Game reviews are an important aspect of the gaming industry today and it can be argued that game reviews are the most watched form of media criticism today. But there’s something irritating about video game reviews, and video game journalism in general.
Gaming is an expensive medium. A majority of the time, when the newest and biggest games come out, consumers are expected to pay upwards of $60 today. ($70 for the top PS5 games) This means that contrary to seeing a new movie, where ticket prices are bound to fluctuate, or the affordable prices of movie DVDs/Blu Rays, music CDs, or paperback novels, buying a new video game is a risk too large to take blindly and getting reliable input on what a new game offers is necessary.
How reliable are these review outlets though? It’s tough to say. A rising issue that isn’t new in the slightest is when it comes to the scoring of games.
The current review score average from IGN according to opencritic.com is a 75, despite them only recommending 53.6% of games overall. This personally makes me question their metric for reviewing games, but even that is hard to look into due to the multitude of different writers that the site hires to review games. Within the last month alone, IGN has had 19 different writers write reviews of 28 games released. All reviewing different games on a different metric than the other and with differing opinions of those games. If I read one review of a new game and he/she gives it an 8, and there are a dozen other games the same month, all with 8s, is it even possible to make coherent comparisons to each of those when the person behind that rate is different for each of those games?
One of the biggest issues as well that have been prevalent through the past few years, is the problem of review bombing on the review cite metacritic. Most gamers will tell you the most reliable source of gaming opinion is in the user review section on meteoritic, but the amount of obvious review bombing that occurs dissolve any credibility this area of the website has. Whether it being console war connoisseurs trashing a Playstation or Xbox game for not being on their preferred console, or the waves of gamers spouting their disgust for a game with inclusionary efforts for forcing woke agendas and politics into their video games.
Sadly, one of the only ways today to determine a definitive rating for a game is to look at average ratings for the games themselves. The ideal way however is the form of taking what you like in gaming now and finding a content creator or reviewer on youtube such as SkillUp, GirlfriendReviews, Gameranx, or Easy allies (a handful of experienced gaming journalists that review games in their area of experience) and relating to their tastes in games overall and formulating on your own whether or not a game is worth buying.