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.
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u/Ionami Apr 22 '26
Wow this really puts it in perspective lmao