Primer On Video Game Reviews

Although I haven’t posted many reviews so far, I feel that it’s necessary to clarify how I rate games. As opposed to rating a game on its quality, or production values, at the end of the day I rate a game on how much I enjoyed playing it. Thus there are certain genres and games that I’ll struggle to enjoy or justify spending money on, even when millions of people love them, or they are critically acclaimed. Take for instance the Street Fighter series. I played some of Street Fighter 2 on the SNES and I certainly enjoyed it. At the time Street Fighter was a cult classic, spawned a film and cultural references as well as having droves of passionate fans. But it was never a game I played very often, or for very long, I far preferred games like Super Mario Bros. 3, A Link to the Past or Super Metroid. The fighting game genre just isn’t one I enjoy very much.

As a result in the past 15+ years of gaming I’ve owned 2 fighting games: BlazBlue and Soul Calibur 2 (and arguably the Super Smash Bros series). Compared the paltry number of fighting games I own, I have an extensive RPG collection, including games like the Witcher. The Witcher is a grubby, unpolished game but as an RPG fan I ultimately enjoyed it very much, completing 3 playthroughs of it. While issues like inconsistent voice acting, a mediocre fighting system and being graphically poor, it was a game I felt had a lot of heart/soul. Additionally the game was pretty well written, with an interesting world and characters, had some good moral quantries, great music and locations. The game also had a good difficulty curve in that enemies always felt like a threat. Another plus was that the economy system worked well, gold always had value throughout all stages of the game.

EDIT: Switching back to 'out of 10' because I find 'out of 5' too hard to quantify fully.