Sulphur on 15/6/2019 at 06:10

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I find user reviews aren't useful beyond talking about objective things like how buggy a game is, if there's bugs in that break the game, or topiques du jour like microtransactions - and even then, Steam's thumbs up/down dichotomy doesn't allow for a review to specify that the opinion's actually mixed. Beyond that, user reviews just aren't reliable (as Starker outlined) unless you have a few trusted sources - like, say, on a forum somewhere on the internet. The same goes for press reviews, to be fair. There's always a skew even if you trust a certain reviewer, so it takes aggregating points from multiple sources to get a decent, more or less accurate take on whether a game's going to be your kind of thing.

demagogue on 15/6/2019 at 07:55

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Ok, there are different reviewers of different quality & usefulness from different sources. That's probably the best answer. Some user reviews boil things down to check-boxes (visual, gameplay, story) and some will go into detail about gameplay, and those can be useful. Those are the ones I look for. I agree the bulk of those kinds of reviews aren't very helpful or are even misleading. So I just look for the ones that appear useful. Professional reviewers can boil things down like that too, but they can also add in a lot of other things not necessarily about playing the game too. It all depends on too many factors to summarize neatly probably.

As for scores, I think they aren't as useful for negatively reviewed games, because there have been a number of negatively reviewed games I've still liked, and they could have been downvoted for several reasons like they don't like the company or political signaling, etc. Actually the category I was thinking about was artistic downer games, which I typically like, but they'll often get negative reviews just because people are alienated by that kind of thing and will downvote it just on principle. (On the other hand, there are some "artistic" stylish games that get upvoted on that basis alone but end up being shallow & I won't like that. So that also cuts both ways.)

But if it's a consistently up-voted game, Very or Overwhelmingly Positive, that probably has to be a good game because it couldn't sustain that kind of voting unless all kinds of different people are consistently up-voting it. (Whereas a mixed vote could be really good but idiosyncratic, bad but has fanservice, or just honestly a blah but not awful game. It's much harder to predict.) Oh, the one exception for Overwhelmingly Positive games is something like JRPGs, where there's a rabid fanbase. If you're part of that fanbase you're going to be a rabid fan, but if you aren't, that score doesn't mean you'll like it. But then you probably wouldn't be playing it to begin with.

Pyrian on 15/6/2019 at 14:06

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My number one source for game opinions is... TTLG. I wuv you guys. :cheeky:

Nameless Voice on 15/6/2019 at 15:51

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One thing which I regularly watch is Zero Punctuation's reviews. The thing is, while him taking pains to point out all the bad things in games can be useful, I often don't agree with his reviews.
I usually agree with him on the games he really likes (Thief, Obra Dinn, etc.), but he often criticises games for things that I have no problem with (like his dislike for RPGs, strategy, and anything very complicated.)

I do agree that someone playing games as a gamer tends to be more relevant at reviewing than someone who plays games as a critic. The other series of reviews that I watch are by Lord Mandalore, who is *not* a professional reviewer, he does it in his spare time because he loves to play strange games, and review them.


For actually deciding to buy some random game I came across, I do find the user reviews really useful. Looking at games on Epic Game Stores is really weird because the store pages tend to be more like back-of-box hype and are really low on useful information (some don't even have gameplay videos!), combined with no reviews - it makes me not really have a clue what the game is about and forces me to search elsewhere to find out (or, let's face it, probably just not bother and never buy it.)

Sulphur on 15/6/2019 at 18:12

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Given that Yahtzee's videos are for exaggerated comedic effect first and foremost, relying on them for useful insight seems a bit rash.