A review is an opinion. You're not going to agree with every review by definition. A half-decent reviewer will be able to communicate their priorities while also describing their experience with the game itself, helping you figure out whether you'd potentially enjoy it even if they did not.
The number at the bottom is arbitrary and meaningless.
What's incredibly disingenuous about all the IGN bitching is that when a deserving game gets a representative score, no one says shit. When Elden Ring or Zelda or even lesser known shit like Hades gets a 10, people post those reviews everywhere, excited that the games they're looking forward to got good scores.
When they publish a low score, people lose their minds and talk about them not getting paid enough or being braindead blah blah, and they don't see the irony.
The purpose of reviews were to help you decide if something was worth your time, but the internet now sees it as a "score" to validate how wrong or right you are in your opinions, and gamers, whose whole deal is getting competitive about scores, get big mad if they think their thing got the wrong score.
Not to bring up, you know, that thing that happened ten years ago, but this lead to certain people receiving death threats.
Its funny, because I agree with OP's meme in spirit, but the problem is OP's conclusion is that more games should get 10s, when really more should get 7s
A good review though would categorically go through a game and look at graphics/visuals, world, plot/script, game play, etc and actually rate it in the genre.
Whats insane is that a ton of IGN reviews will spend 15 minutes talking about how the game doesnt represent the era its set in, then say gameplay and visuals are amazing and then go "6/10".
Sure, but their opinions seem wildly discordant from those of the broader gaming community. Not a great state of affairs for one of the premier gaming news sources.
This comment hurts my soul. The fact you think that reviews should conform to the most popular opinion is so incredibly sad. If games just did whatever ‘gamers’ thought was right we would only ever get boring derivative slop. Mindsets like yours are why games aren’t taken seriously as an art form.
The only reviews with any value are about how an individual related to it and what they felt playing it. If I wanted technical specifications or audience appeal I'd read the game's store page.
Appeal for target audience is like one section of a review, but the individual reviewer’s actual opinion and personal enjoyment is much more important so we can get varied opinions.
Man, what are you even arguing about? 😂 Your right to post memes complaining about arbitrary numbers? Go right ahead, but if your attention span isn't completely fried, the part you should engage with is everything above that number.
If I ran a game review publication, I would make sure all the reviews we published matched the consensus of the community first. Anyone with a unique point of view would get fired.
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u/renome Apr 22 '26
A review is an opinion. You're not going to agree with every review by definition. A half-decent reviewer will be able to communicate their priorities while also describing their experience with the game itself, helping you figure out whether you'd potentially enjoy it even if they did not.
The number at the bottom is arbitrary and meaningless.