When Zero Punctuation and Variety Magazine Offer The Best Reviews, There is a Problem
Yesterday I bought Dead Space and thought it was awesome. Great graphics, stunning audio design and an overall exceptionally polished experience. Today, I’ve played 3 hours more and I’m struggling to stop myself trading it in for Saints Row 2. It’s become monotonous, bland and downright annoying to play.
Curious to see if things pick up and are worth slogging on for, I started looking around for other people’s take on the game. I was under the impression from all I had heard before buying that it was basically like BioShock but really scary. It was at this point I realised something rather unnerving: most of the reviews are just crap.
I knew a game review is no work of art, but I had always defended harsh criticism of them claiming that they are at least fair. Due in part because almost all the reviews I read were from Destructoid, who it turns out are the exception rather than the rule. The same can be said for indie blog Ripten, who wrote one of the few reviews that seemed actually honest. It was well balanced, and overall very positive, thought did mention that “six hours in, I was ready for it to be over, and my interest in the narrative began to wane”.
From reading a dozen or so of the more popular site’s reviews, they all seem to read almost identically. Here are nearly all reviews of Dead Space in 5 short sentences:
The game is scary. Here is a bit of generic story. The graphics are good. The sound is good. It is the best game ever.
None of the reviews make mention of the tedium of the missions, all of which seem to require you to go to a location, do something, then return back the exact same way you went. Game Informer’s review, for example, mentions not a single blemish in the game, except for ‘œmundane’ levels and ‘œa poorly executed asteroid shooting gallery’, neither of which are important enough to dent the game’s 9.25 final score.
Gamespot’s review just doesn’t mention any of even the mildest bad points (on either of the 2 page review), resulting in a glowing 9.0 from them. GameDaily (who I’ve called out before) simply brush off any bad points by saying that Dead Space is simply “too good”. How can a game be too good to critique important aspects such as bland and repetitive missions?
Just as I was losing hope, I spotted a review from Variety (I know who they are). They gave one of the lowest scores the game has yet received. Variety also isn’t even a videogame site. And yet against my expectations, the review is a glorious deconstruction of Dead Space. It mentions all of the important factors as well as an honest explanation of the games flaws.
This was followed up with the most recent Zero Punctuation review. Often, I have dismissed ZP as simply entertainment (see the Braid review ‘œno connection between the story and the gameplay’ for just how wrong he can be), but in this case he picks up on exactly what is wrong with Dead Space; something professional game reviewers seem to have completely missed.
When Variety magazine and Zero Punctuation are offering more detailed, accurate and balanced reviews than the largest videogame-specific outlets out there, we have a problem. Granted it’s a problem we know exists, but I had no idea it was quite this bad. Reviews shouldn’t be “this is what PR people would say about the game. Go buy it”. They should be REVIEWS.
If I can stop myself from trading it in, the NG review of Dead Space will be up within the next few days, hopefully providing you with all the details the other reviews somehow forgot.
This is probably the first game for me that actually makes sense in using the fetch x and fix this task mentality. Having to do jobs of fixing the ship actually made sense compared to games like GTA I suppose where a lot of the tasks didn’t really make a lot of sense and got repetitive quickly just going to certain areas and doing the same thing. Dead Space for me kept it entertaining the whole way through, but I can see why you and people would get tired of it. I did read one review that talked about the backtracking and the areas, but I did not seem to notice it that often. Once again, it felt like it made sense to be going back through the areas to repair, compared to traveling to a new area and just having what would seem a vast ship full of areas you were only allowed to visit once.
It is for these reasons I have stopped buying games on release, I’ll often wait to get a friends opinions or have a go of theirs first.
I completely agree. Dead Space is a solid game, but it’s nowhere near as amazing as people said, and to discount big flaws like that awful asteroid shooting, repetitive gameplay, kinesis puzzles that don’t always work due to fucked physics, and the general slog of gameplay, is not fair.
I think the Zero Punctuation reviews are intriguing are simply because he doesn’t punish the listener by foisting a score onto the review. He simply speaks his mind on how he feels about the game as he experienced it.
I don’t know why more reviews aren’t structured that way. Why do we feel the need to artifically place a value on the game? Theres no standard criteria for saying what constitues a 1 point increase; So why even use numbers? or Stars? or whatever voodoo icon of your choosing?
Now as far as content of the review, most large review sites are game company shills. As long as review sites are dependent on early review copies, as well as game advertising dollars, then we’ll be stuck with reviews that are bland and middle of the road.