A few months ago Justin McElroy, the Reviews Editor for Joystiq.com, tweeted that he was looking for freelance reviewers. I imagine a flood of responses prompted him to tweet shortly thereafter that in order to write for him one had to be “really, really good.”

That got me thinking…what IS a “really, really good review?”  I asked the question to a group of video game journos I’m acquainted with, and was met with silence.

I recently heard the same group of journos commiserating about archetypes of poorly-written reviews, such as those written in the passive voice, or formulaic reviews that follow the opener-story-gameplay-graphics-sound-closing format, or wishy-washy prose that’s heavy on description and light on analysis, or reviews written in a negative tone that end with a score of 7 or a B+.

Again, this aroused my curiosity about the nature of good reviews, and I suggested that I’d rather read a list of good types than a list of bad types. And again, I was met with silence.
 

Most of my gaming buddies don’t know who Cliff Bleszinski or Ken Levine are. They’re not familiar with the Infinity Ward scandal and have no perception of many other events or personalities that those of you reading this column likely take as baseline information. Those friends of mine might not care about gaming industry news, but they do read game reviews.

Historically I’ve been in the same camp. GameSpot was the bulk of my gaming press exposure for most of my life, and after GameStop became such a central part of my gaming activity I picked up their cheap Game Informer subscription. Prior to 2010, my primary use for both outlets was their reviews. And all I cared about was the "don’t buy it, maybe buy it, or buy it" level of conclusion that Dustin Browder suggested to Tom Chick as the only possible results of a game review.

I’ve argued with other game journos that reviews and criticism were entirely separate beasts, which reflected my experience of movie reviews and academic film criticism. Reviews ran in the local newspaper and attempted to tell me whether a movie was worth my money and time. Criticism ran in film journals and academic texts and described the meaning of a film in psychological or cultural terms, and couldn’t care less whether I actually saw the film in question or not.

Yet I’ve heard Justin McElroy say that Joystiq reviews games as experiences, not consumer products. Edge reviews often feel decidedly academic to me. I'd argue that some of the ire Abbie Heppe drew from her Metroid: Other M review had to do with questioning the conventional understanding of a review's purpose by working some substantive criticism into the piece. The "reviews" I respect and enjoy the most aren't concerned with whether I purchase the game in question or not.

I used to care more about review scores than I cared about review copy. Now it's blindingly clear to me that the value of review scores lies somewhere on a metric between silly and pointless. No one agrees on what they mean. Very few people actually utilize the full, available scale of potential scores, resulting in what's referred to colloquially as the "7-9" scale.  And don’t get me started on Metacritic. An “A” does not equal 100 points out of 100. Nor do five stars.

Criticism, however, is usually based, at minimum, on shared understandings of technique and appraisals of quality based on long experience with the medium. A film critic is familiar with how Orson Welles uses depth of focus, Alfred Hitchcock’s commanding use of suspense,  Sergei Eisenstein’s use of the montage, etc.. Familiarity with the established body of “good” filmmaking then informs the way a critic assesses value upon any film. Video game criticism is really no different, and so especially when it comes to decide whether a game is worth my time or money, it's the criticism within a review that matters most.

When I read a Homefront review that contains the following, I immediately question the knowledge and perspective of the author:

The graphics are fantastic.

I can’t believe how well the sounds make me feel so many emotions, and the dialogue is so good!

All the details really pull me into, and make me believe in, the game world.

No military FPS game currently on the market can compete with Homefront’s multiplayer.

You can find Homefront reviews that make statements extremely similar to these, and their authors live in a world in which Half-Life 2 and Portal exist, where Call of Duty Black Ops, for all its ills, presents deep and well-crafted FPS multiplayer, and where Martin O’Donnell’s Halo score helps set a bar for video game scoring in any genre. This “criticism” is so utterly demonstrative of a lack of perspective that I won’t even bother looking at their score.

Whereas when I read a Homefront review that contains statements like these, I have more faith in the validity of the author's perspective:

Characters glitch into each other, scenery snags and the frame rate wheezes during larger set-piece battles. It's certainly not terrible, but as with high-end racing games, the FPS genre is no place for visual slouching.

Not only does the [overall plot of Homefront] make little sense, but our relationship to it is flimsy and vague. … The premise of the game all but demands rich back-stories, personal tales of loss and tragedy that have led each character to this point, but they remain empty cyphers to the end.

Despite the potential of staging FPS battles in familiar suburban locations, the game quickly falls into a rut familiar from too many of its genre peers. There are stealthy sniper bits. There are turret sections. There's a scramble beneath the girders of the Golden Gate bridge which is a virtual redux of Half-Life 2.

Single-player campaigns are fast becoming a quaint anachronism though, and if this offering feels more vestigial than most, it's largely because the genre itself, particularly this brand of modern military shooter, is ever more interested in the long-term lure of multiplayer. Here, at least, Homefront proves more capable.

These statements are clearly penned by someone with an eye for detail, some understanding of drama, a knowledge of genre history, and a command of the current state of FPS affairs. In short, the first block of quotations are drawn from a review which lacks actual criticism. The second block of quotations are drawn from a review which is laden with it.

The conclusion I am drawn to is that not only does criticism need to be part of a review, but its presence is essential to the review having any chance of fulfilling, with any credibility, the primary purpose most of our readers assign to reviews. Would you be more likely to purchase Homefront based on the recommendation of the first author, or the second? And in your answer, we have at least one portion of the formula by which we can judge a review which is “really, really good.”

Dennis Scimeca is a freelance writer from Boston, MA who has contributed to Gamasutra, GamePro, The Escapist, G4TV.com, Joystick Division, and @Gamer magazine, and maintains a blog at punchingsnakes.com. Follow him on Twitter: @DennisScimeca. First Person is his weekly column on Bitmob.