How do you like your reviews?
I have long pondered the role of review scores, do people like them? If so, do they like scores out of 5 or 10, maybe a rating out of 100? What about An A-F scale, or perhaps something a bit more off the wall like ours?. Or finally, do people not bother with the actual rating and make do with the words of the review? Hit the jump for a poll and more words.
There is a nice little poll right below, feel free to vote and then leave a comment.
[poll id=”2″]
I was inspired to make this poll after reading Patrick Klepek’s thoughts on Eurogamer’s review of Uncharted 3 by Simon Parkin.
After reading Patrick’s piece I started to think about the nature of review scores and how others see them. I personally understand why readers want to see a definitive rating at the end of a review, but I am not entirely keen on using the traditional systems here on The Reticule. Then you have sites like Rock, Paper, Shotgun which don’t use any rating at the all in their ‘What I Think’ pieces. So feel free to vote and share your thoughts on how you like your reviews.
4 thoughts on “How do you like your reviews?”
I like out of 10 and out of 100 scores personally. The problem with this is that some people want to just look at the score first and not a lot of the article after.
What I would love to see someone do is put the score at the top of the article/page and not the end! If people are going to read the article they will read it… placing the score at the start sets the idea for the whole article and makes it easier to justify the opinion of the reviewer (at least this is how I see it cause I read the score first and the article after)
I find that a simple paragraph at the end of a review can sum up the game so much better than a simple score.
When reading a review, I prefer no score system.
But I think you need a personal connection to the audience for it to really work. RPS is about the writers, it’s certainly making headway as a brand, but I read the reviews as a ‘Jim’ review, or a ‘John’ review, rather than ‘an RPS review’.
I guess for the purpose of making things clear and easy to understand for readers, using the traditional scoring systems is better, (I don’t really understand our system at times!).
Sometimes I just want to see how a site sums up a game—because I want to avoid possible spoilers in a review, for example, or because I’ve got limited time. In those situations, a score is useful. If the final paragraph of the review is a good summing up, it can also serve in these circumstances.