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.
Totally. That’s why Nintendo games always review poor- oh, wait
The reviews still have a strong focus on graphics, but based on the hardware limitations of the Switch.
Also, the aesthethic is not just about how photorealistic the game looks or what cutting edge technologies it uses. That’s why some games age differently than their peers, simply because their art style is not or less diminished by technological advances.
I don’t care very much about the cutting edge graphics, I rather have something with a round aesthethic than dry looks with ray tracing.
Into the Beach for much the same reasons, made by the same studio. Phenomenal gameplay trumps all.
Only game I’ve ever come back to this much. Unlocked everything, still fire it up every so often to have a run or two and it still somehow feels fresh each time
“It’s a technical wonder, never seen before in the industry. Completely unique dialog trees and interactions with NPCs. Elaborate upgrade system. Crafting mechanics. Full open world sandbox experience. Planned DLC for the next 2 years. BattlePass”
Holy fuck I’m tired of this shit
I hate how every AAA game has to be an open world sandbox with loads of extra features. I just want a good story and strong core gameplay.
It’s just schlock that every AAA developer pads their ad campaigns with. You see those accolade trailers with cherry picked reviews toting it’s game of the year, claiming it “reimagines everything” or “sets a new standard” , when it’s a game built on a 12 year old engine that is showing its age.
Notice how Sound Design isnt even mentioned on the meme. That’s how far down that is in everyone’s minds.
But it should because we’ve been suffering for over a decade of flat non surround or abysmal volume mixing. Dialog that is just too quiet while everything else is loud. But I guess as long as we have separate volume sliders in game that’ll fix it. If only every game came with em.
Also we’ve been pushing graphics all the time but Sound has basically tanked since the invention of the Sound Blaster AWE64 or something. What’s a sound blaster? Well kids we used to buy sound Cards for our computers much like you do GPU cards. That’s how much sound tech has stagnated. We had 5/7.1 setups in the late 90s had games with EAX support now everything is just whatever, play sound.wav. I guess Dolby Atmos is a thing but it’s a thing with a subscription fee.
TLDR: what about sound
5.1 and 7.1 systems aren’t all that widespread, even in the music industry. Surround kinda sits in the same place vr does for me. It’s immensely cool, but it’ll never become standard due to hassle and lack of support.
Most of the recent innovation in sound has been trickled down from the music and film industries. Just a general increase in the capabilities of soft synths and a better understanding of foley, alongside dedicated in house recording studios have raised the bar of audio.
To be honest I agree with you that sound is overlooked, sound engineers truly are unsung heroes. I mean even when people point out the sound in a game, it’s usually directed at the composer.
As a professional generalist/gameplay programmer, imo sound isn’t far off from 3D graphics in terms of complexity, perfs issues and hardware fuckery. That is, if you want to do anything “fancy” with it, of course. As you said, the “play sound.wav” approach is way overused…
I do care about shipping the best SFX I can, and obviously so does our sound guy (who also deeply cares about mixing btw) but unfortunately, as opposed to graphics it doesn’t translate into better reviews/more sales in the execs’ mind so any substantial programming work in that area usually goes on the backlogged pile.
Ironically, I think that situation used to be better because there was a time where you basically had to have a dedicated sound programmer on the team since the software side was also a giant mess.
