A Guide To TheGamer's Reviews
Game reviews are an interesting part of gaming journalism. They're articles with Schrodinger's importance. Reviews rarely get traffic on the level of that of features, guides, or news, and they're often too all-encompassing to offer the deep criticism more targeted features can offer. They also require a huge playtime investment, up against the clock, which means they're not only shallow and largely go unread, they're also rarely your best work. And still, our industry is defined by them. What a game scores on Metacritic is used in fan circles as talking points, or when it differs from the User Score (which sways hard into 0 = don't like it, 10 = do like it), as a cudgel against our integrity. They're 1,000 words, often significantly more, offering the first critical analysis on a game and the only criticism the game will ever receive in a vacuum. They're also just a number. We do them pretty rarely, in the grand scheme of how many people write for TheGamer and how busy our jobs are, yet when you tell someone you're a games journalist they'll almost exclusively ask 'oh so you review video games for a living?'.
Even when we don't write reviews, we get emails complaining about our 'biased reviews', which are usually aimed at pieces like 'the lighting in the original Halo game isn't as good as I remembered'. You might be wondering what this has to do with anything. Well, join the club. I write about toys for a living, sometimes the nonsense just spills out. In this specific case though, I've decided that the process of our reviews could do with some grounding, so this will be our hub for what review scores from TheGamer mean. We have a large review team and have previously debated back and forth over what score to award any
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