Super Nerd Sundays Presents: Games Criticism Is Broken!

Lately my time has been sparse, not because of any writerly activities. No, I’ve had the ill fortune to be playing Mass Effect 2 and Assassin’s Creed 2 at the same time, two very different, very good games that the critical apparatus surrounding video games has treated very differently.

Assassin’s Creed 2, for example, is a flawed masterpiece, a great game with some serious flaws and plenty of hype to live up to. The critical apparatus, that is to say Metacritic and the collective consciousness of the enthusiast press, seemed to see it as such, commenting on its refinement of play and loyalty to the original. There were plenty of gushing, mindless reviews, sure, but scroll down far enough and you’ll see some constructive comments and accurate criticisms of what is a great game with issues that wants to be more. Destructoid sits at the bottom of the list with an incredibly negative and nitpicky review, inexplicably enraged at fun and desperately asking us to like them, but that’s Destructoid. Assassin’s Creed 2, through some miraculous alchemy, managed to get through the lens of games criticism largely intact.

No such luck for Mass Effect 2. Just as hyped as its partner in sequelage, Mass Effect 2 has been warped beyond belief by the critical apparatus of gaming media. A quick look at Metacritic’s collected reviews put the lowest review score at 75%. What’s more is that this review is the only one to do anything other than gush about the epic, fluid game play. Reading through Mass Effect 2 review summaries is like listening to a marketing department vomit, a slough of almost unintelligible comments about nebulous concepts that really don’t offer anything other than the direction of a thumb.

Which sort of defeats the purpose of criticism, robbing it of context and offering it up in a vacuum. If Mass Effect 2 was solely interpreted through these reviews it would be nothing short of amazing, but as I played it I couldn’t help but feel as if it was irreparably pared down from the vast offering that was the first game. At 30 or so hours I’ve only found two options for each class of gun, and while they do certainly feel different from one another it’s still pitifully little, considering how long the game is. I find myself using one power over and over again in combat, and while the ability to change ammo mid fight is nice it’s largely a matter of matching the kind of bullets I’m shooting to the color of the bar over an enemy’s head. That’s not really what I consider challenging or interesting combat.

And the game is possessed of some of the most profound grind that I’ve ever seen, even more than the first Mass Effect. Somehow they’ve managed to make loot-seeking even more time consuming while removing loot from the game. Scanning planets, a necessary evil to both progress in the game and improve your gear, is the single most tedious activity I’ve ever carried out in a game. And that includes riding wyverns from place to place in WoW. At least that offered me some cool visuals. Let me break down just how absurd and out of place Bioware’s system is.

Step one: fly your little ship to an itty bitty planet and press A. Now the planet is big! Next, press Y to make a target appear over the planet. Now hold the left trigger to make your control vibrate slightly and display some shifting EKGs representing the heartbeat of various natural resources hidden somewhere on the planet by the Na’vi. Drag your little cursor around the surface with your analog sticks now, watching the meters to see if they’ll shift at all. Tediously maneuver to them to find a reasonably sized heartbeat and press the right trigger while still holding the left. You’ll be rewarded with a slight increase in resources, assuming you found a well sized pulse. Congratulations! Now do it forty more times. Oh, and after you’ve pulled the right trigger enough you’ll have to fly back to a fueling station, possibly in another system, and buy some more probes. Oh, and fuel. You’ll have to buy fuel constantly, just for moving across the map. So space exploration and resource gathering not only require time, but they require in game resources. The effect is less one of enforcing making tough decisions about your money and more one of endless tedium, enforced every time you want to improve your equipment or the Normandy. And you’ll be doing this a lot, trust me. Certain upgrades require absurd amounts of resources, and others require existing upgrades to be purchased so that additional resources can be spent for the purchasing of additional upgrades. By eliminating your inventory Mass Effect 2 has added in the worst shopping and gear progression system I have ever seen in a game. Ever.

This hasn’t ruined the game for me, certainly. I’m a huge Mass Effect fan and I went into this game with an open heart and the highest of hopes. But it is a huge, central part of the game which is unbelievably broken and unacceptably bad considering the time and effort that went into producing the game as a whole, and it’s something that reviewers don’t seem to be talking about at all. The game they’re reviewing you’d swear that you progress naturally through the game and simply acquire resources as needed throughout the central campaign. The game I’ve been duped into playing has just as much pointless and fiddly shit as the old Mass Effect, but instead of being able to access the menus that were so conveniently part of my menu before I now have to access them through a set of consoles, none of which are ever where I want them to be. Want to equip that new piece of armor you just found? Tough shit, you’ll have to find the wardrobe console and then adjust a set of sliders (why god why sliders?) until you find it among Mass Effect 2’s many hideous options.

To be perfectly clear, however, the core game itself is tremendously fun. Shooting aliens in the face is perennially enjoyable, and to say anything else would be a foul and evil assertion. The addition of ammo, which I initially hated, has grown on me, although I do often find myself wishing for deeper pockets. Sure, you just have to run over some corpses to get more ammo, but it forces you to leave cover and eliminates the “epic firefight” feel when getting more ammo is simply a matter of running around looking for glowing shit. It’s nice, and indeed important, that each shot counts in Mass Effect 2, but the ammo system cries out for fine tuning. In fact, most elements of this wonderful game do. And this isn’t even that big a deal. Games are often shipped in pieces, begging for post-release patches and fixes for broken content. Fallout 3, a great game, had to be patched to keep certain NPCs from committing suicide in Megaton, for example. It’s not at all odd to see something like Mass Effect 2 come out a little bit underdone, wanting for fine tuning. What’s odd is that critics, people who are supposed to comment on what’s wrong in games, criticize them, specifically, aren’t talking about the problems that Mass Effect 2 has. Instead they’ve heaped praise upon a game that could be great with just a little more work and some intelligent commentary from the people who are paid to offer up just that but is, as it stands, just good.

So the failure is shared. Mass Effect 2’s design team could’ve (and should’ve) found and fixed a lot of the clunky issues during testing. Many of the features, such as planet scanning and transit as well as ammo, could have benefited tremendously from minor tweaks or simple removal. And many of the reviews could have discussed the game in the context of both its hype and its many, many problems as well as its many successes. The game does so much right, offering up an interesting and diverse cast of characters (except Jacob) and forcing you to relate to them in order to succeed, expanding the Mass Effect world so that it has more than five inhabited planets and one big ass space station and allowing you to feel that your choices have actual impact on play by showing the long term effects of decisions made in the previous game. It’s easy to get bogged down discussing all those great things you love in a game as well and lovingly crafted as Mass Effect. But when it’s your job to inform us about the quality and consistency of the snake oil we are about to be purchasing you need to nut up and find and analyze the flaws in the games you’re telling us we absolutely need to buy.

The enthusiast press has long functioned as an extension of marketing. Some companies, like Sony, take it even further, directly funding and creating websites to hype their products while professing independence from corporate culture, but it seems like these measures are mere formalities of late. EA and Activision can reliably expect the press to review their triple-A titles with gushing praise and little concern for any of their major flaws. It’s not an issue with the industry so much as with the critical apparatus adjacent to it. If films and books were reviewed in such a way people would dismiss them as cultural garbage as well, but for games this sort of treatment isn’t just accepted, it’s expected. If a triple-A title is criticized fans will come out of the woodwork to defend it as if commenting on the state of the emperor’s dress was tantamount to treason.

Games are making big strides towards becoming accepted as a mature means of storytelling by the cultural mainstream. Inch by inch games like Bioshock and Fallout 3 are displaying the amazing narrative potential games have, but it won’t do us one whit of good unless we fix the culture surrounding games so that it permits intelligent discussion about the thing we all love so much. Sites like Gamepro and IGN do far more damage to games as an art form with their treatment of games like Mass Effect 2 and Modern Warfare 2 than a thousand games like Dante’s Inferno, and they’ll have no incentive to fix their methods if we keep on reading their trite. So rise up, gamers, and fill the Crispy Gamer shaped hole that now sits in all of our hearts. Fill it with intelligent and reasoned discussion of games. Discussion of both their methods, their goals, their successes and even their failures.