The “Break it Down” Blog

An interesting discussion going on over on Ars about how game journalists and reviewers can sometimes find themseves in a battle between the PR company that can get them early-access to titles and their readers that they need to stay true to in order to get advertisement revenue.

Unfortunately for game reviewers, it seems that the PR companies hold most of the cards in this game, namely:

• Early-Access to games to give publications first-run reviews
• Abilities to purchase long-running promotion advertisements on the publication’s sites

In turn the journalists have to walk a fine line between being honest and pissing off all that PR money and getting blacklisted.

For our game reviews the one strategy we’ve always tried to employ is to answer the question: “Is this worth $65?”.

With that single question in mind, a lot of the review parts of gaming get a lot simpler. We find that over-comunicating details (lots of screenshots, lots of movies, lots of detailed descriptions of each menu and aspect of the game) provides addition details to the players that want it, but the ones that don’t can do one of the following 3 things that are engineered into our reviews on purpose:

1. Read the summary and see the score and decide.
2. Read the conclusion and see the score and decide.
3. Read the “Areas of Improvement” to see the justification of why we dinged or praised a title.

We think the “Areas of Improvement” is the single most important of any review we do, clarifying why we may have not liked a title or why we might have loved it. Not ever gamer is the same, if you say you “Hated” a game, but don’t qualify your comment with a list of things you didn’t like, it’s entirely possible that if the stuff you hated, I don’t care about, that I might actually like that same game quite a bit. This is why we list off specific gripes, so players can decide on their own if they agree with us or disagree with us.

As gamers, if there are other suggestions or requests you have for us that you’d like to see in the reviews, please let us know!