Opinion
By JULIAN SWANN

Not a single video game in the past 10 years has been properly reviewed in its first week of release.

This isn’t just Sturgeon’s Law ("90 per cent of everything is crap"). Contemporary game reviews fail to do their job, and the fault lies with the current system of ad revenue and deadlines.

It only makes sense that review websites, which generally earn the money to pay employees via ads and clicks, would want a lot pages for users to visit.

All reviewers operate on a deadline. Most are given a week to experience a product, write a review and have it published.

This system works fine for film and food critics, which is where game critics likely adapted the method from. However, this method does not work for games and they are being unjustly reviewed as a result.

To explain: let’s say neither film, food nor game critics are given free samples of their product to review. The food critic might spend about $30 - $60 for a meal at an average restaurant and invest an hour or two of their time.

The movie critic would purchase their $20 ticket plus snacks, and watch a 90 to 240 minute film.

Going through this process from beginning to end is necessary for constructing a proper and objective review of the focus of your critique. The notion of viewing half a movie or eating half a meal before criticising it is simply nonsensical. You’re missing out on a great deal of the content, and who knows if the other half was of a far higher or lower quality?

Now, what it takes to review a video game is another matter entirely.

The cost of games can be anywhere between $5 and $100. The variance of price that game critics deal with isn’t a glaring issue but the time and investment they have to make is a far larger problem.

I’m not advocating that game reviewers complete 100 per cent of their game before critiquing it – if they did reviews would never get done.

But I am proposing that they at least complete the entire main story. Not finishing the main story is like not finishing a movie – if you don’t see the credits, you’ve messed up.

For an average game, you’d be looking at anywhere from seven to 120 hours to finish the main story alone.

I’m no mathematician but it seems as though needing to make 60 times the investment of a movie simply can’t fit into the system of publishing a game review within a tight deadline.

So what does this mean for reviewers? They have no choice but to skim over 30 per cent of a game and ignore the other 70 per cent? We’ve seen how that can skew reviews.

Take the Monster Hunter series, sometimes referred to as the Japanese Call of Duty because of its well-deserved popularity. It has consistent controls across all systems and satisfying gameplay and replay value. Problem is, they all start off slow.

Let’s say the average reviewer gives themselves one hour to get a feel for Monster Hunter Tri before writing his judgment on the entire product. As someone who has played a solid 200 hours in that game, I would wager that by then they have been able to hunt one of the 18 available bosses without barely completing the tutorial phase of the game.

The average time to complete the main story of Monster Hunter Tri is about 52 hours, meaning the reviewer has played less then 2 per cent of the game. Going through the whole game to experience the extra content as well as the main story takes about 177 hours.

I understand it isn’t reasonable to expect reviewers to finish games if they’re working to the same deadlines as food or movie critics. But what I can’t understand is why editors enforce these deadlines when game critics are clearly dealing with entirely different circumstances.

As a result, consumers pay the price too, disregarding great games based on reviews that missed the most promising parts.

The system for game reviewing is long overdue for a significant overhaul as it’s causing so many titles to suffer under an unjust evaluation.

Julian Swann has been playing video games devotedly for 16 years across a variety of platforms and genres. He has has spent a significant amount of time reading gaming magazines – not only for guidance on future purchases, but to see how reviews match up to his own initial impressions on games he's played.