Thanks so far for all the opinions. I am definitely reading them and taking notes.
I was thinking about this subject a month or so ago. Namely, I realized how bored I was reading game reviews, and I was wondering how they could be made into more interesting reading. Ultimately, I decided that the more straightforward they are, the fewer flights of fancy they contain, the more concise they are, then the better they are.
However, I did go down a different path before arriving at that conclusion. I was thinking of something Elmore Leonard said about writing:
That struck me as brilliant -- get rid of the parts of the story that people don't want to read. I think it can also apply to other kinds of writing as well. So I decided to try to write a review as a dialog between two gamers, since no one skips dialog. I'll show you a partial review I came up with. The problem is that it sounds too much like a Poor Man's Shoot Club, so damn Tom Chick anyway.Try to leave out the part that readers tend to skip. A rule that came to mind in 1983. Think of what you skip reading a novel: thick paragraphs of prose you can see have too many words in them. What the writer is doing, he's writing, perpetrating hooptedoodle, perhaps taking another shot at the weather, or has gone into the character's head, & the reader either knows what the guy's thinking or doesn't care. I'll bet you don't skip dialogue.
I honestly didn't try to make it sound like Shoot Club. I think in the end it's just too cutesy. The thing about Shoot Club is that it's as much about the people playing the game as it is about the games. Even though Tom works in some critical commentary on the game, it's not a game review.So I'm talking to my friend Jordan who loves these MMOs. He was a house baron UO. He was a guild leader in EQ and killed gods, which he liked to describe to me in mythological terms. ("And then we smote him." "Smoked him?" "No, smote, the past tense of smite. I've been reading Bullfinch's Mythology and they can't walk by one another without trying for a smite.”) In Dark Age of Camelot he swiped castles from other realms, often setting the alarm and getting up at 4am to catch the other players napping -- "Dude, I'm a sleepless killing machine!" He can't get enough of these games, but even he was surprised when he found out I was reviewing Rubies of Eventide.
"Isn't that the game that we saw year after year at GenCon and would make jokes about?" Jordan said.
"Yeah, that's it. Every year we'd see it and laugh about how lame the graphics looked, and then after a couple of years we'd laugh about how it was "almost done" every GenCon, and then it'd be at next year's GenCon "almost done" again. I think they started working on it in 1927."
"So why you reviewing that piece of junk?"
"Because I saw some screenshots and they grabbed a new graphics engine, the Jupiter engine, which is the MMO engine offshoot of Monolith's Lithtech engine. Game looks pretty nice now."
"Weird. Never would of thought that game would look nice. So what's it like?"
"I don't know how to say this without sounding like a cliche, but it's a mixed bag."
"What, you can't get all writerly on me drop some metaphor bombs?" Jordan said. "'It's a mixed Bag of Holding, holding both stink and less stinky parts? Be free, man. Be a Writer.'"
"Hmmm…ok, it's like sweet and sour chicken," I said. "Parts are sweet. Parts are sour. Parts are like the green peppers you eat around and parts are the good parts like the chicken. For example, the artwork --"
"Does it suck moocow dong?" Jordan was stuck in his GenCon past.
"Cows don't have dongs. And no, it doesn't suck like that," I said. "The art (and game engine) in Rubies of Eventide at times are as good as most MMOs out there, with the exception of Star Wars Galaxies and Anarchy Online. But my character, an orc warrior, runs like he's afraid he's going to drop a load in his pants. The combat animations are kind of lame too. I feel like I'm watching some kind of weird animatronic Hall of Presidents robot when my orc fights. And you know why I don't like this?"
"Because you're a 'Game Critic'?" Jordan said. He twirled his little finger in the air, like he was holding an imaginary cup of tea. It meant that writing about games proved I was a bit poofy.
"No. It's because we play games like Rubies of Eventide so much that things like combat animations are more important in these games than in other games. We need visual interest in these games."
"Yeah, I know what you mean." Jordan said. "In Dark Age of Camelot I played a Minstrel until someone told me Minstrels wrote poetry in the middle ages and were probably gay. I did like his combat animations, though. He had one special attack where he whirled in a 360 before hitting the enemy with his sword. It was mildly awesome."
"Yeah, and these games need 10 times as much of that cool kind of stuff as they currently have. We play these games for hundreds of hours. They need to be fascinating to look at to hold our attention. The art direction in Rubies is decent, but the animations were instantly boring."
"Ok, but what about the gameplay?"
"We've got more of the sour here than the sweet. Rubies of Eventide makes the mistake that these games keep making. They expect us to find the process of advancing our characters so interesting that standing out in a field of grass whacking the same two or three mob types over and over again is entertaining."
"It was when we played EverQuest," Jordan said.
"But you got tired of it in EverQuest, didn't you?"
"Yeah, and then I started out in Dark Age and got tired of it even faster."
"So now when we play these games and we whack a skeleton for the first time -- and they all have skeletons, including Rubies of Eventide -- it doesn't feel like the first time. It feels like the thousandth time right off the bat."
"Yeah, and killing bats is boring too."
"Right! What? Bats? Yeah. In Rubies of Eventide the mobs mill around in selected spots like cage-retarded animals. They're very polite, going about their business until we feel like killing them. So we kill some to advance to level 2, and before long we need to kill dozens to make level 6, and eventually dozens turns into hundreds as we grind through the higher levels. It’s boring."
Verbosity in a game review is a bad idea. Too many people are impatient to read through the whole thing. If the game has hilarious lines, quote some.
It's all about getting your attention and giving you enough info that you'll have an idea if you want to buy or rent the game. It's not about writing the Great American Novel. On the other hand, I don't want to read a press release or some drooling piece about how it kicks so and so's ass. Explain it to us all like we're 4 years old. (Obsecure movie reference.)
State the positives and the negatives. Not about how it doesn't compare to Discombobulated Geriatric Italian Battle Plumbers Advanced Ultra Tactics X-2. Try to act like it's a new game, not just another offering in a bloated genre.
I think a bit of verbosity and creativity is due in the hook, however. If you don't draw them in with something entertaining at the outset, why would they want to continue to read the whole thing, instead of just skimming to find the justification for the score?
I write reviews for one site and, for another site, literally look at every, and I mean every, PC game review hitting the airways. My job is not only to report the link and score, but also to pull a brief quote representing the substance of the reviewer's conclusion. Frankly, many are crap, and there's no kinder way to put it. After reading dozens each day, there are perhaps 8 sites that I would personally take seriously, and even fewer individual reviewers that I look to for guidance.
As to what makes a good and readable review, let me offer the following: (1) the reviewer should obviously have played the entire game and clearly have an objective viewpoint coming in - not a fanboy approach like some adventure sites have, and not the opposite either ("I've never played this type of game before"); (2) relatedly, the reviewer should have extensive gameplay experience under his/her belt, preferably across genre lines; (3) the review itself should look at a description of what the game has to offer, how it sets up and plays in terms of interface, system requirements, etc., how it looks and sounds, and, most importantly of course, what the gameplay is all about; (4) Having done that, the reviewer needs to evaluate (and this is where experience comes in to play) - how does the game measure up to what it says it will do? Are there any obvious glitches? Is it fun? (the most important question). Does it offer anything new or different to the gaming world?
Finally, the reviewer should try to list pros and cons (what he liked most and least). Then, wrap it up in a clear and concise concluding paragraph. Many readers start there, and then go back for elaboration.
I'll likely be reading work from your site, and will look forward to the products of you and your team.
Old Rooster
I too am concerned that many reviewers seem to be becoming jaded and don't have much passion for games anymore. Gamespot and Greg Kasavin come to mind. There has been a huge glut of high profile PC and console releases over the past month or so and it seems like Greg reviews most of the high profile titles. I personally question how much time and effort he can give to so many games and if he is putting in so many hours wouldn't an overall burnout start to take effect that would distort his views on a particular game?
It seems like more and more of the high profile releases for the holiday season are scoring in the B range when past holidays have seen a lot of A's. Is this year's crop really inferior to previous years (not in my opinion), are sites conciously trying to stop the grade inflation thats been so prevalent, or are they just getting burned out? I'm not sure what the the answer is.
I don't think Greg is a bad guy, and he writes well. I will, however, say, that when I'm reading Gamespot and feel an urge to yell and scream at the writer of a particular review, it's almost always Kasavin who was writing it. And I think you're right - the quantity has to take it's toll. I'm still irked about several factual inaccuracies that appeared in his negative review of Steel Battalion.
Still, I'd by far rather have someone like Kasavin, whose opinions piss me off but whose writing is well crafted, than the typical fansite/hobbiest reviewer, who may agree with me in opinion, but can't write coherently to save their damned lives.
Long reviews are the worst contribution that online pubs have made to game reviewing. There really is no need for a 1500-3000 word (or longer!) game review. Most games don't even require 1000 words. I'll bet that even the folks that claim they like verbose reviews just skim through them, like I do. Good writing is not an exercise in quantity; if you can't adequately extoll the virtues of Gothic II (or whatever) in 1000 words or less, then you are doing something wrong.
Speaking personally, I'm paid for 700 words. I usually end up with 900. Even when I've absolutely loved a game, I can't think of a single time that I've felt a need to go to a thousand or beyond. There's just never that much to say. If I needed to, I'm sure I could go on, but I don't think it would contribute much, if anything, to the overall quality of the article.
The key elements for me in a reviewer is trust. Do I trust the site, and more importantly, do I trust the reviewer. A site builds my trust through picking reviewers who do their job well, and by giving themselves a high enough profile that I feel it is credible that they would try their utmost not to damage that profile via bad reviews. A reviewer builds my trust through writing their opinion, and justifying it with articulate, knowledgeable and well reasoned prose. The more I see a site and reviewer achieve this, the more I respect the site, and the more I trust its opinions. Once I trust a reviewer enough, I no longer need to read his justifications, only his opinions.
That means I want two things from a reviewer: a longish review of around 1000 words, that neatly and proficiently justifies their opinions and shows off their knowledge of the game. I also want a brief list of their opinions only, so that if I already trust their judgement, I don't have to skim through their text in order to discover what they really think.
I dunno, there are many reviewers that I trust, even if I don't always agree with their opinions. I prefer to read why they think what they think and decide for myself whether I'll like the game (which is why I consider ratings to be pointless without the accompanying text). But I also like for them to get to the point, and not waste hundreds of words parroting box copy ("the game has the following features...") or analyzing inconsequential details like "sound" or "graphics" or whatnot (unless there really is something noteworthy to say about those things, which there usually isn't).
My beef with game reviews is that they bore me to tears. Your not writing for the NY Times, you're not shooting for the Pulitzer. Have fun with the writing.
Also, make a lot of the reviews shorter, or have a quick recap at the front of the article and let people who want more details continue on. I don't think anyone needs 3 pages about the latest crap game (or even a great game).
And I agree that a lot of reviewers seem to have no zeal for gaming.
Greg, no offense was intended in my post so please don't take any. I'm not questioning your ethics in the slightest and I have no doubt that you put many hours a day into playing and writing about these games.
I'm questioning whether reviewers ever suffer from burnout. I've seen your name attached to quite a large number of reviews recently. I don't have any hard data to support this but I'm guessing you review many more games in a given month than say Steve Bauman, Jeff Green, Rob Smith or other EICs, particularly because you personally cover both consoles and PC. I find it hard to believe that spending all day and every night playing through games to try and get a review done by street date while overseeing a site that needs to generate content daily doesn't take a toll eventually.
You and your staff's reviews are technically proficient yet I've noticed a distinct lack of passion in Gamespot's reviews of late. Whether a game scores in the 8's or 9's I can't remember the last time a Gamespot review actually made me excited and looking forward to playing a game. Maybe this is the style of writing you are striving for- I'm not sure. I do remember in the past your enthusiasm for a given game showing in a review- your review of Metal Gear Solid 2 off the top of my head.
[EDITED TO ADD] Hey what the hell happened to Greg's post? I guess he must have deleted it.
Speaking for myself, absolutely. And when that happens, I stop reviewing games for a while. I reviewed almost nothing of note all summer, now I'm doing a bunch because I have a lot of review energy and some time.
Yep, it definitely helps to take a break... A few months of just playing the games I want to for fun reenergized my game writing energies, and gave me better perspective.
The guy who sees 12 to 20 games a year and spends $40 to $50 each on them (as I have to for about 80% of my games nowadays) is going to have a different perspective than the guy who sees virtually every major game, and who loses that "but is it worth $50?" or "well, let's see if I can get my $50 out of it" perspective that game buyers or part-time reviewers have.
I know this from experience. I never got jaded -- I've always loved gaming -- but nowadays I can have fun with a more-of-the-same RTS, for example, that would have bored me to tears before because I'd have played six other RTS games in the previous month.
I don't know if many reviewers even factor in value in their reviews and try to answer that $50 question. For me, games that you can complete in six hours and that have no multiplayer, like Max Payne 2, are hard to justify at the $50 price point. A lot of reviewers obviously don't mind, judging by the reviews.
A lot of reviewers get the games for free. Being on the opposite end of the spectrum, I try to factor value into reviews. Not that I write a ton of them, but you know.
I don't think there is much point factoring value heavily in a review. Value is even more subjective than "fun." What's more, it's something that the reader can easily decide for themselves. You should definitely mention if a game is unusually short (or long), but at that point the reader is going to draw their own conclusion anyway. They'll either say "Game X is only six hours long, but it sounds really cool, and $40 isn't that much to drop on a game, so I'll give it a try," or they'll say "Six hours is too short even if the game is excellent. No sale." Telling them whether or not you think the game is a good value is extraneous at that point.
Well, I just think that if a game is full-priced and unusually short, I need to dock it some points. The review score is a recommendation. I have no problems factoring value in to some degree.
Most reviews are void of opinion. Most writers feel that you should talk about problems and features and then decide if it was fun. Very few will come out and say, "Yes the game looks great, plays great, but I was bored as hell with it." I wish there was more of that and less safety.
I want to know if the writer likes the game. Did he give Metal Gear Solid 2 a perfect score because everyone else did, or did he because he's playing it like a mad fool?
K
I've never in my life given a game a review because "everybody else liked it." I've been fortunate enough to never work for an editor who has pressured me to do so. Hell, the editor I have now likes it *more* when I hate a game. I swear, he goes out of his way to ship me titles that I'll hate, just so I can savage them publically. (Dino Crisis 3 being the most recent example, although my Max Payne 2 review bagged me some hate mail too)
As for reviewers not having an opinion, can't say I agree with that. I've yet to talk to a reviewer who wasn't strongly opinionated about most of the titles they play. Why else would they get in the business? I mean, writing is a hell of a lot of fun, but if you just try to invent your opinions out of whole cloth by reading other reviewers, I can't imagine you wouldn't burn out quickly.
Yes, I did.
I am in complete agreement with you. Finding out how short Prince of Persia and Max Payne 2 were, knocked their value down from "must buy"s to "must rent". I have a problem with buying a game that I'll finish quickly and play through maybe one more time vs. a sports game that I'll pour in 40+ hours (or RPG or strategy or online-enabled.)
The older you get, the more you see a need to get value for the entertainment you spend on.
I feel the opposite -- the older I get, the more I value my leisure time. I'd rather play 40 hours of Gothic 2's quality gameplay than 150 hours of the very redundant gameplay in Might and Magic 8.
But I also think games that provide less than 10 hours of gameplay are ridiculous, and should definitely be docked some rating points.
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