When considering buying a new game, where do you guys go for reviews? It seems to me that there has been a trend in the past 10 years or so that seems as if ALL the Gaming magazines and a lot of the Gaming websites that I used to rely on for reviews have totally sold out....meaning they print these rave reviews about upcoming games promising that they are going to be awesome, and then the games end up totally sucking (to me it seems likely that money is changing hands between the game developers and these "news sources"...) Like FarCry 2....holy moly did that game suck...FarCry was one of my favorite games ever, and I was so excited about FC2, but it was actually far worse than the original in many aspects...same thing with Wolfenstein, FarCry 3, and, of course, Diablo 3. I always feel totally ripped off finding out a game sucks after I've already shelled out my nonrefundable $60.
I've found that one thing I can do to to get a good representation of what a game will be like before buying it is to go to Amazon and read the negative user reviews. I say the "negative reviews" because the positive ones are usually fanboyish and not super informative....also you learn to pick through the negative ones for the informative ones....some of them are kind of silly complaints or things that you can tell are specific to that user's experience (or maybe that that user is currently in anger management classes or something)....but you can usually also find, detailed objective reviews that tell you the real story...
A problem with Amazon reviews is that they are usually the most helpful after the game has been out for awhile.
Any suggestions on other game review sources that are still actually reliable? Especially reviews that are available before a games release?
Game reviews...
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Lazlo Hollyfeld
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M.Steiner
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As a general rule, Metacritic is usually the #1 best place to visit as they gather up all of the critic reviews from around the net and the scores from those are used to determine an average metacritic score out of 100. It also has direct links to all of the reviews it lists if you want to check any of those out, player reviews included, and you can see which are the highest rated games for each platform too. At the end of the day a review is just someone else's opinion but this place usually gives you a much better idea of how good a game is since it's not just one individual but an average score of multiple.
When it comes to Amazon ratings and reviews for games I don't always pay as much attention to those myself as I do other sources, and the same for the user reviews on metacritic sometimes. You can guarantee that if a game has something like always-online DRM attached to it for example, as far as the rating and reviews go on places like that it wouldn't matter whether the game itself was one of the greatest ever made, people would still jump on the bandwagon to purposely destroy its rating and reviews page just because of the DRM. So whilst the thing they are all bitching about may be justified, I often find it hard to get a good enough impression of the game itself in those cases without wading through them all so it's not often I check Amazon for game reviews these days. Plus as you say it's usually only after a game has released that you can start to take note of them and I'm one for buying on release.
I use quite a lot of gaming sites tbh but the main ones would probably be (in no particular order):
http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/
http://www.giantbomb.com/
http://www.destructoid.com/
http://www.joystiq.com/
http://www.gametrailers.com/
http://www.youtube.com/user/Rev3Games/
The main site I use is VG247 but that's mainly for gaming news, but I tend to check all of the above for individual reviews as well as keeping an eye on Metacritic. They're usually pretty fast at getting their reviews up but it should be noted that this all depends on the embargo date they have been set, since this states when critics are actually allowed to publish their reviews. As even if they have a review already written up and ready to post they may not be allowed to post it until that ends anyway, which could be some days before release, on the release day itself etc. Depends.
Hope some of those sites prove useful to ya
When it comes to Amazon ratings and reviews for games I don't always pay as much attention to those myself as I do other sources, and the same for the user reviews on metacritic sometimes. You can guarantee that if a game has something like always-online DRM attached to it for example, as far as the rating and reviews go on places like that it wouldn't matter whether the game itself was one of the greatest ever made, people would still jump on the bandwagon to purposely destroy its rating and reviews page just because of the DRM. So whilst the thing they are all bitching about may be justified, I often find it hard to get a good enough impression of the game itself in those cases without wading through them all so it's not often I check Amazon for game reviews these days. Plus as you say it's usually only after a game has released that you can start to take note of them and I'm one for buying on release.
I use quite a lot of gaming sites tbh but the main ones would probably be (in no particular order):
http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/
http://www.giantbomb.com/
http://www.destructoid.com/
http://www.joystiq.com/
http://www.gametrailers.com/
http://www.youtube.com/user/Rev3Games/
The main site I use is VG247 but that's mainly for gaming news, but I tend to check all of the above for individual reviews as well as keeping an eye on Metacritic. They're usually pretty fast at getting their reviews up but it should be noted that this all depends on the embargo date they have been set, since this states when critics are actually allowed to publish their reviews. As even if they have a review already written up and ready to post they may not be allowed to post it until that ends anyway, which could be some days before release, on the release day itself etc. Depends.
Hope some of those sites prove useful to ya
"My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings:
Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!"
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
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The lone and level sands stretch far away.
Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!"
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare,
The lone and level sands stretch far away.
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SL33PY
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What steiner said, also , I check his lists in the 2013 / 2014 game releases threads on this forum 