Why Review Scores Are Daft

Review scores have been a staple of reviews since reviews began. From movie, TV, Albums and of videogames, every form of media has its fair share of critical analysis topped with a little numerical value at the end. Whether it be a score of 5, 10 or even a grade if you're really pretentious, reviewers will often try to give their reviews a small indication of quality as a bookend.

If you’ve read any of my own personal reviews, you’ll know that I do not use review scores. Why? Because not only do I think review scores are dumb, I also firmly believe that the use of review scores has been a negative influence on critical analysis. While they may be convenient, review scores have long out stayed their welcome and it’s time for them to go the fuck away.

I should mention that I will be mainly focusing on gaming reviews for the sake of this write up. I tend to find that the issues relating to review scores is prevalent mostly in gaming. Plus this is where my area of expertise lies. Most of my points can apply to other forms of media, I just want to keep the focus on gaming. Get it? Got it? Good.

Upfront let me get this out of the way, my disdain for review score does not come from a belief that there is no objective way to view art. I am of the exact opposite opinion. I do believe there is an objective way to analyse and critique art. I may have to do a separate write up on this topic as it’s a fairly nuanced and complex topic that I can’t go into full detail here. So let me give you the short version, the quality of a work is objective, but your own enjoyment of the work is subjective.

Basically, you can agree that a game, movie or whatever is one of the greatest ever made, and still not like it. And vice versa. So I do think you can criticize art/media on an objective level. However, things become muddier when you try to add a numerical value to a work.

Let me ask you this, what is the difference between a 9 out of 10 and an 8 out of 10? How do you quantify the difference between a 6 or a 7? At least with a 5-star rating I can understand the logic behind them. 3 stars is average, 4 stars is good, and 5 stars is great, with 2 and 1 stars being bad and abysmal respectively.

So ratings out of 5 I understand, but ratings out of 10 are just messy and confusing. You could argue that ratings out of 10 allow for a bit more nuance. I can see the point in that, but how much nuance does it actually give you. Let's break it down.

In a 10 out of 10 system a 5 would be average and a 6 would be above average. Makes sense so far, but let’s take this further. If a 6 out of 10 is above average, then a 7 would be good and an 8 would be great. So what does that make a 9, an excellent? What's the difference between a great and an excellent? They're basically the same thing.

And what about a 10 out of 10. Does that mean the game is perfect? I doubt it because nothing is perfect. I know I just did a review of The Truman Show where I called it a near perfect film, but the key word there is near. It still had problems even if most were minor. So I don’t think 10 out of 10 means perfect, no credible reviewer would ever call anything perfect.

In that case, what does that make a 10 exactly, phenomenal, outstanding, stupendous, supercalifragilisticexpialidocious? When you really break it down, every score above an 8 is just saying the game is great but with increasingly extravagant verbiage. It's the same for the negative scores. So while rating games out of 10 adds more nuance, it only does so up until a certain point.

That’s not even considering the uses of decimal points in some reviews. 8.5, 7.6, 9.54321, what is all this? Some magazines would even give scores based on a 1 to 100 scale, or base it on a percentage score. Now this is just getting ridiculous. If you’re going to use a scoring system at least keep it simple.

I could rant for days about the nonsensical nature of scoring systems, but I think you get the point. However, that isn’t the reason I don’t use review scores. The reason I don’t use review scores is because of how pointless they are. Why do I need to score a game I’m reviewing? If my long ass review of Bravely Default 2 where I go into detail on the game's mechanics, story and structure did not convince you of the game’s quality, then I have failed as a reviewer. No number at the end is going to fix that problem.

I put a lot of effort into my reviews, I work very hard to make sure they’re the best they can be. Sure they aren’t perfect, my grammar could use some work and I don’t always make my points in the most concise way, but I do try to get better with every one I write. I want people to read and discuss them, even if they didn’t enjoy it, I welcome all criticism so long as it’s constructive.

But if I put a score on a game, and people focus on that, then I've wasted all that time and effort. I want people to engage with the text and not some number I put at the end. That's why I don’t use review scores, they distract from the actual content of a review.

But this leads me into the core malady inflicted by review scores. Readers are now putting way more stock in the scores rather than the actual review itself. People focus so much on the score they ignore the points made in the review itself, even if some of their criticisms are legitimate.

Case in point, the infamous IGN review for Pokémon Omega Ruby & Alpha Sapphire which gave the game a 7 out of 10 for having “too much water”. Everyone has made fun of this review, but here’s the thing, it isn’t wrong. Ignore the 7 out of 10 for a second, pretend it doesn’t exist and focus on the point being made. The point that ORAS has “too much water” is a valid criticism to make. Anyone who has played the Gen 3 remakes will tell you the latter half of the game is a slog to get through because of how much swimming you have to do.

The infamous “too much water” line is a legitimate critique. It's worded horribly which is why it is still mocked to this day, but the critique itself is perfectly fine. But that wasn’t what bothered people, what bothered people was the score. I’m not sure why, 7 out of 10 seems like a decent score to me but others were not so happy with it.

It got to the point where they were comparing the scores for other games to the Pokémon review. People were complaining that a game like Call of Duty Black Ops II received a 9 out of 10 and Pokémon ORAS received a 7. Ok, first off, why are we comparing Call of Duty to Pokémon, they’re not even in the same genre or aimed at the same audience.

Second, what does it matter if Call of Duty got a 9? If you didn’t like it then that's fine, but at least listen as to why the reviewer liked it and gave it such a high score. If you want to argue about the individual points made in the review, that’s fine, that’s where your argument should be focused on. But trying to argue about the score at the end is utterly foolish and does little to address the actual issues in the review itself.

Let me give you an example. The Gamespot review of Donkey Kong Country: Tropical Freeze is one of the worst reviews I've ever read. Not because of the 6 out of 10 score they gave it but because of the laughably false claims made in the review itself. The review lambasted the game for having bland and uncreative level design, a blatant falsehood that is easy to dispute by simply watching gameplay of it.

Keep in mind that I am referring to the original release of Tropical Freeze on the Wii U. when the game was re-released on Nintendo Switch Gamespot gave it a much better, far more accurate review. The 6 out of 10 the original review was not the problem, if the game had received a far more respectable 7 out of 10 it would still be objectionably wrong. It was the review, not the score that was the root core of the problem.

Readers these days don’t seem to read the reviews at all. Most of them will skip the entire review and just read the short summary at the end and take in the review score. And I get it, some don’t have time to read a full review, they just want the quick summary to get on with their day. I’m guilty of this too.

Honestly it feels like the review itself has become a formality. Not that I blame readers for skipping most game reviews nowadays. Have you guys read the work coming out of Kotaku, Polygon, IGN or any of the assorted mainstream outlets lately? Most of it is outright unreadable these days. But if you’re going to get mad at a review score, and you’re not willing to look at and argue against the points used to justify said score, you’re not helping.

But I shouldn’t get mad at the readers. They aren’t the ones that use review scores after all. That "honour" goes to games journalists, and that’s when this topic gets more nefarious. Let's talk about review score inflation. It's a commonly accepted fact that most game reviewers tend to inflate their review scores.

You don’t even need to look that far back to see an example of this. Remember the Death Stranding debacle? If you go back and read reviews for the game, you’ll notice a large disconnect between the score and the body text of the review. IGN was a bit more conservative with their score, giving it a 6, but their review was incredibly critical of the game, critiquing the controls and calling the gameplay outright boring.

That was a critique a lot of reviewers shared, and yet it inexplicably received numerous perfect scores from those very same reviewers. And if you don’t believe me just check out the games Metacritic page. And don’t give me that “it’s just their opinion bro” argument, once you put an objective metric like a score onto a review, the subjectivity argument goes out the fucking window.

We see this time and time again. Reviewers inflate review scores so as not to piss off game publishers and lose their first access privileges. You know it, I know it, everyone knows it. And this has created a bit of a problem when it comes to analysing the review scores.

Remember when I brought up how people were mad at the IGN Pokémon review for giving it a 7. most of you are probably scratching your head at that fact, after all a 7 out of 10 is a respectful score. However, due to review score inflation, a lot of people consider a 7 out of 10 to be average at best. I know that’s ridiculous but that’s how it is. Anything less than an eight is considered trash thanks to review score inflation.

I understand why some people like review scores. They're a quick and easy way to judge whether a game is worth a purchase. They're convenient. But with that convenience we’ve lost a lot of the nuance when it comes to media criticism and discussion. We're so focused on the scores we forget to actually look at and discuss the actual review itself and whether the points it makes hold up to scrutiny.

Worse still, this focus on the score, and not the actual contents of the review, can lead to consumers missing out on something they might enjoy. We've all done it, your browsing Netflix for something to watch and you see something to watch that looks interesting, only to be turned off by the star ranking.

It's worse for games since we don’t have a streaming service on Netflix’s level quite yet. Those you have to buy, with money. So gamers are a lot less likely to get a game if it’s a 6, or maybe even a 7. And that’s a shame because they could be missing out on something they would like.

If people read the body text of a review to find out what the game is like, that would be a good way to tell if a game is worth your time. Because then you can analyse what the game is and, more importantly, you’ll be able to tell if the reviewer is bullshitting you or not. I once read a review of Spyro Reignited Trilogy where the reviewer claimed they got lost. They got lost, in Spyro the Dragon, a game intended for children. Totally going to believe the score that reviewer gave it.

If you want to truly see whether a game is worth a damn you need to read the reviews, preferably from multiple sources, to properly assess what it’s like. Don't rely on a meaningless score to make that decision, trust your own judgement. You could read a glowing review of a game and still not want to play it simply because it's not something you’re interested in. It happens. Don't buy a game because it got high scores, buy it because you’re genuinely interested in playing it. Trust me, I learned that one the hard way.

To be fair, a lot of my arguments are negated somewhat by video reviews. At least with those you have to watch the entire review to get to the score, unless you just fast forward to the end but what moron does that. I suppose that’s why most audiences have moved over to video reviews these days.

Review scores are ludicrous. They're a nonsensical way to try to add an objective numerical value to art, often abused by reviewers to make the game seem better while drawing attention away from the actual arguments presented in the text. They're a worthless numerical value attached to the end of a critique that ironically adds little value to the review.

I know that there are people that like review scores. I understand the convenience they bring, but I just don’t think they’re necessary, and we lose a lot more than we gain with them. Review scores are an outdated concept, a crutch we’ve relied on for far too long and its high time that we got rid of them.

That isn’t to say there no good ways to classify certain forms of media. There are some good examples out there. The YouTube channel ACG uses a “Buy, Wait for Sale or Skip” rating system and I think that’s a great way to do it. It's a better way to judge a potential purchase than a number. I like that system, 4 stars out of 5.