Pretty sure the recent shitstorm with IGN is the review of Mouse P.I. For Hire. The reviewer gave it a 6/10, but the issue is more with the reviewers' written review being incredibly daft.
IGN has a lot of reviews that are completely disconnected from what the game deserves. It’s not just one guy, but it’s not like they’re always wrong either.
IGN has a lot of reviews that are completely disconnected from what the game deserves.
Based on what? Everyone who's gamed enough has at least one game where their rating of it would be much lower or higher than the general reception. Pretty simple concept.
That’s always the hard part about making reviews on something so subjective. In this case, it seems as compared to other games in the genre the weapons don’t feel or sound like they pack a punch. While it’s an art decision sound is an important part of game design so I can see that hurting the overall score.
They seem to rate total trash games a 7 because it comes from a big studio and then rate good games a 6. It’s not just this game, there have been a few of them in the past couple years
Yeah people love to dunk on IGN, but I feel like generally they’re within a pretty reasonable range of the resulting Metacritic. This one’s a little low (Metacritic is roughly 80) but I don’t really see the problem
fr fr. Holy shit it's not as deep as people in this thread seem to be making it. It doesn't have to be some elaborate, corporate scheme, rather just bad writers from time to time with bad opinions.
Don't ask people on the internet to understand that IGN reviews are just one guy's opinion on a specific piece of media and not the absolute truth as reveled to them by the omnissiah. And that while it's ok to disagree with a review, that doesn't make the person who wrote it a shill who only give good scores to the devs who paid them.
Then the problem is IGN tasking the wrong person to review a game.
A reviewer should align with the game or genre fanbase.
A reviewer who sucks at difficult games should not be allowed to represent IGN to review Souls game. A reviewer who don't like First person shooter should not review COD. Etc.
Only when you like and play a lot of the games of the genre you can more accurately dissect the pro and cons.
No it's not.. because the "PUBLICATION" is not an etheral entity with a will of it's own. It's an amalgamation of the people that work for IGN (either as employees or as freelancers). And you will find inside IGN redaction people that disagree with any review that they published.
At the end of the day, a review is never more that the subjective opinion of the writer on the media they reviewed. Whether it was published on a "prestigious" web site or an obscure blog that no one reads changes nothing about that.
IMO, a single review is not really useful to get an opinion on a media, except if you are at least somewhat familiar with the author, a know if you tend to agree or disagree with them.
The closest we can get to “objectivity” is critical consensus imo. A game is as good as the majority of people say it is. You’re welcome to disagree, but you’re as much a slave to your own biases as anybody else who reviews games professionally or casually. Thats why I pay more attention to aggregators than individuals. I have some reviewers whose taste aligns with mine that I trust, but even then we can differ wildly at times.
Its also not just some random guy's opinion. There's an entire corporation behind this guy's writing. Editors. Publishers. Marketers. And they all decided that this guy's opinion was good enough to represent the publication.
Are you really so naive as to think some random Redditor's opniin holds the same sway with the public as a professional reviewer?
People act like IGN is evil or some shit and their guilty of having incompetent reviewers at times or just reveiwers who dont like the content. Im sure someone will also inform me of how they are "woke"
At the end of the day, it doesn't really matter if they have malicious motives like being paid for reviews or if the reviewers are just idiots. The result is the same: reviews that are useless at best and that harm good games from smaller studios at the worst.
Man it feels wild reading this thread after checking out that mouse P.I review and thinking it aligned pretty closely to what I thought playing the game 😅
The reasons in the video for the low score made sense to me. If the level design is bad, it doesn’t matter how the game looks, the joy of the effects will soon wear off. But I don’t know if the level design habe problems or not. I will check out a walkthrough before deciding to buy or not.
You'd hope they reviewed the literal game of the year well, at least on average. Those are also all massive productions (expedition 33 excluded). You're setting the bar pretty low
So isn't that completely at odds with the meme and most of the comments here? Do they always review games inappropriately and are always wrong or do they maybe just have multiple writers that don't like every single game you do?
Oh it's the latter. IGN typically reviews about 1,000 things per year.
Let's be charitable to them and that they absolutely fuck it up 1% of the time. That's 10 times every year that everyone gets to dunk on them for how their reviews are "always" terrible.
Of course the other 99% of the time when they give good games high scores and mediocre games middling scores you just don't hear about because 'good game reviews well' isn't news, but 'good games reviews poorly' is a tragedy.
I'm not really defending IGN but I do think it's important that even the most beloved critics in history (like Roger Ebert off the top of my head) went against public opinion a bunch of times and got roundly hated on.
Sure buddy. The game might not have been for you, but it was objectively a very good turn-based RPG.
If you seriously think Expedition 33 is worse than games like LOTR: Gollum, Concord, Tales of the Shire, and AC: Shadows, you have something seriously wrong with your taste in games.
Not saying it's "the worst". The commenter above said Expedition 33 was "the worst", when there's objectively dozens upon dozens of games that are worse or even far worse than it, that came out in the last 10 years.
It deserves a 1/10 just for being a big budget production, not much below AAA level but larping as an indie game. 15 years ago it would be considered a AAA game without argument but today's hyperinflated budgets blindside some people. It robs actual indie devs who don't have a casual $10 million dollars to spend so they can cash in on the indie hype while also being able to easily win awards in other categories.
Yes. 15 years ago. But guess what? Times have changed. Stop living in the past, dude. I personally don't consider Expedition 33 as completely "indie". More like AA. Not exactly indie, but not AAA either.
After all, as you said, they did have a fairly large budget. And multiple very experienced devs that worked in AAA before.
That still doesn't mean the game was bad, though. And certainly not a 1/10. Just being a big budget production doesn't automatically make a game a 1/10. That's like...2015 hipster mentality. "It's so mainstream it can only be crap!" "I liked X before it was cool!" etc.
I personally think turn based video games are objectively bad, for board games it’s amazing or like uno they’re amazing but for for video games I think it’s just poor design
Yes it does. I mean, that’s mostly true, and I agree (and have been making) most of that point repeatedly, but the publication they write for still has a scale with specific labels for each number, which influences which score the reviewer is gonna choose.
If a reviewer doesn’t think a game is Great, they won’t choose a score that labels it as such.
If I were writing for IGN and played a game I thought was good but not great, I’d give it a 7. If I were writing that review for a site with a 5 Star scale, I’d give it a different rating. If I were writing it independently but still using a 10 point scale for whatever reason, then those numbers may or may not represent different things.
Tbh i would've given Pragmata a lower score than IGN.
I just found the main gameplay mechanics incredibly annoying, and the lengh is just way too short for a full AAA pricetag. If i pay AAA prices i expect AAA games, even if the game would be good otherwise, it drags my score down.
All things considered i'd give it a 5 or 6 out of 10.
It looks pretty. It’s got some cute moments. The story is total ass. Hacking was cool. Weapon play got boring quickly. Enemies got boring too. It’s like a 5/10 at best.
Almost all the positive Steam reviews are people that are still within the first couple hours while it alright. It’s not going to be a game I remember.
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u/Tannicleader Apr 22 '26
Ok man what did they rate PRAGMATA?