Reviewing Reviews (Or, The Long And Short Of It)

Another day rolls by, another review embargo. Yesterday was the turn of Evolution’s MotorStorm Apocalypse, the latest (and greatest) in the series of brutal, off road (not without a sense of irony) arcade racers, and reviews were set to go live at 10am GMT – that’s the embargo time and date set by SCEE, after which gaming sites like TSA could talk about the game openly.  Why was that particular embargo in place?  Well, presumably it was due to the demo announcement, which went live on the official PlayStation Blog at the same time: gamers could see that there was a demo, and then immediately follow up by reading a review or two – it’s a shame the same blog didn’t post links to reviews, but hopefully they weren’t too hard to find, VG247 rounded up the first batch anyway.

It’s a strange one, though – and the above link demonstrates this perfectly: a good proportion of people only really care about the score – that singular figure at the end of one and a half thousand words – carefully picked, deliberated over words that can easily take anywhere from a good few hours to a couple of days to nail and perfect, at least as much as we can.  Naturally, that score is hugely significant – it’s a ready reckoner for anyone doing the rounds to quickly see what that game is ‘worth’, but in relation to what?  What’s the frame of reference?  What’s the score actually being compared to?

Take, seeing as we’re already here, MotorStorm’s score.  8/10.  Our review policy states that such a score equates to two words – ‘very good’ – but what does that mean?  Can you relate it to our review of MotorStorm: Pacific Rift, which Michael rated a 6/10 way back in 2008?  Not really, because the two games were reviewed by different people, with different approaches to gaming and completely different outlooks on what a game should be.  I’m not saying that the Rift score is ‘wrong’ in any way – it’s not, but that’s the point: it’s just one man’s view of a game boiled down to a figure at the end, albeit in this case a stylised one that harks back to an old site design.  It’s the words that count and, re-reading the Rift review, they still ring true: the sequel to MotorStorm simply wasn’t as good as the first.

Is all this really a big deal?  Possibly.  When Test Drive Unlimited 2 came out I wrote 900 words on it but stopped short of awarding the game a score.  It wasn’t so much an experiment – more of a conscious decision to try something else and actually write about the game as a gamer rather that desperately trying to evaluate everything as I went along.  I made no notes, I just played the game, on and off, for a week, and then poured out a series of thoughts into that article.  It was held back until the embargo, and went live along with all the other reviews of the game at the time.  Some of the comments in the story were confused as to where the score was, but we were happy with the piece as it stood, and I wouldn’t have written any more for it if I had scored it, except perhaps to play the online portion a little more.

Things move quickly in the world of videogames, and when you’ve got limited time to get through a game, chances are after it’s reviewed and out there’s little motivation to go back to it unless it’s a really special title.  There are exceptions: those that actively push the community angle normally get some playtime after launch but, from a personal point of view, it’s normally the games I haven’t reviewed myself that I find myself enjoying the most down the line – there are occasions when reviewing a game spoils the experience somewhat, being forced to distill something down into things you liked and things you didn’t is hard enough but trying to remain objective whilst doing so is harder still.  TSA’s readers are a widely diverse bunch and you’ve got to try to be true to everyone.

But the hardest bit is scoring a game.  When you’re on an embargo like MotorStorm’s you’ve no idea what everyone else is going to score something and, whilst you’re confident in your own ability to effectively ‘judge’ something in text, it’s the figure that everyone’s going to see.  TSA: 8/10.  As it stands, we were pretty much in line with everyone else and after reading the text (yes) it seems most reviews commented on roughly the same sort of things: Apocalypse isn’t a terribly complicated game, and it’s unlikely to split opinion as much as something like Killzone 3, but there’s always that lingering notion that you might have missed something obvious.  At least we got a score out there, hey, we’ve still to finally award one to Gran Turismo 5.

Perhaps it’s time to do that.  How about [randomreviewscore]/10?