Game reviews...

I think the current system for reviewing games is broken.

I've been playing "Transformers: Fall of Cybertron" and it is a really good game. It is just fun, and improves on the problems of its predecessor in every way. The story is kinda' "meh" but it is visually unique, has reasonably diverse gameplay, the multiplayer is interesting, it basically does everything I could want. In fact, try as hard as I can, I can't really pinpoint anything that is actually wrong with this game. Much like my beloved Republic Commando, all of the pieces in this game come together and just work.

It's kind of weird to have a pair of games act as a microcosm of a systemic problem, but I think that the two Transformers games published by Activision do just that. The first one "War for Cybertron" dropped back in the ancient year of 2010, and the sequel "Fall of Cybertron" dropped this year. Fall of Cybertron launched near the time that Black Ops did, if memory serves me correctly. War for Cybertron came out around the monolith known as Modern Warfare 3. As a quick point of reference, the metacritic score of these four games, on PS3

War for Cybertron- 77
Black Ops- 88

Fall of Cybertron- 77
Modern Warfare 3- 88.

Exactly the same mean score awarded to each franchise following a two year gap. This makes absolutely no sense. War for Cybertron was a good game that was marred by some problems. Maps blurred together, it got repetitive, some Transformers were stupidly difficult to control. I'm of the opinion that Black Ops was one of the worst designed games ever. Moving away from how ridiculous and stupid the plot was, it was incredibly repetitive, unreasonably short, and used a lot of cheap tricks to try to create difficulty. The multiplayer was okay, but the maps got abused really quickly and the matchmaking system just did not work. It worked in that you never had to fight the game to accomplish something. So, y'know what, I thought Black Ops should have been a....60 or 70. The media at large felt it should be higher. Okay, fine. 77 and 88 as they are, I can get behind it.

Flash forward to this year, and the scores above. You have got to be shitting me. One game goes out and improves upon every single problem the predecessor has. The other just...doesn't. Okay, MW3 was not as repetitive as CoD's of the past, but it really doesn't switch up a lot. It has loads of things wrong with it, whereas with Fall of Cybertron I dare you to find a reason it doesn't work.

The way game reviews are handed out right now is broken. Somehow the great game which is created by a small studio with improvements in every way with no hype is exactly equal to a somewhat flawed predecessor. Somehow the good game that looks pretty but offers no substantial improvement over the last gen and has a metric shit-ton of hype behind it is still better. This keeps happening, somehow a game with crazy hype is never bad.

Compare Warhammer 40 000: Space Marine's metacritic of 70, against Gears Of War 3's 91. GoW3 is the better game for sure, but on a scale of 100 is it really 20% better? More examples, etc, etc.

Anyway, this vexes me.