Who Is Writing Reviews Nowadays Anyway?
A survey of the values, parlance, and trends of current reviewers
I’ve written before that, “‘games media’, ‘reviewers’, and ‘critics’, are terms that are used to describe the same individual but are rarely correct.” Reviewers are individuals frequently paid by a website to play a game and write a review in time for the embargo–the time and date the publisher has permitted a review to become public in exchange for playing it before public release. This is frequently in addition to their daily quota of news and the occasional editorial opinion or interview or participation in a “best of” list for some platform, genre, or all-time landscape.
History is a series of inflations and contractions. Currently, and for some time, we have been contracting. The available websites capable and willing to pay someone for a written review has been shrinking1, whether due to mergers between those who are left, interest waning, or funding shrinking. We rely on public funding funneled through other websites and donations more than ever. Reviews “don’t matter” yet people keep throwing themselves in the grinder to write them because someone keeps reading them. Reviewers are churned through the wheel at such a rate that we’re repeating the same conversations–dare I say ‘discourse’--seemingly weekly online. Few are reading and responding to each other’s work, good writers become developers or stick around only to remain on the margins of success, doomed to a life of freelance work. And so here I am, a former reviewer myself, continuing to review the reviewers out of a love for the game and nothing else.
This writing started under the belief that if I am going to be writing about reviews, criticism, culture, etc, I should be reading the current writing in that field. I then thought to frame it as a survey of a sampling of reviewers. In the spirit of not wanting to be mean or single out an individual–as the occupation of reviewer at these larger outlets subjects them to enough vitriol2 directly–the authors will be referred to using the characters of Metal Gear Solid (1998).
When I first began this draft in June of 2024 I counted at least 180 websites and 1241 individuals as having a review posted on OpenCritic. Twice now have I gone through and copied, pasted, and formatted the list of reviewers for the most recent games within the past 90 days and there pared it down to the most recurring names from a scattering of the larger websites: IGN, GameSpot, Eurogamer, and so on. The result was nine reviewers from whom I would read between 5-10 of their most recent reviews and take notes on anything and everything that stuck out to me. I would pick a random review–tending to pick the more well known games–as a sample to pick apart by separating sentences into ones that tendered judgement and those that were simply reciting information–stuff like, “A small collection of treasure islands wherein you fight other pirates for loot, lighthouses that act as fast travel points, rival ships dotted around, and speed rings that make you go faster when you sail through them.” This practice was not because I believe 100% of a review should include qualitative assessment but a curiosity about how much content of any given review is stating plain facts or listing its features instead of offering any sort of opinion on them. I found the average split slightly favors opinion over restating back of the box facts, which is how I would hope a review, an explanation of an opinion, would be.
So often a neutral adjective or noun (neutral in that these words do not, by themselves, dictate whether a game/what it is attached to is good or bad) was employed with an implicit positive or negative connotation attached to them. Variety, options, uniqueness, dangerous, freedom, tension, replayability: all adjectives that are implicit in signifying a commendable or damnable quality in whatever is being discussed. The language of videogames is not only jargon such as Metroidvania or HD-2D or bunny hopping or buff but also in placing inherent qualitative judgements into otherwise neutral descriptors. The most common words formed a ternary diagram in my head that I’ll use to plot out and see if there are any areas on the map that directly correspond with high scores. In the interest of space I have placed bulleted lists backing up each of these, and other observations, at the very bottom of this post.
Variety is the difference in things you are seeing on screen, whether it be landscapes or enemies, it means difference in behavior and differences in action.
Freedom means the ability to go anywhere, do anything, the freedom of making choices instead of having them made for you, in having options available at all times.
Innovation is uniqueness, something new being introduced by the game that has not been done before, expanding and adding onto something that came before that becomes the new standard by which to measure success.
These three are the pillars of what is being looked for in a review.
Freedom of choice is prized even if the potential is not made kinetic by the individual player. I wrote about this a little after playing Fallout: New Vegas. The game’s value is increased in a player’s mind by the appearance of locked out skill checks when talking to people. This appearance signals that there exists a phantom playthrough in which you sorted your skill points differently and were able to access that which is blocked off from you presently. Whether you ever materialize that ghost into a substantial save data does not matter. Hal Emmerich puts it best, “especially since your decisions can have a profound impact on how things end up; my fingerprints were all over the ultimate fate of the Living Lands.” The simple fact that it is present enriches the decision you have already made.
Solid Snake describes their displeasure at the lack of freedom in, “It’s a big river with the illusion of explorative opportunities and just a few branching canals.” Celebrating the presence of freedom, we have Meryl Silverburgh, “It is, to its credit, a lot more freeform-feeling than most Metroidvanias I've played. While progress between each stratum is often gated by major story beats, you're free to push in either direction when travelling within one.” Here again I’d point toward the usage of neutral language with implicit qualitative judgement. That sentence is descriptive, but knowing how we talk about videogames, I read an inherent positive quality being stated in between the lines, “free to push in either direction.” I’m not criticizing this parlance as bad, it just stuck out to me when reading and believe it is an observation worth noting for how videogames have a language all to its own in ways separate from the examples I listed previously. It is not just in creating new words but also in how they change existing ones.
We feel rewarded by the simple act of making a choice and seeing the reaction by the game. The greater the variation (here begins the cross-contamination between the pillars) between outcomes the inherently better the game becomes. This is why Mass Effect 3’s original ending, with its color palette swaps, was so hated. Player expression, through how they choose to present their character through a dense catalogue of facial and body sliders, what clothes to wear, what location to visit first, which skill tree to accrue points in, to say “yes,” “no,” “tell me more,” and to cause an effect on the state of the world by the time credits roll are highly valued above maybe anything else besides firm technical performance. This is why Cyberpunk 2077 went from the laughingstock of the web to becoming a pinnacle of the landscape once it was able to square away its major glitches.
Intermingling with freedom the next great value of a game is variety. We don’t want to see the same orc model in hour 20 that we saw in hour 1, you need to consistently be placing new things in front of us to please our receptors. To quote Hal Emmerich, “biggest issue with combat is in the variety of opponents,” and Nastasha Romanenko, “using the exact same moves over and over again, fighting largely the same enemy styles, and it quickly becomes tiresome.” This desire for variety is intermingled with freedom because we want the freedom of making choices and we also require those choices to be different from each other.
This value is also intermingled with quantity, as freedom and variety also feed into the amount of things to do and see, with the higher the number the better the game is. “Variety” as a singular term is the most recurring throughout my notes (18 appearances in just the quotes I pulled from the text). Despite being a neutral descriptor, an adjective that merely means, “the quality or state of being different or diverse; the absence of uniformity, sameness, or monotony.” we take its presence, or lack thereof, as a qualitative judgement of a game. A game has no variety? Bad. A game has a lot of variety? Good. Naomi Hunter puts it best, “nothing to dislike about more variety.”
This is likely why Split Fiction received such unanimous praise as it followed the same delivery rate of Hazelight Studios previous game It Takes Two (Geoff Keighley’s Game of the Year 2021) in terms of introducing new and different scenarios to play through with differing mechanical requirements not only per section but from the individual players. Mei Ling put it best describing it as, “a novelty parade.” A game nowadays not only has to last 30+ hours to be worth the asking price on launch (God forbid you play it a couple years later when its on sale or reduced in cost) but it also has to be consistently introducing new things to look at and to do to be worthwhile.
Just beating out technical performance in my survey is a desire for innovation within games. We want games to be introducing something new that has not been seen before, which goes hand in hand with variety. We don’t want every game to be just like the other, they need to be introducing some new mechanic that hasn’t been done before, telling a story we haven’t already played through. The lack of innovation is most acutely felt by Hal Emmerich in their reviews: “by-the-numbers adventure is without question the most milquetoast and unimaginative game I’ve played in the genre,” as well as, “has little else to distinguish itself; if not exactly breaking new ground; ends up an overall unsurprising adventure that has few distinctive ideas to call its own,” and, “plays it quite safe…doesn’t offer much in the way of innovation…few by-the-numbers game modes and no killer features to shake up the genre”
Due to the prevalence of adaptations of other works into games, we also see the sentiment that a licensed work has to be faithful while also separating itself from the original with something new. Solid Snake: “boosting the source material in a myriad of ways while remaining faithful and even augmenting the things that made the original work.” Gray Fox: “standout example of how to take an old franchise and do something with it that feels fresh while still being true to the lineage of the series.” I more value the ability to introduce something new than being “faithful,” to the point of copy+pasting. Alien Romulus would have been much better if it were not so slavish to its forebears, best picked apart by Ben Verschoor in, “Alien: Romulus: The Cinemorph.”
Due to a foundation of game reviews being product reviews, we still are suffering from the lingering effects of performance, the ability of a game to never stutter, glitch out, crash, or immediately load in the textures for all surfaces, being highly valued. Naomi Hunter: “bugs; repeated crash; multiple crashes; fell through the world; got stuck on level geometry; audio stuttering; long load times; key items didn’t highlight.” Hal Emmerich across three different reviews makes sure to set space aside to detail any technical issues, and specifically “jankiness” of a game.
A game is guaranteed to score low due to bad performance over any decisions in narrative or mechanics and visual style. The average review score is 763 because so long as a game can maintain its framerate it is guaranteed to reach the base level of “good.” As helpfully illustrated by ResetEra user Kotetsu534, we can at least take comfort that the hype levels of olde have died down. Since 2012 there has been a notable drop in the amount of games receiving 90+ scores on Metacritic.
There is a notable focus on “game feel,” fights having impact, controls being stiff or sluggish, needing the game to feel good to play, having weight, precise, tight, satisfying. Interactivity between player and screen is what separates games apart from the other forms so this focus on how that interactivity is being communicated is understandable though often I believe we have overly homogenized what is good and bad to the detriment of experimentation being rewarded. Just see the evolution of the control scheme throughout the Halo series to view the homogenization of first person shooter controls, with alternatives being dismissed. ThatGamingBritShow has a great video discussing this topic, “How TimeSplitters was the BETTER Shooter”
I found an offhand comment by Naomi Hunter, “impressive looking for a game that’s exclusive to the standalone Meta Quest 3 headset,” very amusing as it made me think, “Is ‘impressive for a VR title’ the new, ‘good for a Wii game?’” Surprisingly “pacing” wasn’t as prevalent a mention as I expected, though it was funny to see “glacial” used by two separate reviewers (Silverburgh and Liquid Snake) to describe the pacing of their respective game subjects. Somehow a “in my opinion” in someone's own review bearing their name, still managed to appear twice: Solid Snake, “is, for me, the best amalgam of,” and Romanenko, [literally!] “in my opinion”. This is an affliction that extends to the “YouTube video essay” field as well, so many times I am multiple hours into a video only to hear, “in my opinion.” How maddening to be listening to one's voice and hear them restate the obvious. Likewise I am reading your words, I don’t need you to couch your opinion with an, “in my opinion!”
Annoyingly I find reviews frequently gesture at a larger topic that is never expanded upon. Gray Fox writes, “it spotlights race, slavery, poverty, generational trauma, and death.” Can you elaborate? …no. Romanenko, “the game is still a masterclass in RPG writing, and features questlines that trump much of what the genre has managed in the two decades since.” Some of this lacking of development can be attributed to embargo’s whether the official review embargo text provided by the publisher or the unofficial “no spoilers” that dominates and suffocates any detailed context being written in critical text. From Solid Snake I will read “They’re well worth engaging, and there are even opportunities where you could turn a one-time bitter enemy into a trusted friend,” and be left on read for any follow up to explain or detail that statement.
Some reviewers over-rely on referencing other games to describe the subject game, something I have noticed is very unique to games. Liquid Snake in one review writes, “feels very Fortnite, with its cartoony aesthetic and admirable amount of destructible structures.” “grab and hurl objects and enemies, much like the game-changing Half Life 2 gravity gun”, and name drops Dark Souls, Monster Hunter, Zelda, Shadow of the Colossus, and Spider-Man. Meanwhile Meryl name drops Capcom's Ace Attorney games, Case of the Golden Idol, Paranormasight: The Seven Mysteries of Honjo, The World Ends with You, Makoto Wakaido's Case Files Trilogy, Famicom Detective Club, and Emio: The Smiling Man all within the same review text.
There exists too much guessing at: 1.) the audience’s reaction to the game: “This friction won't be for everyone” by Meryl, “Your mileage may vary” by Solid Snake, “is going to be a game that I predict some people will bounce off of after just a few hours,” by Gray Fox, “is a fun game that you'll probably enjoy if you liked the last few, but you'll likely enjoy it even more if you're new to the series,” by Roy Campbell, “but for a new player playing the game for the first time, they’ll perhaps wonder why, as part of the remastering process, things like this weren’t eliminated,” by Romanenko. 2.) the future of the game, “Still, it’s an extremely impressive first draft that I’m eager to see Blizzard build upon in future expansions,” “Even so, Rogue Incursion is a strong opening act for a series I’m already eager to play more of,” Emmerich, “looks like it will continue to grow over time,” Solid Snake.
Taken individually, lots of reviewers still subscribe to the exhaustive, “touch on everything [graphics, story, sound, gameplay] even if you don’t really have anything substantial to say about it” policy of game reviewing. These are the least interesting reviews to read and the most product-like. Solid Snake, Hal Emmerich, and Roy Campbell read similarly and take this approach to their writing (important to note: all three are also from different outlets). Campbell was the only reviewer I believe I ended up disliking the most and forcing myself to read the minimum required amount of five reviews because of how boring the write ups were.
Mei Ling was after and was by far the best written reviewer of this bunch. There is a reason Ling is not mentioned in any of the quoted trends listed above and that is because they buck those trends and chart their own path. They also are a believer in the usage of vocabulary outside of the videogame thesaurus, “It feels like a gussied up minigame given centre stage; a woozy, flaky deckswabber; I'd feel well and truly hornswoggled; Workmanlike; dog-eared; naturalia; crackling, cackling; achingly dull riddle-me-this mushroom bullshit; Etherise; plucky; lavish; anomalous; shimmering, stagy confidence; Toiling in awe; a grotesque Satnav of a pimple of a productivity app, a creature spawned from fear of Not Enough Game, to squeeze the universe into a ball and wrap checklists around it; denouement” Words word words! I’ve been saying there is still value in text, in writing, in the simple fact that there are so many words! I don’t think this is the highest peak of word usage but by god is it refreshing to read reviews from someone who uses words from outside the escarpment of videogame jargon. What a relief it was to find someone out there still engaging with the wealth of words on offer by the English language (I believe this individual is property England English too). It was the type of writing I was instantly mourning having to move on from when I began reading the next subject when I came across the phrase, “There are some cool moments sprinkled throughout.”
Ling is an excellent reviewer when it comes to the field, though I even noticed they lacked some conviction to follow through in one review that read highly critical (their website has unscored reviews) that ended on, “But we both came to the agreement that, eh, it's not our bag.” Why not just come out and say you think it is bad! The entire text up to this point has the tone of, “I don’t like this and think it is not good,” but the follow through is lacking, and I do not believe this is restricted to just this reviewer.
Naomi Hunter was very clever in weaving in opinion in otherwise declarative sentences as well as nailing that tone of describing a scenario with the implicit expression of “this is good/bad” being heavily felt. Emmerich was perhaps the most singularly focused on finding innovation or new ideas within the games they reviewed, as well as being the most performance minded, seemingly going out of their way to include a paragraph on that subject in every single review. I found Nastasha Romanenko a little hyperbolic, with their, “masterclass in RPG writing,” “the best entry in the series in over a decade,” “achieving a spectacle not yet seen in the two-decade-old franchise,” and, “game’s scenery is genuinely photo-real from certain vantage points.”
I enjoyed performing this survey. It has given me a greater understanding of the field of reviewers currently working at some of the larger websites. Reading just headlines, subheads, and tweets is not substantial enough to really understand what is being valued and actually written in the text. Similar to how a majority of people only look at the score attached to a review instead of the text, I am glad to have read the text to survey who are writing reviews nowadays instead of just glancing across the scores and excerpts posted on OpenCritic.
As promised I’ve charted the top rated games on OpenCritic that I am familiar enough with to try and chart, of course this is a combination of my own experience and familiarity with the reactions and conversations about the game. As expected games with a good rating across the three categories are often the highest scoring and form that center body on the chart.
Freedom
There were more than a few times where I ran into invisible walls in the open world that didn’t make much sense to me. It would block me off from certain areas instead of letting me travel through or past them, making for a jarring disruption to my otherwise freeform travels.
Not only does that often end up with you having to make dialogue decisions that can affect your standing with them, but you’ll be given access to special missions and gear based on which side you work with and buddy up to as you continue your own story. It adds some level of replayabillity to the whole affair as there are a lot of ways you can change the narrative … depending on the decisions you make and the alliances you forge.
There are 8 branching class paths that offer a ton of variety, and building your party based on what class you’re using is key to surviving.
It adds some level of replayabillity to the whole affair as there are a lot of ways you can change the narrative.
It’s a big river with the illusion of explorative opportunities and just a few branching canals
the campaign is still a little too rigid to stop repetitiveness sinking in faster than I’d like.
It is, to its credit, a lot more freeform-feeling than most Metroidvanias I've played. While progress between each stratum is often gated by major story beats, you're free to push in either direction when travelling within one.
Early on, for example, I undertook a series of exhaustive quests from the local miller to help me get into a high-profile wedding feast. When I managed to get to the wedding another way, leaving the miller's quest unfinished, the game didn't close off that avenue of the story, or automatically fail it. Instead, when I returned to the miller post-wedding, the script immediately bounced back and shifted gears to accurately reflect where I was in the story at that point, all without missing a beat. The same goes for when you stumble on important quest items unexpectedly ahead of time, or come to solutions slightly differently to how the quest might have intended.
Sometimes that cleverness can fall flat, such as the time I decided to steal a supposedly magic amulet instead of winning it fair and square from its Romani owner. The recipient - the owner's daughter - implied that theft was the only way forward, but on my return with the stolen amulet in hand, only then did she bemoan that its magic comes from being handed over willingly, so stealing it robbed it of all its power. In that moment, I felt annoyed and misled, and I left grumbling to myself how I should have just endured the slightly arduous-sounding, multi-stage wager challenge proposed by her mother instead. My fault for wanting to cut corners, perhaps, but a path I thought the game was pushing me down nevertheless.
but that’s not an option
especially since your decisions can have a profound impact on how things end up; my fingerprints were all over the ultimate fate of the Living Lands, which could make it worth another playthrough to see how things might have gone differently.
explored without limitations
It's extremely unlikely you'd see the world in the same order I or anyone else saw it; branches off into many different directions based on who you align yourself with; exploring the world never got old.
You can [x14]; All of these options (and many more) are possible and better yet, rarely do choices have an easy answer; I wanted to immediately boot up the game and start a new playthrough just to make different choices and see the paths I hadn’t taken previously; game gives you plenty of choices;
Variety
goes out of its way to deliver a wide variety of ways to play it, and many of them are good, though some feel a bit more half-baked than others.
There are 8 branching class paths that offer a ton of variety, and building your party based on what class you’re using is key to surviving.
It also features a cool variety of themes…and unique mechanics to play around in each of them
No matter where you look in Pirate Yakuza, you won’t be lacking for interesting things to do.
gets old fast
nice variety; something special has been lost by shifting from such a unique style to the endlessly covered ground of medieval fantasy
In some respects, I still think the original just about edges this one out in terms of variety and visual spectacle
for variety’s sake
more than healthy mix that keeps things interesting for a long while
lack of unit variety and multiplayer modes
The only variety
there’s a fair amount of diversity; get repetitive
only so much variety
nothing to dislike about more variety
biggest issue with combat is in the variety of opponents
same handful of enemy soldiers
variety of formulaic game modes; none of which possess even the slightest hint of novelty
Pro wrestling is a variety show
too reliable and make very differently shaped spaceships the settings for some familiar outcomes
a novelty parade
and it gets repetitive quickly, partly because every fight feels the same and also because the combat is serviceable but not much more than that
little variety
using the exact same moves over and over again, fighting largely the same enemy styles, and it quickly becomes tiresome
the campaign is still a little too rigid to stop repetitiveness sinking in faster than I’d like.
Innovation
Inventive
don't turn any major ideas on their heads
retread things we’ve seen done to death
doesn’t feel too derivative
not terribly ambitious
by-the-numbers adventure is without question the most milquetoast and unimaginative game I’ve played in the genre
if the non-fantasy setting had you hoping this might be one of the ways in which AI Limit breaks that mold: Nah.; But while there’s not much unique to be found in AI Limit’s combat, the few new things it tries are mostly good ideas that make me wish it took more risks
Boss fights are largely straightforward
There’s also one or two encounters where AI Limit tries new stuff…But these fights are few and far between, leaving you to slap around the much less interesting, big, ugly, slow moving enemies that make up the bulk of the boss fights most of the time
has little else to distinguish itself; if not exactly breaking new ground; ends up an overall unsurprising adventure that has few distinctive ideas to call its own
it’s a formula that feels all too familiar, sticking to the well-established traditions
It’s not exactly revolutionary stuff
plays it quite safe; doesn’t offer much in the way of innovation; few by-the-numbers game modes and no killer features to shake up the genre
variety of formulaic game modes; none of which possess even the slightest hint of novelty
Atomfall takes a novel approach to storytelling
doesn't reimagine immersive sims
A lack of game-to-game innovation jumps off the screen
This is formulaic BioWare set in a fantasy story with the feels of a summer movie
“In my opinion” in my own review writing
is, for me, the best amalgam of
in my opinion
Can you divulge further? …no.
it spotlights race, slavery, poverty, generational trauma, and death [proceeds to not elaborate, take my word for it bro];
the game is still a masterclass in RPG writing, and features questlines that trump much of what the genre has managed in the two decades since
More than that, it’s also a meaningful addition to the series lore, giving us another great story fans will want to follow to the end. [This is never developed or explained in the actual text, probably because you can't talk about spoilers in reviews]
They’re well worth engaging, and there are even opportunities where you could turn a one-time bitter enemy into a trusted friend
Technical performance
objects would noticeably blur when animating
bugs; repeated crash; multiple crashes; fell through the world; got stuck on level geometry; audio stuttering; long load times; key items didn’t highlight
regular crashes and bugs
Another thing that holds AI Limit back pretty significantly is how buggy it is
it’s the fact that across my 50+ hours with it on Xbox Series X, I encountered almost no glitches or technical issues worth mentioning
It also suffers from minor, but noteworthy enough to be annoying, bugs
the usual jankiness that comes with early access games
full of performance issues and other jankiness to boot
suffers from various performance issues, bugs, and general jankiness throughout
multiple crashes, quests that wouldn’t complete
I experienced some bugs in my time with the game
performed well during my review, save for one or two hitches when larger enemies would make their debut
constant performance issues, and a fair share of bugs make; performance issues and quest-breaking bugs that at this point seem endemic to the engine itself persist
Loading into an area in the Imperial City results in you watching the world in front of you burst into relief in real time as textures scramble into place. There’s also constant frame-rate problems, and the highest number of hard crashes we’ve experienced in a console game in years
Game Feel
Janky
big fights don’t always feel like they end with the impact they should
stiff controls, sluggish movement and weapon use, and difficult-to-read feedback on combat interactions were definitely pain points; feel good; feel immensely impactful; hits feel pulpy and satisfying; feel so much better
feels utterly weightless
diminish the impact of your weapons and traps even further
clumsy way its controls
controls lack the precision needed
just doesn't feel good to aim with a controller
don't feel all that good to use
Shooting is tight, melee is satisfying
Faithful
faithful adaptation of the spirit of the movies
boosting the source material in a myriad of ways while remaining faithful and even augmenting the things that made the original work
a perfectly crafted world that couldn’t be mistaken for anything but the iconic Alien universe
is a faithful and entertaining stab at bringing Alien to virtual reality
standout example of how to take an old franchise and do something with it that feels fresh while still being true to the lineage of the series
feels both fresh and yet distinctly like; perfectly recreates the tone, feeling, and pacing of the iconic opening;
Pacing
glacial pacing
glacially paced
just below feeling powerful for the majority of the game, before crescendoing towards the end, making for some nice pacing
but the Side Stories do a brilliant job of keeping the game's pace up, and ensuring that no one idea outstays its welcome for too long
Referencing other games to compare/contrast
“feels very Fortnite, with its cartoony aesthetic and admirable amount of destructible structures.” “grab and hurl objects and enemies, much like the game-changing Half Life 2 gravity gun”, Dark Souls, Monster Hunter, Zelda, Shadow of the Colossus, Spider-Man
Capcom's Ace Attorney games; Case of the Golden Idol; Paranormasight: The Seven Mysteries of Honjo; The World Ends with You; Makoto Wakaido's Case Files Trilogy; Famicom Detective Club; Emio: The Smiling Man
Guessing at audience reaction
I have no doubt that these silent, unknowable mind games will be deeply enjoyable for some, but it's also the exact same recipe that's likely to cause frustration in others.” “This friction won't be for everyone” another reviewer was, “Your mileage may vary.”
is a fun game that you'll probably enjoy if you liked the last few, but you'll likely enjoy it even more if you're new to the series
but for a new player playing the game for the first time, they’ll perhaps wonder why, as part of the remastering process, things like this weren’t eliminated
Guessing at future
Still, it’s an extremely impressive first draft that I’m eager to see Blizzard build upon in future expansions
Even so, Rogue Incursion is a strong opening act for a series I’m already eager to play more of
still has a lot of growing to do during its live-service evolution
The theoretical Atomfall 2 feels like it could be a much greater game someday, so long as it's built on this game's intriguing quest framework. Here and now, Atomfall is a good game that sometimes gets in its own way, but it's the process of finding your unique path through its story that will stick with you after the dust settles
can't see anyone playing this with a mate or partner and coming away feeling they'd wasted the weekend
is going to be a game that I predict some people will bounce off of after just a few hours
I wondered if Ubisoft would be able to meaningfully shake things up this go around; is something I’ll leave for players to experience themselves; I’d say more but those details are under embargo
looks like it will continue to grow over time.
I began this most recent draft BEFORE the death of Giant Bomb and Polygon. [Addendum: Giant Bomb has in fact not died but is now employee owned]
Here are some examples from everyone's favorite punching bag, IGN: “Not even your fake review was able to save the game. That Sony money…,” “IGN.. YOU guys are CLOWNS,” “Now we all know(for a zilion time already) that you guys are total s**s at reviewing games for real, and you are just paid to give ‘good’ reviews, this is what the entire internet said when it's about IGN,” “IGN is a joke when it comes to rating anything,” “What kind of morons are they hiring at IGN. Such a joke of a site.”
This is based on listing out the OpenCritic score for every game released in the past 90 days as of May 10, 2025 on a spreadsheet you can view here. I also wanted to view the point spread between the lowest and highest review score given to a game and found the average spread to be 35.8.