Reviewing video games is slightly different from reviewing any other entertainment media. There’s just more work that goes in to it and a greater cost at the end of it. Let’s think about it for a moment.
Reviewing an album takes an hour to listen to the album, an hour of notes and drafting and then you finalise the review in another hour. Say you listen to it twice to be rigorous. That’s four hours. Four hours into a video game review process and I’ve just started taking serious notes. People read your review and decide whether they want to spend £10 on a CD or album download.
Reviewing a movie takes two hours to watch the movie, another hour of note-taking and drafting and then an hour to finalise the review. Let’s say you skim back through the movie to check things and that takes another hour. Five hours in total. By that time I’ve probably completed my notes about interface, design and main mechanical features of the game and I’m hammering down the home-straight to finish it up before I can start writing. People read a movie review and decide whether to spend £10 going to the cinema, renting or a bit more to buy the Blu-Ray.
People read a video game review and use that to gauge whether or not to spend £40-£50 of their own cash. That’s quite a responsibility to shoulder so I like to be as sure as possible that I know what I’m talking about. I do this by pouring time and, if I do say so myself, expertise into the review.
A good measure of the time taken is that if it’s a story-driven game I will complete it before I review it. That takes as long as the story takes, plus an hour for feature checks and an hour or two for multiplayer experiments if applicable. If it’s an RPG that could literally go on for a hundred hours then I play at least fifteen hours – three times a fair estimate of a movie review – before I permit myself to assume I know enough about it for review. That’s before I even start to type.
The process of reviewing is going to be different for almost every reviewer. Some people say that they start the review process with the game at a flat score of zero and assess how it earns its rating throughout the course of playing the game. Others say they start off with a game assumed to have a perfect score (not a perfect game, a perfect score) and remove points based on the problems they may encounter.
Personally, I start with no score in mind and play for an hour or two to get a feel for the game. During this initial period I don’t take any notes and I try not to think of anything technical like frame-rate or resolution. I concentrate on how much I’m enjoying the game and how natural it feels for me to be playing it. By the end of this time I have a rough idea in my head of what the score will be but it is by no means set in stone, it’s a vague indication which usually changes by a point or two as I get into the review a bit deeper.
I’ll make a few notes about the interface, menus and game options and then I’ll play some more. After around four or five hours I make rough notes of everything that has stuck in my mind – positive and negative. This includes things like pacing, character interactions, sound design, mechanics etc. Then I play the game until it’s complete, making any additional notes as I go. I make a point of taking several breaks through this period so that my mind and my eyes don’t get too fatigued.
After all that, I go back through my notes and check things in the game that I’ve made a note of. I check that I wasn’t just being silly when I noted the awful placement of a save-point or the wooden dialogue of a cut-scene. I also play a section of the game on each different difficulty level (if available) so I can make a judgement on how accessible it is and if the difficulty spikes badly.
When I’ve finished with the main part of the game I will often give a bit more time to understanding the multiplayer side of things before I finally sit down with my notes, open Word and start typing a review. This is the first draft and it might take anything from thirty minutes to two hours, depending on how easy the words are coming to me.
After the first draft is finished I read it through, correcting anything that seems initially out of place and then I save it, close it and forget about it for at least six hours (usually until the next day). I go away and do something else, even if it’s only playing a different game.
When I return to the draft I read it through and amend anything that doesn’t feel natural. I will often add or remove entire paragraphs or move sentences around to make it flow more naturally as a piece of writing. I think this is the step that most “amateur” reviewers skip because there are a huge amount of enthusiastic, well-researched reviews which simply don’t read well as a body of text – it’s far more common than a review that hasn’t been properly thought-through.
After an hour or two of amending my copy I’m usually finished. I close it all down and make a cup of tea before returning one final time to read it through and write that all important score-out-of-ten at the bottom.
The whole process probably takes a minimum of around fifteen to twenty hours of work on average. This might seem like a touch of overkill but I see it as preserving my own reputation. I work hard to ensure that I can stand behind the review I wrote with absolute conviction and I hope that the effort I put in shows in my work.
I believe that it’s vital to realise that, in spite of the common amateur reviewer’s defence, a review is not “just one guy’s opinion”. A review is more than just an opinion, it has to be objective in its appraisal and demonstrate how that objective assessment influences a final opinion. So while the reviewer’s opinion does feature and play a big role in how aspects of the game are described, it is only the ruler he uses to measure an aspect, not the measurement itself.
One final note on this is that for the entire duration of the review process I avoid any other outlet’s reviews. I have stopped watching videos, listening to podcasts and I routinely avoid review sections of websites and magazines while I’m reviewing a game if that game gets mentioned. I’ve even been known to remove myself from social media networks when people start openly discussing games I’m in the process of reviewing. I do all of this to make sure that the review you get is mine, not anyone else’s.
