Wonder how much they paid for those reviews.
This just makes no sense whatsoever. None. How do you explain two games from the same giant publisher in the same series that get wildly different scores? Look at Prince of Persia from Ubisoft for Xbox 360 and PS3. It's got an 81, while Prince of Persia: Sands of Time got a 92. Did Ubisoft run out of money? And keep in mind that Prince of Persia: Warrior Within got an 83, so they definitely must have known that they needed to pay up if they wanted good reviews. I guess maybe Ubisoft just doesn't know how the game works, even though they are one of the largest publishers in the world. Or do they? The first Assassin's Creed garnered a paltry 81 Metacritic score, while Assassin's Creed 2 to got a 91. It's also really ---smurfing--- weird that these Metacritic scores actually jive exactly with the relative quality of each title. What a crazy coincidence.
75+ is still a high score... I really wonder why we have rating scales if people only consider a fraction of them anyway. Reviews get bought, glaring faults in games are often overlooked or ignored completely, except in some cases, where an otherwise good game gets poor scores because the reviewer didn't like one specific thing. Ubisoft's review scores especially are dubious at best; take Far Cry 2 for example, if has basically no redeeming features and pales in comparison to the original, but all the reviews prior and at release said it was great. The Assassins Creed games are Ok, but nothing special, it's a very polished engine, but the actual gameplay is rather mundane and repetitive, and I actually enjoyed the 2nd game far less simply because aside a new setting it didn't really offer enough new in terms of gameplay, nor do I feel it addressed the flaws present in the original. I don't feel the majority of these games are worth the high scores they're getting at all and aside from graphics an awful lot of the current generation of games pale in comparison to even last generations games.
GTA 4 likewise got great reviews, but it's inferior in every way to the previous game. I was hoping I was on the last mission about 25% into that because it lacked depth, and lacked variety.. It looked prettier, but that was about it. The reviews didn't reflect this at all.
Oblivion, sure the NPCs walked around, sure it looked stunning, but the game was flawed in many ways, and the whole thing felt like prefab blocks copy+pasted together, especially the dungeons. The gameplay experience I found to be much worse than it's prequel and was full of annoying little 'improvements' which detracted from the game (Special items undroppable, no weight etc. World Leveling up around you), Morrowind was a handcrafted masterpiece by comparison, but all the reviews at the time completely overlooked these very significant flaws in the gameplay.
These were all big name games, none of the reviews at the time were in any way balanced. I can come up with several more examples, but these are simply recent ones of why I have 0 confidence in the current review culture. Some parts of reviews these days are even just copy+pasted from the press releases the reviewers are sent!
Something like World of Goo, yes, that was worthy of the praise it got, but let's be fair, the current generation of 'Movie-like' 'adventure' games are a long, long way from classics like Day of the Tentacle, which was a real adventure, and a real good story which you actually had to work to advance, not just a movie with limited, closed areas of gameplay where you press buttons now and again. Every moment of it was also different, and unique. It was by all accounts a better *game* than anything that has come out in the last few years even if you do take into account it not looking anywhere near as good as the modern titles. Advancing the story in that game gave a real sense of achievement and you'd often discover a lot more, and feel much closer to the world during that process due to the sheer level of interaction and variety present. Playing a game where the entire game feels like one long tutorial, telling you exactly what to do at every given moment (because it's all you can do) lacks that entirely; it's more like a job.
As for Heavy Rain, a lot is said about the control system, but I feel a good control system is one where you should KNOW what to press, not one where you're told. I get the impression it's a game where every button has a different use in different situations, and you're just guided as to what to press. Reviews might try to convince you that this is a good thing, but I consider a good control system to be one that I can master, by knowing the controls, not one where everything I've learnt so far doesn't matter because the game reinvents the control system for every given scenario, and likewise it's no good if the interaction with the environment is entirely context sensitive making what was useful on one stage no longer useful on another, even if it would seem like the most logical solution.
The reason games like the original Tony Hawks worked so well is because it had a simple, but well designed control scheme. Every button did something, you knew what it did. You could interact with every part of the environment in the same way using the knowledge of what each button did, and it was up to you to find the best way to use those actions in the best places. I'm sure players in that game came up with ways to play the game that the designers of the game and levels had never considered and doing so was an immense amount of fun. Can you say that about a game like Heavy Rain, or the Uncharted games? Even in that series some of the later games started to make the mistake of adding stupid context sensitive bits to each level, which broke the rules you knew, it's no wonder the series is a joke now.
Maybe it's just because I work in games that these things bug me so much, and it frustrates me to see so many flawed games, and poor ideas getting rave reviews with the cracks papered over, or made to sound like positives when really they're just poor design being forced on the player.
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Topic: Heavy Rain (PS3) (Read 2589 times)
