One of the reasons why I like Skill Up reviews is because he tends to focus on whether or not the game is a good time.
Personally I’ve stopped watching reviews for that reason. Too much of his review depend on whether he actually had fun with the game or not. If it’s a game he didn’t enjoy he’s going to review it much harshly while finding whatever positives to justify recommending a game he enjoyed.
For instance he didn’t enjoy the Outriders expansion and one of his big points of criticisms was that it’s too hard to play solo. Which is a pretty dumb criticism to have when the game has a world tier system with the sole purpose of letting you set the difficulty. It climbs with XP but you can always set it to a lower difficulty if something is too hard. He could’ve easily set it to world tier one and just shred through the game, he simply stubbornly chose to be on the highest difficulty that was unlocked for him. And he was at the difficulty level where builds start to matter, except from the video it’s pretty clear he doesn’t have an actual build in mind. His criticism was the equivalent of playing master difficulty (or beyond) in Diablo 3 as a monk without any consistent spirit generation, and then saying Diablo 3 is too hard. Anyone who has played Diablo 3 knows statement like that is complete BS but anyone trying to understand whether they’d actually want to play Diablo would instantly be dissuaded from giving it a shot.
And the flipside is Destiny’s Lightfall expansion review where he just decides to add everything “free” into the same expansion review pile because he loves Destiny. And of course then proceeds to downplay every glaring negative point about it such as “No new pvp maps. You shouldn’t expect it because Bungie isn’t focusing on PvP either” and “Nothing new about gambit, the players don’t care about gambit either.” or “One new strike and no real improvements to that core gameplay loop. Game development is hard you guys”. To give the expansion context, it’s the weakest expansion after Y1 (which was the lowest point of the entire series) and is complete filler in terms of the story. Yet Skillup still felt it was good enough to recommend it to people.
For me his reviews have become mostly worthless because I first have to intuit his experience with the game to understand which way his bias has swung, so that I could get context of his final verdict.
