It is fine that it is subjective, but this is why reviews from a major corporation don't make any sense. You want reviews from a large number of individuals so that you can get to know some of their taste to see if it is similar to your own. Then you can make a decent guess if you will also find the thing fun.

Not to mention these major review sites rate on a 7-10 scale which is kind of worthless. They are also effectively bribed by game studios so it is actually worse than worthless. It is actively harmful to finding out the truth.

Yeah, and e.g. I don't have much fun with racing game. Doesn't mean the games are bad and other people, who actually like the genre don't have fun. This is why you should know the reviewer and their tastes and biases to make a better judgement whether a game is for you or not from a review.

I like ACGs format for reviews along with the rating scale being a spectrum from Buy now, wait for a sale, never touch. He's the only one I really go to nowadays to see if the new hot thing is worth my money. It usually isn't haha

cough cough gregtech new horizons

Yea the greater majority of the population wouldn’t like escape from tarkov or even something lighter like a souls game but some of us enjoy the pain.

Proper spatial / binaural audio in games is a game changer for me and it's wild that I have to buy something like DTS Sound Unbound (and before that, X-Fi sound card with CMSS3D) just to kind of "emulate" it in games. This is tech they figured out in the 90s.

If the game requires you to use the volume sliders to have a decent sound design, then it's kind of a "mix it yourself" game.

5.1 and 7.1 systems aren't all that widespread, even in the music industry. Surround kinda sits in the same place vr does for me. It's immensely cool, but it'll never become standard due to hassle and lack of support.

Most of the recent innovation in sound has been trickled down from the music and film industries. Just a general increase in the capabilities of soft synths and a better understanding of foley, alongside dedicated in house recording studios have raised the bar of audio.

To be honest I agree with you that sound is overlooked, sound engineers truly are unsung heroes. I mean even when people point out the sound in a game, it's usually directed at the composer.

As a professional generalist/gameplay programmer, imo sound isn't far off from 3D graphics in terms of complexity, perfs issues and hardware fuckery. That is, if you want to do anything "fancy" with it, of course. As you said, the "play sound.wav" approach is way overused...

I do care about shipping the best SFX I can, and obviously so does our sound guy (who also deeply cares about mixing btw) but unfortunately, as opposed to graphics it doesn't translate into better reviews/more sales in the execs' mind so any substantial programming work in that area usually goes on the backlogged pile.

Ironically, I think that situation used to be better because there was a time where you basically had to have a dedicated sound programmer on the team since the software side was also a giant mess.

There was a point I used to turn down SFX because I wanted to listen to the music. At some pointed I started to turn down the music so SFX was more punchy like it used to be.

I hate how every AAA game has to be an open world sandbox with loads of extra features. I just want a good story and strong core gameplay.

Which part of that has never been seen before?

Japanese game magazines use a collaborative scoring system for game reviews. 4 editors provide individual ratings and personal opinion of the game, and a combined overall score which is simply a sum of the 4 scores.

Graphics used to be the hallmark of a great game. Back in the early days, if your game didn't come with improved graphics, it was trash (like, '90s era games I'm talking about). These days, good graphics can be achieved pretty easily, so it's not nearly as important as it used to be when trying to stand out from the crowd. If I had to pick the tipping point for this trend, I would have to say Minecraft was the game that proved definitively that graphics < gameplay.

Same. Love playing a beautiful game, like Kingdom Come: Deliverance, but I also love Rimworld. Like more hours in RW than any other title, by a wide margin. And it's top down goofy 2D graphics and I wouldn't want it any other way.

Graphics are like, one of the last things I give a shit about as long as they're not hampering the game. I don't care if I'm playing Wolfenstein 3D or the latest triple-A graphics splurgefest so long as it's a fun game, but stuff like Cruelty Squad is an absolute no-go because of the dogshit HUD that serves only to distract the player and make it feel claustrophobic.

Indeed.

Graphics will always be less important

The popularity of various "ugly" games is proof of that

undertale

Rimworld

Dwarf fortress

Minecraft

Diablo 2 (not resurrected)

Probably many many more

The reviews still have a strong focus on graphics, but based on the hardware limitations of the Switch.

Unless you're an Indie studio, then games aren't meant to make money until the bills start piling up.

Personally I've stopped watching reviews for that reason. Too much of his review depend on whether he actually had fun with the game or not. If it's a game he didn't enjoy he's going to review it much harshly while finding whatever positives to justify recommending a game he enjoyed.

For instance he didn't enjoy the Outriders expansion and one of his big points of criticisms was that it's too hard to play solo. Which is a pretty dumb criticism to have when the game has a world tier system with the sole purpose of letting you set the difficulty. It climbs with XP but you can always set it to a lower difficulty if something is too hard. He could've easily set it to world tier one and just shred through the game, he simply stubbornly chose to be on the highest difficulty that was unlocked for him. And he was at the difficulty level where builds start to matter, except from the video it's pretty clear he doesn't have an actual build in mind. His criticism was the equivalent of playing master difficulty (or beyond) in Diablo 3 as a monk without any consistent spirit generation, and then saying Diablo 3 is too hard. Anyone who has played Diablo 3 knows statement like that is complete BS but anyone trying to understand whether they'd actually want to play Diablo would instantly be dissuaded from giving it a shot.

And the flipside is Destiny's Lightfall expansion review where he just decides to add everything "free" into the same expansion review pile because he loves Destiny. And of course then proceeds to downplay every glaring negative point about it such as "No new pvp maps. You shouldn't expect it because Bungie isn't focusing on PvP either" and "Nothing new about gambit, the players don't care about gambit either." or "One new strike and no real improvements to that core gameplay loop. Game development is hard you guys". To give the expansion context, it's the weakest expansion after Y1 (which was the lowest point of the entire series) and is complete filler in terms of the story. Yet Skillup still felt it was good enough to recommend it to people.

For me his reviews have become mostly worthless because I first have to intuit his experience with the game to understand which way his bias has swung, so that I could get context of his final verdict.