Why User Reviews Are Necessary

The other day I read an interesting column about how user reviews on sites such as Amazon or Metacritic are bullshit, because lots of people tend to vote only the maximum or minimum amount of points (or stars) and because Metacritic doesn't even require you to own the game you're rating and because certain publishers and game developers have been caught rating their own shit. And maybe average Joe simply isn't as "qualified" to review games as us professional games critics. To which I say - get off your high horse. User reviews are as important (and full of shit) as most "professional" ones.

Let's get one thing out of the way: Video game critics and wine experts have one thing in common. The better ones among us are great with words, but aside from that, we're faking it, because we're just as stupid as everybody else. You don't need any special skills to tell whether or not you like or dislike a game and tell people why you do or do not enjoy playing something. This isn't fucking rocket science. It's goddamn entertainment. Anyone capable of forming an opinion and explaining it with a few words can be a games critic. Maybe not a great one at that, but the lousy quality of today's gaming magazines and websites is an entirely different matter.

So user reviews are bad, apparently. Current popular example: The PC version of Fallout 4 scored an 85 with professional reviewers, while the user rating sits at an underwhelming 5.4 on Metacritic. And while the average user score is certainly off the mark with this one, you can't deny that many of them raise valid points of criticism, from the horrid console UI to the usual plethora of Bethesda bugs, tons upon tons of boring fetch quests or the fact that the story pretty much forces you to be a goodie-goodie, where games like New Vegas allowed you to become a slaver, if you so desired. And while I'm personally enjoying the streamlined new perk system and the absence of durability loss on anything but power armor, you can't deny that this is the easiest Fallout game of all times. A five year old could master this game on the default difficulty setting. That whole "wasteland survival" feeling gets a little ruined when you can get all sorts of perks that make you immune to radiation during the first five or so level ups.

I don't agree with a 5.4. I like Fallout 4. But you can't just claim that all of these user reviews are completely pointless and contain no valid criticism. Many of the things users bring up on Metacritic or Steam aren't mentioned in any professional reviews and, as a user, I find them interesting and relevant. And there are lots of games, where the user rating is simply more accurate than the professional average.

This still image is only slightly slower than the actual gameplay.

Take the abysmal Need for Speed: Rivals, for instance. A professional metascore of 76 for the worst game in the series by far. The PC version of this game is frame-capped at 30 FPS. A fucking racing game, which came out in late 2013 with a 30 FPS frame cap! If you unlocked the cap, it would break the game's physics, cars would start flying away and everything ran way too fast. The game also introduced great features such as unskippable tutorial videos on how to accelerate and use your brakes. Because clearly we've never played a racing title before. The tutorial is played twice for good measure. Look, if you wanna see for yourself how fucking awful and broken this game is, look at TotalBiscuit's Let's Not Play. I have bought this game after reading some of the positive professional reviews, none of which mentioned those annoying tutorials, the shitty frame cap or the problem with the physics engine, let alone the piss-poor performance of the Frostbite engine, which struggles to maintain Rivals' ridiculous 30 FPS in the first place. The low user-rating of 3.2 is spot on and I would have saved a lot of money if I had checked metacritic before I bought this thing.

Another great example for a series of games, most professional reviewers don't know anything about is Call of Duty. Year after year they fart out another spectacular 4 hour campaign with lots of flashy explosions. Granted, Black Ops 3 actually offers a few more hours of gameplay, but it's still on rails, you still can't leave your predetermined path and, most importantly, a huge part of the player base never touches the fucking campaign! I haven't finished the story in any CoD title since Modern Warfare 3, because - like a large part of the community - I focus solely on the multiplayer portion of the series. And guess what? Professional reviewers don't get to fucking see the multiplayer, because they get to play a press version, weeks ahead of the official release.

Yes, they get to play against other reviewers and random Youtubers, but how's the matchmaking? Are cheaters ruining every lobby? Are there dedicated servers? Are any of the new game modes "professionals" praise in their shitty reviews actually being played or do people ignore them anyway, because everyone only plays TDM and Domination? If you want to know about any of these things, you depend on user reviews, because professional reviewers are too busy talking about the campaign or the 3 new multiplayer modes nobody is going to play.

War never changes :P

But what really ticks me off is when a professional critic complains about user reviews being bought. Excuse me? I remember when I was asked to review the hilariously awful Silent Hunter Online. You probably haven't heard about that game, because who the hell gives a fuck about browser-based Free2Play submarine simulators? If you watch only a single video today, make sure it's the following trailer:

I was asked to change my negative review into a neutral preview, because Ubisoft paid for the article. Sponsored content. It's a fucking advertisiement, pretending to be a real article. Yes, you spend a lot of money on a magazine to read fucking sponsored content.

Oh and do you remember Final Fantasy XIV? The first version, before the re-release, which now rivals WoW's subscription numbers? The original Final Fantasy XIV was so bad, Square fired the entire team that worked on it and started from scratch.

The original release was a broken, unplayable mess, where your biggest problem was a pair of broken panties. I'm not making this up. Apart from the usual weapons and armor your average Eorzean adventurer would carry around, every character also had a pair of underpants, which would take damage in combat like every other piece of equipment. And this would eventually result in a little warning icon on your screen, informing you about item damage. Problem is, if you didn't level up the crafting profession required to repair your own knickers, you'd be stuck with the item damage icon for all eternity, because you could not take your broken underwear to a repair NPC or another player. You could do so with any other item, but removing your undies was not allowed, so they'd remain broken for good.

I was asked to review the game for a magazine and they bumped up my intended rating by about 10 points, because, "Square are too important, we can't afford to piss them off." Yes. This is a thing. So excuse me, if I can't help but laugh when a professional reviewer complains about certain user reviews being "bought". So what if there are one or two phony user ratings among hundreds of legit ones on Steam, Amazon or Metacritic?
They made me hand out a rating of 73 for the original Final Fantasy XIV, a game so unfinished, so unplayable, it was little more than a concept demo. If you wanted to know how awful this game was back then, user reviews were a lot more trustworthy than certain professional outlets.

Don't get me wrong. This doesn't happen all the time. I've only experienced this with four or five of my articles with a place I've long severed my ties with. But it absolutely happens. There's a reason many readers are having a hard time trusting professional reviewers these days. There's a reason certain magazines spend more time explaining and justifying their review scores than they do talking about fucking games. Of course you have to take user reviews into consideration before you buy something! Fuck the numbers, ignore the fact that many of them rate in nothing but absolutes and always go for a straight 0 or 10 and nothing in between. But read their reasons. Figure out why they love or hate a game.

I always wanted to be a games critic. I read all the gaming magazines I could get when I was ten years old. And when some of you flew cardboard boxes to the moon or dressed up like cowboys I'd sit and write my own reviews about my favourite C64 games, just for myself. To me, this is the coolest job in the world. Some of the folks I get to work with nowadays were true childhood heroes to me. But for fuck's sake. Stop being so goddamn arrogant. You write about fucking videogames. You're hardly brain surgeons.

-Cat