Ranked and Criticised

A majority of consumers always like to know about the product they about to purchase before going to the checkout. Many fear the situation that the moment they try to use the product it turns out it isn't what they had planned on purchasing or the product has flaws they weren't aware of, be it design or functionality. To avoid this many look at reviews, that way the consumers will be aware of anything undesired and let them have second thoughts about the product. In the gaming industry, reviews have a strong influence on how the market flows. Good reviews means good products and then those good products will then be purchased by consumers knowing that they have just purchased something worth buying. Simples right?

Unfortunately it isn't as fine and dandy as it sounds. Usually one forgets that a review is just an opinion and that there is more than one group reviewing a single product. Therefore each review you see, whether its in a magazine or on a website, they are based on the experiences of the reviewers. Since each reviewer is going to be under different reviewing conditions no review is going to share exactly the same opinion.

Then there's the issue whether the review is any good or not. You would like to think that the reviews you read are fair, unbiased and it tells you all the important information that you like to be aware of, such as control and graphical issues. In some situations that may not be the case. For some cases the fault lies in the developers side. Some don't realise this but some reviews are not actually based on the full game, rather reviewers are usually given a review build of a game (similar to a public demo and explains why some groups are able to release a review score before launch date). Times where it is the reviewers fault is when the reviewer is specifically asked to review in a particular way (be it by the employer or even the developer), eg. not mentioning pros/cons and giving a high score for the sake of attracting purchases.

My final thoughts on this are that reviews should really be used to give rough idea what the product has to offer. Do not take the numbers given as scores too seriously and begin to compare them to other games, especially those of a different genre. And remember! they are just opinions. There have been several occasions where a reviewer thought highly of a game I didn't enjoy, similarly some games reviewers weren't pleased with I enjoyed. I'm sure that you too have experienced this.