Editorials

When is a review not a review?

October 5, 2010, Author: Andy Corrigan

I’ve never been one to openly criticise somebody else’s work, especially in a field of which I’d like to be working professionally, but in looking to see how the rest of the press had received Capcom’s latest ‘Zombie ‘em up’, Dead Rising 2, there was something that just jumped out on Metacritic’s list of registered reviews and I just had to write about it.

Quite rightly, I won’t say too much with our review still to come, but it’s fair to say that I’m currently enjoying the hell out of Dead Rising 2 and most of the assessments seem to reflect this opinion with the game earning a Metacritic status of ‘Generally favourable reviews’. In any medium, reviewers and critics will agree and disagree on the finer points. What is truly great to one person will always be mediocre to someone else; however there was one solitary negative review that stuck out like a sore thumb. This particular review was published on The Guardian website, written by Nicky Woolf who offered the game a measly two stars out of five.

Let me just preface the rest of this article. This is a newspaper that I personally have a lot of respect for, thanks to their reliance on facts and they’ve been very good to the games industry over the years where the usual tabloids have strived only to sensationalise. I almost feel bad with what I’m about to write as once upon a time they even went as far to give us a favourable review just after we first launched, but there are severe problems screaming out in Woolf’s work. This is without taking into account that nearly half of the review was spent discussing the direction of the zombie in the film industry, when in limited space I suspect describing the game might have served more useful. Hell, I won’t even touch on the extremely nerdy point of why he was wrong to reference ’28 Days Later’ as a zombie flick… Must… let… geeky things… lie…

I have no issues with any other writer or publications, professional or amateur, online or otherwise, disagreeing with the general consensus. In fact, if they truly believe what they write and can competently back up their views, then I’ll applaud and respect them all the more for it. Doing that and covering bases is something that the Guardian is well known for, so it comes as a surprise when a review can be so short and feature so many inaccuracies.

Worthy of the same score as the Clash of the Titans game?

I’m not going to sit here and completely pull the review to shreds; enough people in the comments section had already done that. My problem with this review is that from the line ‘juggling items in the pitifully small inventory’ it becomes painfully clear that Nicky Woolf had barely put any time into the game at all before penning about it. With no mention of a levelling system which unlocks many new inventory slots over the course of the game, alongside new attacks (another unjustified complaint) and health containers, it shows just how little of the game was played and with this in mind, can Woolf really have given a fair account?

He clearly missed the levelling aspect completely as instead he spent most of the game in his words ‘navigating through crowds of slow-moving zombies just by bobbing and weaving’, thus missing out on half of what the game has to offer. It’s not exactly easy to miss in even as little as an hour’s gameplay. It’s meant to be tough going early on, that’s the nature of the game and the thing that encourages you to level up quickly. Would you play a Final Fantasy title, not bother levelling up in fights and then complain that it quickly becomes a hard slog? I’d wager that most would spot the need for levelling up pretty early… if you have a basic understanding of games, of course.

Now, this isn’t a personal rant about Nicky Woolf in particular, this is something that is rife in much of the mainstream media where games are considered so trivial that this level of ‘will this do?’ depth is expected, but from the Guardian I’ve come to expect so much more. It’s true, I’m a firm believer that a review is simply the opinion of one person and their experiences with a product. In this sense, he really hasn’t done anything wrong; however, I also believe that as a reviewer it’s more important, nay, your duty to at least play enough of a game to give a full and accurate report to your readers, rather than playing for a short time and hoping that it was enough to get you by.

Gamers are a very knowledgeable and passionate bunch and even if they don’t always articulately express it on ‘teh internetz’, you can’t easily pull the wool over their eyes. If you try, as this situation proves, you’ll quickly be found out.

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