Edge Magazine Reviews Castlevania: Lords of Shadow 2, And Weren’t Impressed – Here’s Why

Edge deliver a relatively harsh review of the upcoming Castlevania: Lords of Shadow 2, scoring it 4/10. WGB sheds some light on what their biggest problems with the game were.

[DJ]

The best lessons in Game Design are when a game is designed poorly.

[vishmarx]

great news.they gave zone of enders 2,suikoden 4,magna carta 2,army of two, LoK defiance a 4 too!

and they gave saints row 4 an 8 and ridge racer unbounded a 9!

purchase assured

[starchild]

Yeah, Edge editors have the weirdest taste in games. I almost never agree with them so I don't put much stock in their reviews.

[yeahokchief]

I've already received my preorder bonus from best buy and it shipped yesterday. Looking forward to this game.

[jsslifelike]

This article is so long that simply copying the original review would have probably been easier... and a more interesting read than just excerpts.

[firelogic]

Unless every one of the games you listed as prime examples of why Edge sucks was reviewed by the same person, you have no leg to stand on. Bottomline, they played it. You didn't. You can't judge.

[vishmarx]

@firelogic
"Bottomline, they played it. You didn't. You can't judge."
offcourse i can,edge has a habit of giving notoriously low scores to good games..most decent games get a 6 at most.and games like ridge racer get a 9.
i have played suikoden,LoK,ZoE2.
none of them are 4.0 games.
there are opinion and then there are stupid opinions.
no game deserves a 4 if its not barely playable.
all these games are widely accepted as not only playable ,but quite great

[Razputin]

LMAO. Ridge Racer a 9.

I obviously didn't get the correct copy on Steam.

I have Thief preloaded. I was debating between getting this or South Park.

With the complaints this person gave they don't have much merit as to why the game is actually bad.

Seemed like they just nitpicked things they sucked at and didn't like.

But seriously Ridge Racer a 9.

[Aceman18]

i love the demo and have it paid in full. these reviewers opinions dont matter to me as i chose what games i want to buy.

[Saurian]

This is 100% true, why on earth have so many people down-voted this comment?

If you are interested in game design, or have been involved in production, it is extremely helpful to pick apart game systems which do not quite work. If you can break down their system and then isolate the exact components which bring it down, you learn an important lesson from it.

I swear, the attitude of the gaming audience today is just baffling.

[DevilishSix]

I agree edge has some weird tastes and has given some unnecessary low scores. I really wanted this game cause I enjoy GOW and enjoyed the first game, however when I saw Game Informer gave this game a 6 red lights started flashing cause they are pretty easy on scoring games. I need to see a few more reviews, but its not looking good.

[showtimefolks]

edge magazine yeh nuff said

you just don't get impressed by anything, the only reason you are famous is because of your harsh reviews. Its when a game gets great review score from edge when we are shocked

[morganfell]

"When Edge feels stealth makes sense..." and this opinion comes from their vast experience in game design.

Screw you Edge, I preordered already, and the demo made me glad that I did. Some reviewer is trying to tell me what to think and buy? No thanks Edge.

[showtimefolks]

morganfell

if i listened to reviewers than some of the best gaming experiences

vanquish
mercenaries 2
alpha protocol
yakuza dead souls

stragomccloud

forgot to wear his or her glasses while playing.

nope111

people even hated on the 1st game even thought it was excellent, no doubt had few minors issues but overall an excellent gaming experience

isarai

been keeping track of development throughout so i know this will be excellent no matter what edge or any other reviewer said

[Lysander91]

They're not " trying to tell [you] what to think and buy." They're called reviewers. You even called the person a reviewer. Their job title is petty self-explanatory. In case you need me to spell it out for you, their job is to give a review of certain products. Dictionary.com defines a review as: "a critical article or report, as in a periodical, on a book, play, recital, or the like; critique; evaluation."

Now, this is where it gets crazy, and you might have a really hard time understanding. try to stay with me though. Reviews are opinions! The great thing about opinions is that the exit in our own minds only. We can put them on paper and call it a review, but we can't force them on other people. The other great thing is that people have different opinions. For example, the fact that I think it's great is an opinion that you might not share. You might actually like a game that someone else disliked. I know, it's shocking!

[starchild]

Which goes to show that we all tend to give too much importance to reviews and review scores. The whole industry does.

I don't think many of us care too much what reviewers think about movies, for example, but somehow in gaming many people do. It makes no sense.

A "professional" review is not really any more valuable than the opinions of any one of us here commenting.

[morganfell]

Lysander,

They are not reviewers. And they are certainly not journalists. Far from it. They are people giving an opinion and that is not a review. Once upon a time this was not so much the case. The internet was just getting started, and we were moving wholesale from the BBS to the brand new 'net. This is likely before the time of most people on this board.

In those days past we had actual reviews. Publications, and they were mainly print, had a feature unknown to these supposed writers and it was called a standard. These standards were often detailed showing how they scored, to what they gave weight and for what it was they detracted.

In addition the magazines had a person of authority called an Editor in Chief. His position was to secure to a degree, as high as possible, regularity and uniformity among the reviews. This person was to insure the standards were adhered. The idea was to make the review an examination of the game while reducing the opinion. No games received a 10, or a 5/5 because a reviewer was willing to overlook flaws because they liked a game so much. They were not allowed to toss standards out the window willy nilly because the over all presentation made them want to ignore issues, or as is now they want everyone to like what they like. Ignoring the shortcomings didn't mean they were not there.

Reviews, like the magazines that served them up possessed a quality no longer seen today. The idea of servicing the demographic. Reviews were written for the audience rather than the reviewer.

Now we have opinionists admit there are issues and still award a top score. What they are saying is "We have no standards...and it doesn't matter!" They are telling us is what they like and dislike is more important than an actual long look at the truth. And you have younger gamers who swear reviews have always just been some persons opinion.

Absurd.

Reviews should not just be opinions built upon the foundation of someone's ideas of how the game should have been made. We read enough of that tripe on message boards. We certainly do not need it rammed on us by some person who is determined their voice matters more than anything. Reviews should not be a situation where the reviewer feels they are of greater importance than the subject material. This rockstar attitude and desire to be hip has made reviews worthless. These people do not work in the industry, they write about it.

But now they are not happy unless they feel their power has allowed them to change the industry. It is about their ego. Their voice must be heard, and it had better be heeded. They wield the wand of 10. And that is the heinous nature of their actions. They are damaging our hobby and they do so with no justification whatsoever. Developers are more than ever making titles for these opinionists and less for gamers. Chasing the 10 ruins more titles than lack of technology.

So people such as Edge can go suck some fish heads. I have read more valuable writing on a chewing gum wrapper. Like a few others I recognize that these people are nothing more than the enemy. They are responsible for ruining far too many titles and as such they deserve the same treatment as anyone that pulls the fire alarm in the middle of a party because they wanted people to pay attention to them.

[Saurian]

Dear Morganfell, I just wanted to say that your post is the single best thing I have read online in a long time. The problems you state, the situation you describe, is precisely what is going on today and it must stop.

I have been involved in the production of a few titles and have written a number of "Official" guides for titles such as Bayonetta and Vanquish. Working closely with the studios involved and getting some hands-on experience in designing and tuning game mechanics has taught me many valuable lessons. For me, an expertly crafted game system is the primary reason I play and enjoy games in the first place. Terms like "progression" and "exploration" mean something completely different to the "opinionists" as they do to me. For me, "progression" is improving my ability within the game system, "exploration" is exploring how deep the game system goes. The gaming press on the other hand only understand these concepts in terms of narrative, they crave the same prestige as film critics and have superimposed aspects of film reviews over their game "reviews".

This approach has let loose a series of extremely cancerous memes which are stifling game development the world over. As you say, morganfell: developers are increasingly making games to appease these people and not gamers. The problem here is that the gaming audience have taken the concepts and memes put forward by the gaming press as absolute, when in actual fact they are completely unsuitable for describing the gaming medium.

Here's an example: "This game is xx hours long". This simple statement is a cancer which is infecting every video game message board and comment section. The idea that a game's "length" is determined precisely by the length of its narrative content is utterly ridiculous. ANY game which can only hold the attention of the player for the duration of its narration utterly fails as a game. The whole point of playing games is to PLAY them! The pleasure should come from playing the game itself, not sitting back and passively following a narration. All the best games, bar none, are meant to be played repeatedly, there is no "running time", again another film term superimposed on gaming.

Case in point: look at all the fuss over the "length" of games like Metal Gear Rising, the press and the people who follow what they say all bleat about the game being "too short". Metal Gear Rising is a Stylish Action game, a genre which present game mechanics as deep as a VS fighting game but wraps them up into a single-player game. There are no human opponents, instead the whole point is to challenge your own limits, completely master the game system and see how absolutely epic you can become at it. It's a very rewarding journey, you learn skills and achieve levels of combat brilliance you never imagined you could achieve. This is what gaming is! It's about YOU! You don't simply sit back and enjoy a story for xx hours, YOU are part of it, YOU get to be as amazing as the hero you are playing as. But the gaming press (and now the audience) never see it this way. The game is xx hours long, so you are going to get xx hours of enjoyment out of it.

Utter garbage.

Cont...

[Saurian]

...Cont.

Look at Ikaruga. You can finish Ikaruga in about half an hour, yet I've played it for hundreds of hours over many years and I'm still loving it. Psyvariar is the same, 30 minutes or so if you don't continue, I've been playing it for close to a decade. Same with Devil May Cry 3 (thousands of hours), Bayonetta (thousands of hours). I could go on all day...

Games are GAMES. You are meant to PLAY them! You don't simply sit through a narration once and then never touch it again. This attitude is the reason we get so many cut and paste games which hold the player's hand from start to finish and have no replay value whatsoever. These games are usually the ones which do really well in the reviews because they methodically tick all of the boxes these idiot opinionists expect to be ticked. The saddest part is, they tick NONE of the boxes someone like myself wants ticked...

I feel that the gaming press today are the biggest problem the gaming industry faces. These people feel that they are above the medium they are critiquing. The simple truth is that they are utterly clueless, but their over-inflated egos and massively oversized sense of self importance dictates that they will just keep doing what they are doing.

They don't care about championing the most skilled game designers. As someone who has worked on a number of titles now believe me; this is a problem we desperately need to address if we are to ensure that the most skilled game designers remain in the business. We need to take the conversation away from the "Opinionists" and instead entrust the conversation to be led by the gamers, people who actually know what they are talking about.

[Lysander91]

@morganfell
I completely disagree. The only way to be objective is to list a bunch of facts about a game. A simple statement such as "the graphics are good" is completely subjective. You could say "there is 2x msaa" but how does that help me? That information is useless to me. Someone's opinion tells me a lot more about a game than simple facts. If I want facts about a game I can go on wikipedia. Why would I need 50 different people telling me the same set of facts?

The simple fact is that there is no objective standard to judge games or any artform by, and any standards that are set are completely arbitrary and based off of others opinions. The only purposive of any review is to give an informed and well explained opinion.

The real issue is that people take others opinions as personal attacks, and then attack reviewers for their opinions. There are tons of reviewers out there. Find some that generally hold similar opinions to you and follow them. You don't have to agree with the consensus.

[morganfell]

Yours is the standard remark in a discussion on this subject containing the usual "bunch of facts" line. These comments are the norm for people that are not familiar with the manner in which game reviews were handled in a bygone era.

This is a tell.

The tell in this case is two fold and is why I admit it in such initial explanations as it inevitably reveals the people with whom I am discussing matters.

The reviews about which I am speaking always carried, generally toward the end of the article, a section on pure impressions. It is what composes the bulk of writeups in this day and age and those that used to read actual game journalism are quite familiar with the manner in which many publications handled matters. Blatabt opinionism did not permeate throughout the article.

That latter part, because it was separate was valuable in other regards because it may have been the reviewer was not particularly versed in the genre or familiar with the prequel or source material and it gave you insight. This was often not the case as magazines sought to have someone versed in sims review sims, an RPGer review RPGs etc. The discussion of other staff and their experiences with the title often popped up as well and broadened the scope.

As said, one person handled the majority of the writeup but he did not comb through the game in a vacuum. Rather his piece was the result of an amalgamation of experiences from the staff as most were likely playing that title. And as I said he reviewed the game with the target demographic in mind. The review was from the gamers perspective and written for the target gamer. Now it is ego serving self promoting "Everyone read what I like!" and as such it is hardly worthwhile, let alone objective.

There was always a bit of opinion in those reviews. In places it is impossible to avoid. But every available mechanism, from joint play to Editor oversight, was in place to reduce the impact of such motivations. And in that day we had journalists.

Those gamers that have not been, were not rather, exposed constantly to the insightful and community serving writing from that era makes it impossible for them to understand why all the media now is some public self flagellation telling you what they think, why you should agree. Such methods are not okay in the least.

Writeups in the past were more about information and less about critique. That is what I need from someone I do not know and do not care to know. I do acknowledge that there are certainly far more games hitting the shelves now than we had in those days and the preorder, get it early, get it now rush rush rush attitude has forced those attempting to review a title to hurry their process. Thus it receives practically none of the care such writing endeavors were once awarded.

But these people must be held to the same line which they employ on regular occasions to attack games. Their whimsical writings do far far more damage to gaming than does a poorly made title and their holier than thou attitude must go. And face it, what is good for the goose...

Do it correctly or not at all.

I do not take these opinions as personal attacks because they are not about me - something these writers fail to comprehend. I take them as what they are, harmful to a hobby I enjoy and incompetent on an immeasurable scale.

The give me a click mentality does nothing to make these rag writings valuable or excusable. Not in the least.

[joab777]

I dont think many ppl buy games based on edge reviews anyway.

[unjust75]

This game does not look as good as the first. I played the demo and it looks awful. Graphics aren't everything,but in a time when new consoles are out and it's nearing the end of a systems life cycle you'd expect much more from a developer who's first outing received critical reviews.

[stragomccloud]

What are you talking about? The game looks even better! It even had better DirectX11 support this time around.

[Elda]

Agreed!....the game looks beautiful.

[starchild]

Uh what in the hell are you talking about? Admittedly I haven't played the console versions, but the PC version of CLoS2 is heads and shoulders above the first CLoS which is already a beautiful game.

I wouldn't hesitate to call CLoS2 one of the most graphically beautiful games of the PS3/360 generation.

[CrossingEden]

Why in the world does a hack and slash game have a stealth section? You're doing it wrong!

(/ﾟДﾟ)/

[nope111]

I really enjoyed the demo and cannot wait for its release, no review can sway my opinion.
i stopped listening to critic reviews years ago, games like Alice: Madness Returns, Gods Eater Burst, and Lost Planet 2 are good examples of really unjust reviews.

[Lysander91]

How can an opinion be unjust?

[Hicken]

When it's not justified. If I say people are better with three toes, I need to have some way to justify that statement. It should be naked by some sort of reasonable... reasoning. Otherwise it's just silliness.

[Lysander91]

@Hicken You don't need to justify an opinion. If I say that I don't like the Transformers films, I don't need to say why. It's just a fact. In the case of reviews, they do "justify" their opinions though. You might not like or agree with them. If they don't tell you why they do or don't like something, then it's not a very good review or IMO a review at all.

[isarai]

eh, don't care, i've found TONS of amazing games that got shitty reviews. all i know is i loved the first, and the demo of this felt like a good improvement in every way so i'm getting it.

[Inception]

Yup me too. I never listen to any review before i got my hands on the game. For LoS 2, i already tried the demo and it's nowhere near 4/10 score. In my book, 4-5/10 score are for games that very unplayable because of bugs / glitch.

[WeAreLegion]

I'm normally ok with bad reviews, but all the reviewers who praised the first game hate this one. Why is there stealth?!?

[Wolf873]

I read somewhere, stealth does not makeup large portion of the game. Just dispersed minimally.

[Wolf873]

Tried the demo, loved it! But I'm playing the game more for story, as I need a closure and the amazing music. Alone in the Dark too got a bad score, though it wasn't a bad at all especially on PS3, even though some grievances were well earned. But lesson learned, not all bad score games are actually bad. It's pretty much subjective.

[Lysander91]

Hey, you got it right. Reviews are subjective. They are opinions. You don't have to agree with them and they don't have to agree with you.

[Hicken]

Okay, I don't really care if this as marked as off topic, but it needs to be said:

Pick one. Edge cannot be both singular and plural. If you say "Edge reviews," then it should be "wasn't impressed." If you want to use "weren't impressed," then it should be "Edge review."

/rant

[WonderboyIII]

Tried the demo, it did not have the magic of the first. But it is just a demo after all. I wasn't too impressed, but I am still willing to give the game a go.

[John Kratos]

Gameinformer gave it a six, the prospects for this game aren't looking to good. Plus the embargo doesn't lift until the 25th, which is the release date for the game, that's always a troubling sign.

This is kind of sad considering the first one was a good game with a few problems in my eyes. Problems that could have been ironed out in a sequel.

[WonderboyIII]

Looks like Darksiders 2 all over again. First was great, second was bloated.

[zlpw0ker]

well,I really hate stealth in a game and it doesnt fit in a hack n slash game.
But the combat complains that the reviewer have is opinion wise.LOS1 you could get intrupted by foes while in combat,and it shouldnt be like a certain game that you basically can play blind to kill enemys.
And dodging should never give invinci frames,you roll off,you get hit you get hit.
prolly gonna have to take quick peek on stealth on CVLOS2 before I buy it.

[Tzuno]

Go play some Sims 3....Edge and let us spill some blood.