Super Nerd Sundays Presents: The State of Video Game Reviews and Brink!

The state of gaming media is a sorry one. Inflated review scores, incoherent diatribes seated behind a paper thin wall of journalistic neutrality and a constant flow of money and freebies make it difficult to take the majority of what major gaming publications say seriously. There are a few halcyon beacons where this isn’t true, mostly fringe websites focusing on smaller subcultural groups such as Gamerswithjobs, or edifices of journalistic integrity helmed by veteran writers instead of video game writers, places like Gameshark and Kotaku.

It would be forgivable if this inflated scale was applied across the board. But instead gaming culture has become an entity which must ferret out some sort of rough hewn money trail if it wants to discern the validity of any sort of review. L.A. Noire’s 90 percent metacritic score has to be considered in light of Rockstar’s relationship with the press, which could best be defined as the relationship between the cool kid on the playground and his fawning, nascently homosexual, above all else obedient followers. Dead Space 2’s 87 and 90 percent Metacritic scores represent a similar expression of money, media leverage and fawning adoration for franchise and publisher. Compare this to games like Fallout: New Vegas, flawed masterpieces with dwindling scores (84/84/82 depending on your platform) despite remarkable execution and design.

I’ve selected these games because of the myriad of technical issues that plague both. New Vegas is well known for its issues on the X-Box 360 and I’ve occasionally had issues on the PC (nothing I’d bat an eyelash at) and Dead Space 2, considering that it uses an engine that was already in place for three years before its release, has thrown some hilariously inept technical issues involving its physics engine my way during nearly every play session I’ve experienced so far, occasionally ruining the combat changes that its developers attempted to implement with their renewed focus on thrown objects in combat. Let’s also not forget just how ambitious Fallout: New Vegas was with its efforts, its writing and its scale, and just how derivative and repetitive Dead Space 2 is, to say nothing of its atrocious writing and facile storytelling.

If we were to assess these games based on their scores, Dead Space 2 would clearly be the better purchase. But even a cursory examination of them as crafted objects that hundreds of artists collaborated on for years would expose serious differences between them, differing concerns and differing accomplishments. And if we were to examine these games the same way that we examine, let’s say, films, we’d understand the expectations of the reviewer going into the product. We’d know that Dead Space 2 was given some free passes because no one expected much of it and that Fallout: New Vegas was held to a higher standard for the phenomenal performance of its franchise in the past.

But this isn’t the nature of the discussion of video games. Instead we’d left with raw scores that people use to assess the quality of works. In fact, reviewers are pressured into assigning these scores even when they don’t because of the perceived short attention span of their audience (pause for the irony, given the dozens of hours required to finish a brief game and the two hour investment required of a film). Perhaps some of this can be blamed on the development of this critical apparatus in the age of the internet, where feedback is immediate and attention spans are pathetically short in any forum for discussion. But an explanation doesn’t make this kind of a pattern acceptable, nor does it make it any less appalling that games are denied their just deserts, that the apparatus for assessing them is undermined by its own participants or that people who attempt to break this cycle of blah are at best ignored for their efforts and far more often ostracized for even trying.

This has been particularly apparent to me while watching the evolving discussion surrounding Brink, the latest excellent release from the underappreciated and oft-ignored British developer Splash Damage. Brink, in case you aren’t aware, is a team-based multiplayer shooter that builds on Splash Damage’s tradition of creating unconventional objective oriented games that cater to a variety of play styles through a supportive network of various classes. Brink specifically plays with the idea of movement in shooters, specifically asking players to balance their mobility against their combat capabilities. This runs in clear violation of the old gating of combat capability in shooters: class selection. The result is a game that is as much about movement mechanics and the control of movement on the map as it is about playing as a team, accomplishing objectives and shooting dudes. If you’re interested in any of these elements it’s well worth looking at, and if you like two or more it’s pretty much a must buy. If you liked any of the Enemy Territory games you’ll probably like Brink, and Section 8 players looking for a more populous and faster paced game would be well advised to look into it.

But you’d never know any of this from the reviews of Brink. Rather, Brink is a failure. The single player game is weak, the bots are stupid, the guns aren’t powerful enough and the shooting isn’t shooty enough. It’s so obsessed with teamwork that it’s broken, broken, broken, and its cardinal sin is that it’s not Call of Duty.

This is the state of discourse surrounding games. I know I’ve written of it derisively before, but no game better exemplifies it than Brink, a “half finished” game of big ideas with an infrastructure for growth built in. Brink is a game from a small studio, published by a publisher with a relatively modest media presence (compared to juggernauts like Electronic Arts, Sony, Microsoft and Activision) with an unconventional focus and new ideas about game-play that have a handful of qualities in common with other game play varieties. If ever there was a game that warranted critical defense and discussion, Brink was it.

Perhaps some of this is owed to the isolated nature of game reviewers. Most reviewers don’t have the time to actually assess multiplayer products as actual, functioning entities. These are games that don’t really materialize until release, games that rely on dedicated communities to propel them, and they’re being assessed by people who are being asked to constantly churn out a stream of interchangeable comments and grades for products which are often shown to them half-finished with a set of notes, however incomplete, about what will be changed in the release version.

But the state of discourse remains one where this sort of attention is not only standard, but is rewarded. Brink is going to be buried under a mountain of praise for L.A. Noir, a game which will likely be forgotten in a matter of weeks for the next big media release. And we as a community will be left with a handful of reviews written and published before this multiplayer gem was released which will provide all of zero insight and background to neophytes to gaming culture, the people who really need these reviews. These are the people most thoroughly failed by the state of game reviewing: the people who aren’t inoculated against the bullshit culture of which they’re born.