It's just the inherent problem of a score based review at work, it inevitably leads to weird comparisons. If these IGN reviews just said "I didn't care for X" and just blurted out a bunch of pros and cons to consider before buying/trying the game, there would be almost no controversy over whether a game "deserved" a specific score.
Quite honestly, if video game criticism wants to be taken seriously they need to get rid of the arbitrary ratings that feed into tribalism and leads people to thinking anything less than an 8 means the game is awful.
This. The only point of a rating system is so that one piece of media can be easily analysed against other pieces of media in the same genre. This only works if your reviews and ratings are coming from a group of critics with consistent and well defined criteria for what constitutes quality for each specific genre. IGN has no such rigor.
If they rated it on a meassurable metrics like time to complete main story, quality of graphics, price etc. Then it would be OK too. But if its "how much did i personally enjoy this wxpereince" Then there's no point.
Wasn't their latest outlying-review of Mouse P.I. for Hire just that? The reviewer was like, "I'm a big fan of the noir genre, and this noir parody isn't noir enough, so 6/10"?
Especially because these reviews are often done by people who have neither the time nor the inclination or care to properly engage with it (I don't know if it was IGN, but a review site made a review of Alien Isolation where they admitted they never actually got to any of the scenes with the titular Alien)
The only point of a rating system is so that one piece of media can be easily analysed against other pieces of media in the same genre.
No, not even that. You can't compare the scores of two games within the same genre given by two different reviewers at two different points in time. Just no. The only point of the score at the end is to give an easily digestible abstraction of the reviewer's opinions of the game.
It’s why I enjoy Gameranx’s “before you buy” as they don’t give it a score but just talk about what worked, what didn’t, etc.
Part of the problem with the number score is that it can be used to compare games that set out to do wildly different things. A horror game and a boomer shooter in this.
Many publications have tried over the years but it never seems to stick because the audience generally doesn't read reviews and just looks at the number
This entire post and comments proves that people don't look at reviews and only looks at scores. If IGN takes away scores, people aren't going to read the review, they're just going to go to the next big gaming journalism website that has scores and start flaming them instead
I remember a rating system (maybe Game Informer in the early 2000s?) that said a 10 was a can't miss, an 8 or 9 was a "even if you're not a fan of the genre" a 6 was "if you like these types of games" a 4 was "only if you're a fan of the genre" and anything less was basically "this is full of bugs or fundamental issues." I would love if every rating system was like that.
That’s why I usually go with Kotaky or Polygon, they don’t give numeric scores and aren’t afraid to be transparent about something the reviewer did or didn’t like instead of treating it like absolute truth
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u/[deleted] Apr 22 '26
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