I don’t understand the purpose of big company reviewers (for subjective stuff like media at least). If I’m watching a smaller reviewer my goal is figure out their tastes so I can ignore the criticisms that I know don’t bother me, and pay very close attention to where their tastes align with mine. Like if dunky calls a game buggy or slow paced, that’s probably more a positive than a negative, but if he says the controls are clunky, I’ll probably agree. ACG tends to like games that are less mechanically adventious and easy compared to what I like, and we have evry different tastes in storylines, but he’s a really good barometer for sound and graphics.

If kotaku or whatever releases a review it’s really hard for me to understand whose voice I’m getting, so the review is pretty useless, how do I know if the guy calling the game a challenge is the guy that infamous cuphead reviewer or a guy that has been beating dark souls since he was 4.

Same here,

Unfortunately most of the folks in gaming media that I follow don’t write or produce proper “reviews” anymore. Reading a review from IGN or Gamespot… I don’t know anything about the reviewer so I take it with a grain of salt. Like with Starfield, I give the same weight to IGN giving it a 7 as I do with some no-name whatever tiny website I never heard of giving it a 9.5

Just have to read through the reviews. If someone docks the game for not letting you fly manually between solar systems like you do in Elite Dangerous then I just have to write-off the negativity because… of-course fucking not, did anyone expect that? With something like, the repeated knocks against the barren nature of the procedural generation leading to repetitive tedious travel - I take that more seriously, because it was something I was hoping they would have addressed when moving that direction. Something like the story sucking or the NPCs having cringey dialogue is completely subjective and means nothing without knowing the reviewer’s tilt.

If someone docks the game for not letting you fly manually between solar systems like you do in Elite Dangerous then I just have to write-off the negativity because… of-course fucking not, did anyone expect that?

I think a lot of people expected that. This is the see-that-mountain-you-can-go-there studio.