Game reviews are, at best, a tricky affair.  Everyone seems to have their own idea of how games should be reviewed, what criteria should they be scored on, and what manner of scoring should be used.  To be honest, an awful lot of it is just various ways of fiddling with things in order to create systems that give games the scores people think they should get.

As you might imagine, that makes most reviews worth about as much as the pixels they are displayed with.

So, in order to help make reviews more useful, and also to help keep it clear exactly how we are reviewing things, I’d like to lay out a few of the core principles we’ll be using here at SpecRock when reviewing games:

Really Play the Game: This, I think, is one of the key things that are lost in a lot of reviews. People are so eager to make sure their wham-bam-amazing review is up first that they get it out the door with only a minimal amount of having actually played the game having gone on.  I’ve seen plenty of reviews based on the first 2 or 3 hours of game that rave about it, only to discover that the entire thing goes downhill swiftly afterwards, but the reviewer never got that far.  Conversely, there are games that you can only scratch the surface of after a few hours of play; is it really fair to dismiss those because you didn’t take the time to really play them?

So, our policy here is to only review a game after we’ve either played it to completion, played it until we’ve thrown up our hands in frustration, or played it until we’ve really experienced it (for games that don’t have endings, ala Rock Band).  What this means, of course, is that we won’t be providing launch day reviews (unless some companies wish to send us their games awful early…).  Our reviews will come when they are damn well good and ready, and we think they’ll be all the more useful to you because of that.

Step Forward, Step Back: No game exists in isolation, and as our slogan says, this is a place for gamers with history. Every game, in some way or another, builds on all that has come before it, and a critical measure of a game is often in how it succeeds or fails on that front.  This is not a question purely of innovation – not every game has to innovate – but more a question of how well does the game do what it’s trying to do.  If it’s a new survival horror game, what innovations does it bring to the table?  If it doesn’t do anything particularly new, how well does it use the standard elements?  Does it improve upon the formula, or does it drop the formula on the floor, and then comically slip on it and fall on its ass?

Graphics, Shmaphics: Ok, not exactly.  The way we look at it is, we expect games to look gorgeous these days.  For the amount of time and money that’s put into them, it’s just a given.  Therefore, how pretty a game looks is of relatively less value than a lot of other things.  Of course, if something sets a new standard for gorgeousness, that’s important.  Conversely, if the game looks like it was vomited up by a C64 after a long night at the bar, that’s important too.  What’s more important, though, is the aesthetic sense of the game; do the graphics fit with the game?  Do the graphics get in the way of the game experience, do they enhance it?  These are the graphics issues that matter, not how photo-realistic the blood splatter looks.

It’s an Equation, See? Most of us have found, as we get older, that our time to play games is more limited.  Life is more than willing to provide constant distractions to keep us from our games.  So when we do have time, we want to make sure we’re using it on something worthwhile.  And the cost of games has been trending up, and we also want to make sure we’re spending our money wisely.  Most of us don’t get free copies from publishers, so when we plunk down $60, we want to feel like we didn’t waste our money.  We also want to know that a game that promises us 40+ hours of gameplay isn’t padded out with 20 hours of repetitive fetch quests, or that the hot new action game can be blasted through in 5 or 6 hours.  There is no perfect equation to find the ratio of fun vs. time and money, but it’s usually pretty easy to figure out whether a game is close to it or not.

Score Ain’t Nuthin’ But a Number:   A lot of people don’t actually read reviews; they skip down to the “score” or “grade” section and then post angrily when the score doesn’t fit what they assume a game should get.  This is not very helpful to anyone.  Besides, these numbers are ultimately meaningless because they tend to be massively inconsistent – people have a hard time really pinning down what a 7 really is.

So, to avoid this mess, we won’t be assigning scores here; we will simply be giving in-depth reviews that discuss our thoughts on the game.  We want our reviews to be useful, and we want people to at least take the time to read them before deciding to flame us.  It’s more fun for everyone that way.

So that’s our review policy in a multi-paragraph nutshell.  We hope we can provide information that helps you to make informed choices as a gamer, and perhaps help you see games in a different way than just B- or 8/10.

And if we haven’t reviewed something you’d like to see, drop us a line!  Or, if you are feeling particularly industrious, write one yourself and send it in!