Tuesday, December 27, 2016

Game reviews / Final impressions

I've been thinking about game reviews a lot lately.  I like reading reviews of games to help me decide if I want to buy it or not.  Then I usually watch some YouTube videos of gameplay, but never the beginning of the game.  Sometimes what I read and what I see don't add up.  And it makes me wonder how much of the game the reviewer actually played. 

If a game takes about 60 hours to play did the reviewer actually play the whole game before they wrote their review?  Probably not.  They've got a lot of other things to do . . . and other games to play.  They probably played enough to get the gist of the game but that's not the whole picture.

But you can't always trust what you see on a YouTube video either as the whole picture.  Unless the player is commenting about everything they are experiencing (story, game mechanics, art design, impressions, etc.) they're not giving a whole picture either.  Yes, they might oh and ah at things, or yell and cuss at times, but there's more to that if you want to get the whole essence of a game.

Since I'm finishing a lot more games than before maybe I could write a review of the games that I've finished and you can compare the review I write with the gameplay videos I make.  These won't be professional level reviews, just my impressions on how things went.  I figure I could stick to some basic categories and talk about those things that may or may not influence you playing a game.

I'm thinking about the following categories:

story
characters
game mechanics
art design
overall impressions

What do you think about those categories?  Do you think there should be more things that I cover?  Less?  I haven't decided if I will give out a final score/rating for the games.  I don't know if it would be on a 5 or 10 point scale.  Or maybe 100.  Who knows.  Just throwing out ideas now.  Let me know what you think.

5 comments:

Zenra Nukenin said...

The Working Girl's Gaming Reviews? I say go for it! Personally, I'd much rather see a review of a game than a spoiler-ific Let's Play.

Pengwenn said...

did you make up that name or did you find it somewhere? I like it.

Pengwenn said...

on second thought "working girl" might have a different connotation that I might not wnat . . . on the other had if it brings views . . . . hmmm

Pengwenn said...

of course my tag line could be "my time's limited...."

Zenra Nukenin said...

I came up with that name from the description in your "about me". The alternate connotation didn't occur to me until after I posted. I had hoped no one would notice.