Now a days almost everything can be reviewed online. Just about any product or service that you can possibly think of can be reviewed. Games, of course, are no exception as you can review whether you like a game or not virtually anywhere you want to. From game sites such as this one to game platforms like Steam and GoG to retail sites like Amazon and Walmart, you can complain or praise a game to your heart’s content. You can even check out the Dunder Casino Review to learn more about it.
Here we focus on the two big game platform sites since they each have thousands of games that can be directly purchased and instantly delivered.
GOG Game Reviews
GOG.com (Good Old Games) is the best place to review older games that are not tied to any DRM (Digital Rights Management). This means that you can easily install the games on any device that you want to without worrying about how many times. Thus, GoG is the best place to find reviews of old games that are no longer in stores or any other major online platform. There are new games too, but GoG is the best place to go online for classic games. For the most part, the reviews here are positive and constructive since many of the games bring back great memories for the players. Other contributing factors include limited DLC and little online play to worry about it.
Steam Game Reviews
Steam is the largest PC game platform by a great margin. In fact, most new PC games today are found on Steam. The main exceptions are most of the older games on GoG and major game companies like Blizzard. Thus, you won’t find blockbuster series like Warcraft or Diablo on Steam. What you will find is nearly all the latest games along with some software and videos thrown in for good measure.
The reviews themselves on Steam are currently either Recommended or Not Recommended which is signaled by either a thumbs up or thumbs down sign. Stats are then compiled on how many reviews were labeled as each. The higher the percentage the better the overall sentiment. For example, the best is Overwhelmingly Positive which is normally in the mid to high 90 percentile. However, not all reviews on Steam reflect the true sentiment of a game. Some games are down voted simply due to having too much DLC or for being banned from online play. The best example of the latter is Player Unknown Battlegrounds being one of the most popular games in years, but has only 56% positive reviews overall!
Yea with online game reviews you gotta be careful, especially the player submitted ones. The official game reviews can sometimes be helpful but even then, if a game gets a bad review you might still enjoy it
Play the game and judge it yourself or just watch some gameplay of it.
Always read those reviews and do not base on poor feedbacks. You may want to try the game yourself and see if its good for you
Yeah unless there’s repetitively poor feedback negative reviews don’t mean much
By playing the game, those reviews get more context.
Some reviews attend to be rushed with little to no experience with the game and that can make reviews unfinished when it comes to taking in everything from the games.
One thing to realize about game reviews is that overall reviews tend to be leaned more negatively. And I think it’s just that if someone has a bad experience, they’ll go out of their way to review those bad experiences. But if someone has a good experience with a game, they’re more likely to just keep playing the game and not review those positive experiences at all (unless approached to talk about their experience). But if there’s a ton of backlash for a game (e.g. Fallout 76, Pokémon Sword/Shield, Diablo Immortal, etc.), the pendulum tends to swing the other way and there will usually be people that will stand up to support a game whether or not the game deserves that backlash.
Personally, I like game review sites that offer not just user reviews, but also editor reviews (where an editor or multiple editors of a gaming site review(s) a game). For instance, Metacritic offers critic reviews and user reviews, so you can see both perspectives, and have a better evaluation for whether a game is worth purchasing or not.
But unfortunately, Metacritic doesn’t have a way to show playtime for a game, which can drastically affect how a game is reviewed, especially with how thorough the review is. For instance, a user might play a game for only 20 minutes and hate the game just from 20 minutes of gameplay even though the gameplay might actually get better through more progression. Or the player might play the game for a while and see that the game is stunning, but they might not play enough to see bad progression of the game; these types of games tend to be “first impression” games.
Fortunately, that’s where Steam reviews tend to shine most. When you review a game on Steam, you can see the user’s playtime; the only thing I don’t like about Steam’s review system is that you have to pay at least $5 on Steam to even have the ability to review, which does come with its own biases, especially for freemium games where you have two types of players, the free players and the premium players (which sometimes consist of whales, which are players that spend a lot of money in a game). For instance, a game that’s marketed as “free” might actually be more fun when you spend money; maybe you unlock more story content or other things that bring a more positive experience, but the base game itself might be awful.
For the most part, reviews will differ. And so I think it’s important to look at multiple reviews of a game, not just from one site, but from multiple sites. That way, you can understand more perspectives.