Tobold's Blog
Thursday, March 24, 2022
 
Define review bombing

Gamerant is ranting about Tunic being review bombed. Tunic is basically a cute version of Elden Ring, with a cute little fox fighting brutally difficult boss battles while the game gives very little useful information to the player. Critics love it, as they love Elden Ring. Actual players are far more mixed in their scores. A good number of them saw a cute game that promised to play like one of the older Zelda games and then got really frustrated when the game turned out to far too hard, with no way to lower the difficulty. I don't call that "review bombing".

Yes, review bombing does happen for various reasons. A game can get a lot of negative user scores for reasons that have absolutely nothing to do with the quality of the game, often political. Or tribal, with users being upset that a game is either exclusive to a certain platform, or not exclusive. Cyberpunk 2077 is being review bombed (presumably by Russians) after the Polish CD Projekt Red pulled the game from sales in Russia and Belarus over the invasion of neighboring Ukraine. There are some borderline cases, like a game getting bad user scores for issues like monetization. But in general I would define review bombing as not actually being about the game being good or bad.

Tunic and Elden Ring having lower user scores than critic scores is a very different phenomenon. Elden Ring is so successful, I recently even saw a TV ad for it on a major French TV channel during prime time. And nowhere in the ads does it inform you that if you are not very good at action games, you won't have much fun. Tunic is, if anything, even more deceptive, because it looks so cute. It looks like a game for children, but it is likely to make first the child and then daddy cry. As one of my commenters remarked, if you buy a book or a movie that is too challenging for you, at least you can read or watch it to the end if you so desire. Brutally hard video games simply stop you from getting past certain points if they are too challenging for you. If you buy Tunic or Elden Ring, play it for a few hours and then rage quit, you are completely justified to rate the game low on Metacritic or Steam. Yes, it is a problem of the game "not being for you", but in absence of a warning label that is the game's fault. The infinite health cheat mode that I used to play Elden Ring should be included in the game as a "story mode difficulty".

Comments:
I've not tried the games, with "brutally difficult boss battles" you mean the kind of stuff where you have to farm months in order to even stand a chance or the ones where you need to click'n'dance without mistakes for 15 minutes or the ones where every time you die you lose everything and have to re-equip from scratch?
The problem is that the definition of "difficulty" varies a lot, so it's always hard to determine if a game is a good buy. Youtube videos can be misleading too, because you don't know the channel's PC setup/controller etc, but I'll have a look.....
 
For Elden Ring it is mostly the click'n'dance. You can spend most of your runes before starting a boss fight, so you don't lose much on dying. What makes Elden Ring different, and by some definition "easier" than previous Dark Souls games is that farming to get stronger and have a better chance at the boss fights is now definitively a possibility. It's a choice: The grind gets longer, but the click'n'dance gets shorter, because each of your hits does more damage.
 
The critics sold their souls to politics, and now they cry as players ignore them.
 
Hmm ok after some more youtube viewing, it looks like just one more rehash of the same genre: hack'n'slash, dodge attacks, drink potions. As much as I love click'n'dance I'll stick to WoW raiding where at least my character has an interesting gameplay and the dance differs significantly from one boss to the next.
The graphics is awesome, one day when high-end cards will become affordable I may get some of this new games to play in 4k. For now, I think it would kill my GTX1060 on the spot.....
 
The best Android games
Click Here


 
You could always grind souls in previous Fromsoftware games (excluding Sekiro). What's new in Elden Ring is that its open world design encourages that behavior. Before it was something the players had to go out of their way to do.
 
Post a Comment

<< Home
Newer›  ‹Older

  Powered by Blogger   Free Page Rank Tool