Numbered Game Scores are Meaningless

 

Despite what people might say about the people who write for games review sites, review scores are still things that a lot of people pay attention to and for your average consumer of video games I can understand why.  A numbered review score is a nice quick way to see if someone thinks a game is worth your time or not.  If you don't want to risk potential spoilers or you want to go in as blind as possible but still want a recommendation before dropping some cash, a numbered score can be useful.  For example if you wanted to get the general opinion on a game like LISA, a game best experienced with as little prior knowledge as possible and wanted to limit the risk of any spoiler talk or having any of its more fun plot beats ruined for you, a quick look at Metacritic or IGN (IGN doens't actually have a review of LISA because they suck shit) will let you know if it's worth picking up.

But, for as long as I can remember reviews being a thing the numbers in these reviews barely mean anything.  For example, a 10/10 is a perfect score so therefore one might assume that a 10/10 review means that the games is perfect, a flawless masterpiece meant to be played by absolutely everyone, a work of art so good in every way that even non-gamers would be able to pick it up as their first entry into the medium and have their mind blown.  Well no, not the case.  IGN gave Breath of the Wild a 10/10 review despite the game being sparse, far too easy, chocked full of filler bullshit in the form of shrines and seeds and having some of the worst combat the series has ever had thanks to shitty damage calculations and breakable weapons.  Despite its laundry list of flaws and annoyances, because it belongs to a long running IP run by a big corporation, these sorry excuses for writers will slap a 10 on it.  So if 10 doesn't mean perfect and instead just means really good, then anything under a 10 becomes equally skewed.  We now live in an era where a game that gets released and is given a 6/10 by a reviewer will be deemed by a lot of people to be "unplayable".  Just look at IGNs review of Starfield, a game that is disliked by many for being sparse, buggy and full of copy-paste jobs still manages to get a 7.  

The numbers have been skewed so hard they don't mean anything anymore.  Do you like the game? give it a 9, did you like it A LOT? then bump it up to a 10.  Did you dislike the game? 7/10, was it really not for you? slap a 6 on that bitch.  I feel like anything below a 6 is reserved for stuff that's flat out broken (or maybe not since Starfield got a 7 hyuk hyuk) or for games that offend the reviewer in some way such as the infamous God Hand review where the guy playing it sucked at the combat and didn't like the humor so he gave it a 3.  Fuck that guy by the way, deserves to be kicked out of the industry if you ask me, twat.

If you ask me, a real 10/10 game doesn't exist.  Nothing is perfect, everything has its problems.  There are certainly some games that skirt the line of perfection like DOOM, Hotline Miami or SMT 3 but even those titles have certain little things in them that pull them from that number.

But despite all that, outside of a quick reference so some punter can know if a game is worth the buy in or not, numbered reviews are generally really fucking stupid.  It is completely daft to expect a person to boil down a complex opinion on a thing, not just games for that matter, into a number.  Like I personally, if you put a gun to my head and asked me to do it, would rate famously shit survival horror game Countdown Vampires and medicore but the still impressive Parasite Eve 2 a 7 out of 10.  Without hearing my thoughts in detail those two identical numbers don't mean anything.  A lot of reviews do come with articles attatched to them but there are also a great many cases where people don't read those and instead either look at just the number or worse, the metacritic which is why the skew is so annoying

Reviews have a lot more problems than just the number at the bottom, the people writing them not knowing what they are doing, chiefly, I'm just bitching about something I find stupid while I'm sick with the flu.  Ideally, you should just ignore reviews entirely.  Look at a little bit of promo material, decide if its your kind of game or not and just fucking try it.  You don't need internet approval to enjoy a game, ignore the general audiences and just play stuff