How to Read a Game Review

An article discussing the changing opinions towards game reviews. From GamesReviews:

"There's always a lot of discussion when a review doesn't fit the chosen narrative of a game's hype. Even when it's pretty much spot on, fans of a given franchise will question why it didn't score higher when it's their very favourite new game, better than Grand Theft Auto V by miles "and look at what you gave that!" There's no talking to people who've decided their very own score based on a twenty second teaser trailer, but a worse kind of reader has appeared - the sort that don't know what a review is and how to get the most out of it. And, sadly, their number seems to be growing."

[thorstein]

Not bad, but there really, really needs to be an article titled: "How To WRITE a Game Review."

Make it an industry standard and make sure that flamebait titles like "Why (insert game title) is Overrated" are not allowed. That isn't a review. That is flamebait.

Final paragraph is spot on!

[matgrowcott]

Funnily enough, I've worked with several sites that have internal writer's guides covering just that.

But then editors are willing to give their writers the benefit of the doubt, or know it's a big title and would rather publish sooner rather than later, or are caught up in the hype themselves and would have fired the writer if they'd given Bioshock Infinite anything less than a 10/10...

It's a mess, and I personally try not to work with sites that can't get their act together in terms of sticking to their own rules, but not everybody has the benefit of being able to choose the work they do or even realize it's happening, so it's a tough thing to, for want of a better word, 'police.'

[Ezz2013]

the first problem with reviews is that some of them are done by people who are not even into the genre they are doing a review on

[matgrowcott]

@Ezz

The writer doesn't have to be into the genre, so long as they can review it objectively. It makes no difference at all.

[MRMagoo123]

I am hoping they do a "how to read articles" one soon tho because thats a major floor on this site for a lot of users. I dont mean you guys didnt read but I thought it was relevant to the convo you where having.

[SpiralTear]

Any article that uses the word "overrated" in its headline is probably not worth your time.