Reviewing games is touchy, especially when there are many different types of gamers out there who expect many different types of things from the games themselves, and from reviewers. I’m not incredibly experienced in writing game reviews yet, but I try my best to get the highlights covered, perhaps even talking in-depth about features that I find extremely good or severely lacking. To get to that point, I play the games I review a reasonable amount of time – and that time could vary from title to title.

I beg your indulgence for a few moments.

I’m not a big fan of saying, “I’ll finish a game before I review it” or “I’ll play X number of hours before I review it”, because to be perfectly honest with you, if a game doesn’t hook you in the first couple hours, at the very latest, then there’s a problem somewhere along the line. I don’t think anyone – reviewer or casual gamer alike – should be forced to play a game when the developers have failed somewhere in grabbing the attention of the player early on.

That being said, with non-RPG titles, I usually put three to five hours into the game play before a review. If I get really into it and finish the game, more power to me. Games that I dislike early on, like X-Blades, are on the lower end of that scale. I think I saw all I needed to see after about three hours of game play, if that. How would the major issues I have with that game change after the three hour mark? After five hours? After I finish the game? Trust me, the camera and control issues aren’t going to change at any point in the game.

RPG titles I will likely play longer. Some of these games are dozens and dozens of hours to completion and sometimes the story takes a bit longer to get rolling. In a 10-hour action title, the story has to be approached at a different pace than a 40-hour RPG, and the same could be said of my reviewing. In my review of Sacred 2, I stated that I played about 12 story quests into the game (about eight hours of game play because I get sidetracked a lot) and I still couldn’t figure out the story – that’s a problem which I recognized after the fourth or fifth story quest. I gave it extra time because, well, its an RPG. (Apparently, in this case it didn’t matter ’cause the story is so all over the place that after nearly 10 hours of play I still hadn’t figured it out.)

If I play a game less than the average time for a title, I’ll say it in my review in the spirit of full disclosure. I’ll also tell you why, because usually those are games that really, really suck (like Too Human or X-Blades). Potential players should know what the issues are that early in the game, and why they caused me to stop playing.

So, as you can see, there are a lot of variables involved, so I won’t give solid specifications on how much of a game I’ll play before I review it.

If you’ve read my previous reviews, you’ll notice I use a scale of one to ten as the final score. I hope readers focus more on what I say about the game than the final score. (I’m not convinced I’m going to keep the “final score” idea, I might just get rid of it altogether and just discuss the game and leave it at that – but I haven’t decided for sure yet.)

I tend to view reviews and thoughts from individuals who run smaller gaming blogs as a more accurate depiction of these titles, so I build my reviews with that in mind.  Sometimes I think the large gaming sites put too much stock in what the general gaming public wants instead of taking each game and reviewing it on its own merits.  For example, I dislike blanket statements that knock games for not innovating, considering a feature to be a holdover from years past.  Instead of complaining that a game isn’t an innovative title, why not take the game on its own merits and consider how that “non-innovative” feature works in the game.  A great example of this is Persona 4, which uses a mechanic that many game reviewers despise these days – turn-based battles.  It works well in Persona 4 because its executed well.  Whether its a tried-and-true mechanic or a new, innovative one, if it works well in the title, why is the game dumped on?  Along those same lines, innovation does not automatically mean a game is great.

Taking that into consideration is really what I focus on when I write my reviews – I don’t care about the “mainstream”, FPS-or-nothing crowd or appealing to what they want to see.  I’ll take each game on its own merits and consider how the features I want to discuss work in that specific title, not on some larger “non-innovative” scale that some reviewers seem to be in the habit of using.

Well, those are some of my thoughts on my own, personal review philosophy.  Its not something written in stone – mostly its just stream-of-consciousness rambling.