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There's always hate for IGN, and despite agreeing with it for the most part I still use IGN as my go-to review handler (along with Metacritic). But what games review sites does r/games actually consider to be a respectable and fair judge?
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I enjoy Game Informer's reviews, and find them to be honest and reliable. Since I was subscribed to their magazine for a long time I came to enjoy reading each editors' piece and let them know my thoughts on it via email; recently my subscription with their magazine ended so I rely on their online reviews now. They still have a great team. Some noteworthy reviewers: Ben Reeves, Dan Ryckert, Andy McNamara.
I can't believe I had to scroll down this far to get even an honorable mention of GameInformer. I love those guys. They think hard about each review and are almost always worth trusting in completely. Very fun people too.
This is for me as well. Love everyone on their team, and they really go the extra mile to show us how much they care about the reviews.
I love the GiantBomb guys.
For me, it's less about the sites and more the people on the sites.
On GiantBomb I pretty much like everybody, but generally listen to Jeff and Patrick's opinions on games when looking for buying advice.
IGN has a few good people. Greg in particular.
I also like TotalBiscuit, but he doesn't do reviews.
I agree, follow reviewers and not review sites. The idea of an objective review is stupid. Find someone that has similar taste or something interesting to say and follow them. It's the same with movie reviews. I follow Movie Bob because he loves genre movies and always has something interesting to say.
This is actually a point I hadn't thought of; follow someone who has similar tastes. The problem therein I would imagine is that that person cant review every game you want to buy.
I follow multiple reviewers. What you can do is use RSS to suck in all of the reviews you like. If the reviewer you like doesn't have a dedicated feed for themselves or you only want to see their reviews and not their other content then you need a fancy RSS reader which can filter. Newsblur can be set to only show you specific authors or articles with certain labels/tags on them.
So if you like only Patrick at GB you can only grab his reviews and show them along with John Walker's (RPS) and Beau Hindman's (Massively) stuff. Bam, rolled your own review site.
Where can I go to figure this RSS stuff out? I have absolutely no knowledge of it.
This is a good overview. I use Newsblur to manage my feeds.
RSS 101
Ever noticed that icon that looks like like the wifi icon turned on its side sitting up in your address bar. It indicates that an RSS feed is available. Click it and it will give you the available feeds. If you plug that address into an RSS Reader it will aggregate all of the content from those RSS feeds and you can read it all in one spot. RSS is how those pesky karma-whore redditors manage to submit popular videos (zero punctuation, tabletop and so on) almost immediately after they get put on the Internet.
That's why I follow multiple reviewers with different tastes. In the end though, you are the best critic and have to discern each review on your own. I sort of create this internalized franken-review from many respectable reviewers that I trust.
I agree, I love GiantBomb because they have a good variety of well-documented reviewers. People who frequent the site tend to listen to the podcast, they watch the quicklook, they know the guys. For example, as an RPG nut I can generally tell that if Vinny or Brad like a game, then I'll probably want to check it out. Or, if I'm not sure, I can watch an hour of the game's gameplay for myself and listen to them talk about the pros and cons from their perspective.
In general, I really like the way they cover games.
I like Daemon Hatfield. He seems like an okay dude.
IGN used to have an amazing crew back in the day. Daemon, Greg, Hilary Goldstein, Erik Brudvig, Mark Bozon. My tastes closely matched theirs, and they put out the best podcasts in gaming (maybe ever) during that 2007-2009ish era.
I liked Greg and Clements, I think they dropped Clements or something
yeah Clements got hired as a community manager or something like that at deepsilver i miss him being on beyond. BEYOND!
I don't like Daemon Hatfield; he has a very strong anti-Nintendo bias, which annoyed me whenever he'd review a game for a Nintendo system. His Tales of Symphonia: Dawn of the New World review in particular is very shitty.
I didn't know that. I was basing my comment on the videos on IGN's YouTube channel.
I agree that it's more about the people on the sites. Which is why I like Rev3, the people being Max Scoville and Adam Sessler.
I also like TotalBiscuit, even though he technically doesn't do "reviews" but by watching a "WTF is..." I can pretty much get a good feeling of whether I'm going to like a game or not.
Last game I did this with was "Dust: An Elysian Tail" and I couldn't be happier.
I like his videos but he should really stop getting drawn in to arguments with reddit kids, he's only lending them legitimacy and making himself look silly.
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I also love GiantBomb because of that whole Kane and Lynch
2fiasco awhile back where Jeff Gerstmann was let go for giving it a negative review (not his first offense of the kind), and then Ryan, Brad, and Vinnie, and I believe Drewall left Gamespot together to form GiantBomb.I've never heard much talk about GiantBomb for that, though, so sometimes I wonder if it's not as cool as I think it is or if maybe there's more story to it than them just having integrity? Still, as far as I can tell they're pretty trustworthy and, if nothing else, entertaining.
They did a huge interview on that a year or so ago. It also had to do with Ratchet and Clank's Tools of Destruction. Sheeeit.
Wait really? Do you happen to have a link?
gamespot,giantbomb
There ya go
I can try to find one. It was when Giantbomb and Gamespot merged together again and they went over it.
Exactly the reason why I went to giantbomb in the first place. I stayed for the persona 4 endurance run. Also, one of the very very few websites I disable adblock plus on.
P4 Endurance Run is incredible.
I recommend their Star Trek Online coverage. It's that same level of "what the fuck is happening to us right now"
It was the first Kane and Lynch, Drew didn't work at Gamespot.
Yahtzee's Zero Punctuation is, in my opinion, the most entertaining video game reviewer by far. Although if you want a complete and fair breakdown of any game, look elsewhere. His reviews are highly opinionated and tend to lean negatively, while being informative and absolutely hilarious.
The thing about Yahtzee's reviews is, even when you disagree at the end about whether a game is good or bad, I've never found him to be wrong about anything, at least in the games I've played. They're always valid complaints that he finds to rail against.
Eh, I wouldn't say ALL complaints are valid. I'm not sure what game this was, but he was complaining about not being able to press R1 and R2 at the same time? How is that a complaint? It so incredibly easy to press those two buttons at the same time. You just have to use your index and middle finger.
I believe he mentioned something like that in his MGS4 review, where I tend to agree with him. Controls have always been somewhat iffy in the MGS games.
I agree completely.
reviewer, not really. critic maybe, entertainer most definitely. Yes they can be funny but I take his "complaints" and "opinions" with a grain of salt.
It's more shoehorn 8h graders humour than actual reviews.
Seconded in regards to Giant Bomb. Their reviews are good but I really feel like I'm going to either be interested or not in a game when they talk about it on the Bombcast. When they really get into it with one another it sheds some real human light on the experience that you really can't get even from a written review. This goes for other shows as well like Idle Thumbs, though they don't so much do reviews as just talk about games that they are currently enjoying.
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Agreed. I may not like TB as a person, but his first impression videos have given me more insight into some games than most in-depth reviews. He's good at what he does.
What's wrong with TB as a person?
Rev3Games' video reviews are great. Sessler is far and above better than his coworkers but the entire team is thoughtful, unbiased and professional. My new favorite youTube channel
I like max Scoville too. Rev3 is a great channel to watch
Yeah me too. He is on the Comedy Button podcast with a smattering of other individuals from other game sites. Its not really game related, but I find it pretty funny nonetheless. Just a recommendation
Tara and Anthony are also great=!
Brap brap my fellow comedy button fan.
He was the reason G4 survived so long. Genius of a man.
How about some love for Eurogamer? I started checking them recently, and so far I like them: some real quality articles and pretty fair reviews.
Eurogamer for the Digital Foundry articles alone. Some of the editorials are very well written also. The most recent on Xbone DRM was a good read.
I agree here. I rarely read too much into Eurogamer's reviews, but their other content is often of high quality. Especially compared to the dreck a lot of other sites being mentioned here put out.
Eurogamer is my first internet stop in the morning. Since I'm in the US I have a bunch of great stuff to read even when it's early.
I really like Eurogamer's scoring policy, even though I generally do not like these number systems. They also seem fair and acknowledge personal bias
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Wait, what was the issue with Sim City? I thought their coverage of that was pretty good... They've become my preferred gaming news outlet.
They amended the score 4 times or so due to the server/always on shenanigans.
Yeah, I know, I just don't see the problem with it. a bit wishy-washy, perhaps, but surely they were just trying to be thorough.
The initial score of 9.5 raised eyebrows considering the problems people had with the gameplay regardless of connection issues, but it was the first update that really turned their readers against them. For well-documented problems involving connecting to the servers and even lost progress, they dropped the score to a still quite good score of 8.
Then dropped it to a four when they became aware of the full extent of the problems (which was admittedly a little late) and EA/Maxis's refusal to offer an offline mode, then reupped it to a 6.5 when the issues were resolved, noting that there had been some tradeoffs.
I definitely fault them for releasing the original review before the faults in the game were widely known, but they were pretty thorough in their followup coverage, not just in updating their opinion of the game to reflect its state, but in reporting on the developments with the game.