I’m not sure if there is anything more obnoxious than game review discourse on video game social media. When a game that people are excited for gets bad reviews, we hear that “the reviewers are morons!” If that game gets great reviews, we hear things like “wow, even these morons like it!”
If a game that people think (or want) to be bad ends up getting good reviews, it’s all because the reviewers are paid shills, or perhaps, very woke and incapable of thinking for themselves.
And then there are those who completely shun the concept of game reviews and say that the only important reviewer is yourself. This is technically true but is also a viewpoint that lacks important context in my view.
I truly can’t believe that gaming social media is not providing us with more nuanced takes. It’s so unlike the gaming community as a whole.
I’m here today to provide some incredibly shocking and controversial opinions. I think game reviewers are valuable and help enhance gaming for me in a variety of ways. I also think that they are (mostly) doing a good job. Are things perfect? Of course not. There are things reviewers as a whole could do to be more helpful or credible. I’ll go into those things, too. But some of the flaws with game reviews also come down to an audience that is often too childish to accept contrarian opinions, or opinions that differ from the quality that they perceive that a game will be at. Video game reviewers are out here offering thoughts on games before I have to spend my hard earned money or valuable time on them, and that means something to me.
Game Reviewers Are Generally In Line With The Overall Consensus
I don’t watch movies, so it’s always fascinating for me to go on Rotten Tomatoes and see how often critics and general movie fans widely disagree on films. Captain America: Brave New World currently has a 48% approval rating from critics and a 79% approval rating from Rotten Tomatoes users. Mufasa: The Lion King has a 57% approval from critics and an 89% from users. Not every movie is like that, but it is not uncommon at all for users and critics to be on completely different pages when it comes to movies.
Meanwhile, if you look at games, and avoid the few each year that get review bombed for stupid political reasons, there is often a remarkable consensus between gamers and critics that I’d say doesn’t exist in literally any other entertainment medium (I’ve enjoyed a whole lot of music that Pitchfork thinks is the worst thing imaginable as another example). Let’s look at last year’s game of the year nominees from The Game Awards as an example. These are the Metacritic scores from critics compared to the scores from users.
Astro Bot- 9.4 (9.2 from users)
Balatro- 9.0 (8.3 from users)
Black Myth: Wukong- 8.1 (8.2 from users)
Elden Ring: Shadow of the Erdtree- 9.4 (8.1 from users)
Metaphor: ReFantazio- 9.4 (8.7 from users)
Final Fantasy 7: Rebirth- 9.2 (8.9 from users)
Those are some remarkably close scores. This is especially hard to do with a game review scale where it isn’t a simple “recommend or not” like Rotten Tomatoes. The user reviews on Metacritic are filled with plenty of 1s and 0s that can drastically tank a score and are almost always ridiculous scores to give to well-made games like these.
As I dig through various game scores, I will find the occasional one that has a little bit of variance. But overall, it’s hard to find a game with a whole lot of difference if it has a decent amount of critic and user reviews, as long as we exclude games that clearly got review bombed by people who never played it.
I could see some saying that this is kind of a bad thing, as the critics should have more discerning taste than the average person. But I think the interactive nature of games makes it harder for opinions to wildly diverge compared to something more passive. Interacting with something you can “feel” is just way different than something you can only listen to or see. I don’t see a lot of situations where one person thinks a car handles like shit, and the next person thinks it handles great. We all know what feels right. Because of this, game critics have an almost remarkable consensus with their readers. In a world where entertainment critics are at least occasionally far off course from the average fan, game critics are remarkably in step with the average gamer. I view this as a good thing.
The Occasional Contrarian View Is Fine, And In Fact, Good
One of the main ways that I see game reviewers as a whole marked as “garbage” is when a hundred reviews drop for a new big release, and everyone attacks the one review that is different. As an example, there were 68 reviews for Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2, and the individual review I saw highlighted the most was a 6/10 from Eurogamer. Of 68 reviews, only 2 were at a 6 or lower. That is about 3% of critics having a lower opinion on it. Naturally, this means that these reviewers are idiots, right?
I’m someone who is really enjoying KCD2. I have a ways to go, but I’d probably put the game at an 8.5 as it stands. But the game has some absolutely annoying elements and serious jank in spots. I think it all comes together to be a magical and unique experience, but I’d also guess that much more than 3% of people won’t enjoy it for one reason or another.
Of course, there could always be the occasional person who is cynically giving a lower review to try and get attention, but I personally don’t think that is the case most of the time. Every person reading this can think of a well reviewed game that almost all of your friends liked, and you just didn’t click with for one reason or another.
So, even if I vehemently disagree with a review that ends up being lower than what I think a game should be at (I want to note that a lot of these controversies occur before anyone yelling about it has even touched the game, but I digress), it’s still an opinion I value. Those reviews can clue me into flaws that the other reviews might not, and those flaws might be the kind that turn me off from a game. These perspectives are valuable because even the greatest games of all time will have detractors, and I’m perfectly happy to see those viewpoints represented. The beauty of the aggregation models that Metacritic or Opencritic use is that all of the reviews are tallied up, so the contrarian reviews are just thrown into the pile with everything else. They are represented, but the overall consensus will still shine through. This is why I like this model over sticking to any one specific outlet, even if I really value that outlet. I believe that hearing all of the opinions and averaging them out is often the best way to look at these things.
Why Reviews Matter To Me
Another consistent opinion that I hear is that none of these opinions from reviewers matter. The only person who can decide if a game is good is you. You should play the games that you find interesting and completely ignore reviewers.
Obviously, I can’t really counter that as a concept. But I do believe that the thinking here is a bit flawed. This argument implies unlimited time and money. If you look at the past few years of games in particular, it’s almost impossible for any working person, especially any working parent, to find the time to play every game that interests them. In 2024, 197 games came out that received an 8 or higher through Opencritic’s review aggregation system. And that doesn’t even go into all the 7s and above, which are often good games, too.
Can I watch trailers and figure out what games will appeal to me? Absolutely. I’m usually pretty good at figuring out what games I will like. But with so many good games coming out, it can be hard to even keep up with that. It’s a lot easier to pull up Opencritic, look at the highest rated games from the year that I haven’t played yet, and vet the games from there.
Also, no matter how good anyone is at figuring out if a game will appeal to them, there will always be exceptions. Last year, if I was playing games solely off how good I thought they would be, I would have missed out on Silent Hill 2 and Indiana Jones and the Great Circle. Almost nothing I had seen from those games looked great to me, and I was very pleasantly surprised by both. It can go the other way, too. While The Plucky Squire still got good reviews overall, I thought it was set to be a 9/10 type game from everything I had seen from it. It ended up closer to an 8/10 from critics. After I played it, I ended up giving it a 6/10. That game looked amazing, but it just didn’t translate in any way for me. In all 3 of these cases, reviewers either hyped me up on a game that I wasn’t giving a chance, or at least prepared me for the fact that a game wouldn’t be quite as good as I thought. That is very helpful for anyone with limited time.
That isn’t to say that you shouldn’t trust your gut at all. I just think, in general, people tend to be too all in or too all out on what reviewers provide. My motto on game reviews is simple. If I’m REALLY interested in a game, the reviews are not going to dictate what I do one way or another. I’m going to try it myself. I was disappointed that Rise of the Ronin’s reviews weren’t as high as I expected when that game came out, but I still played it day one and ended up loving it. If I’m moderately interested in a game, and the reviews end up being lower than I anticipated, I might hold off for a sale or save it for a slower gaming time. Last year, I was pretty interested in Flintlock, but I was pretty stunned at how mediocre the reviews were. I decided to play other things first, and then never got into it after almost everyone I knew who played it ended up not caring for it. I guess there was an outside shot that I ended up liking it, but based on all of the disappointment I saw from friends, I think the critics saved me a little bit of time. If I’m not interested in a game at all, the only thing that can pique my interest is strong reviews. That is what happened with Silent Hill 2 for me last year. It went from a game I mostly planned on ignoring to one I needed to play before year’s end.
I think if you use reviews in this way, they can be a valuable tool. They don’t need to dominate your thought process for what you end up playing, but they can be a helpful guide in a world where we all have way too much good stuff to play.
Reviewers Can Still Be Better
This doesn’t mean reviewers are perfect. I think there are blind spots that could be addressed to improve overall trust in the institution, even though I think reviewers are often fighting a battle that they can’t win.
One of the biggest non-political outrage induced gaps between user reviews and critic reviews last year was Dragon’s Dogma 2. The game scored an 8.6 from critics, but a much lower 6.4 from users. I will be transparent and say that I was never a fan of the first game and decided after the 2 hour demo that the sequel also wasn’t for me. But the game was critically acclaimed. While it attempted to bring the series into the future, by all accounts from almost everyone I know that played both games, it wasn’t a game that was remarkably different from the first game. It was updated but had a lot of the same strengths and weaknesses overall. And yet, Dragon’s Dogma 2 scored significantly higher than the first game, which had a 7.5 on Metacritic. Obviously, some may disagree and think that Dragon’s Dogma 2 scored where it should, but it is interesting to see such a stark difference in critical reception between the original game and a sequel that was largely trying to do the same things.
My theory for this is that almost everyone who signed up to be the Dragon’s Dogma 2 reviewer for any particular outlet was someone who probably enjoyed the first game. Thus, thanks to that sort of self-selecting bias, the reviews were higher. We are also seeing this with Monster Hunter Wilds, as the user reviews are a fair bit lower than the critic reviews. I think with sequels in particular, outlets are doing a bad job of giving out perspectives from those who aren’t already fans of the series. I had a hard time finding any Monster Hunter Wilds review written by someone who wasn’t already a veteran of the series. Thus, I wasn’t sure if I could trust any of their perspectives. Not every outlet can do this, but I know the bigger outlets always have multiple people play some of these bigger releases for their podcasts and such. I’d love to see more outlets take on the approach from the old magazine Electronic Gaming Monthly and publish multiple reviews for games like this. They could then average it out for Metacritic/Opencritic usage. I think this would be significantly more valuable for gamers, especially in situations like this.
I also think that outlets that focus on one single platform should have their reviews diminished or not posted at all by these aggregation sites. This might sound too harsh, but a consistent trend with almost all of the sites that just review games from one platform is that the exclusives from those platforms get elevated. Obviously, these outlets can fill a valuable role in the gaming ecosystem, but I think many of them diminish trust for the institution on the whole when they are included in sites like Metacritic.
When you look at any website that aggregates political polling averages, like the now defunct FiveThirtyEight, they make special notes when a poll is funded by a partisan institution. Those polls are often viewed as less valuable by most models. I think we need similar approaches with gaming.
Like it or not, these websites have an inherent bias towards the platform of their choice doing well. Some of these sites rely on access more than other sites as well. I don’t hate them for doing their thing, and I’m sure some of them are incredibly fair with all of their critiques, but even the appearance of bias can be enough to damage credibility. I think these platform specific outlets often do a lot of damage to gaming media trust as a whole, even though I know there are some good ones out there.
At Least We Can All Agree On One Thing
I could talk more about other things I’d like to see in the review space. I wish that we had review scales where we actually used more than 7-10 for games that are worthwhile, for example. However, gamers are already crybabies and harass reviewers for handing out 7s. I don’t think today’s small minds could handle an actual “5 is average” review scale, like what EGM had back in the day. I put our current sorry review scale situation almost exclusively on whiny gamers.
Perhaps reviewers shouldn’t even use scores, but as I said, I do find these scores to be quite valuable when they are aggregated on sites like Opencritic. It is a quick and easy way for me to find new games that I might have missed.
Despite all of the heat that gaming media takes, I certainly trust them way more than the average gamer. I look at The Game Awards, which are awards almost entirely decided by gaming media and not by consumers, and they always do a pretty good job of picking out nominees. Sure, I will inevitably disagree with plenty of nominations every year, but the media driven awards always do a much better job than consumer driven awards in my view.
After I play 95% of video games, I will generally look at what the aggregated score is and think to myself “yeah, that makes sense”, even if I’m not quite in line with it. Gamers themselves often validate these scores by having pretty similar user scores. You will always be able to pick on one outlet and use that outlet to paint the gaming media with a broad brush, but the facts indicate to me that the gaming media is doing an overall good job of showing people the best games to play.
Even if you disagree with that, there is at least one thing we can all agree on.
Absolutely no one out there is reviewing games as fairly and with as much awesomeness as Westen from BigNerdGaming.
Big Nerd Gaming 
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