Can We Trust "Big Name" Games' Journalism Outlets?

As everyone in the gaming community has heard by now, gaming journalism giant IGN recently fired an employee for plagiarism. This firing has lead to the discovery of a pervasive pattern of plagiarism from this employee and the subsequent removal of many of his reviews. While this is certainly unacceptable behavior from a reputable journalism outlet, it's not the only reason to be critical of their reviews. IGN and similar journalism outlets, have a history of padding reviews with fluff and giving games a much higher score than they sometimes deserve.

Reviews for the recently released We Happy Few by Compulsion Games highlights this point nicely. It seems like IGN has been helping themselves to a few joy pills based on the review video they posted to YouTube on August 13, 2018. While the author of the review, Brendan Graeber, does eventually give the game a 7.3 (what does the .3 even mean? Is it slightly better than an average 7?), his discussion of the game mechanics and his exploration of all the game has to offer is seriously lacking. Graeber admits at one point that he played very few side quests, sticking only to the main story line, while this is likely due to the deadlines and time pressure of IGN and not any sort of personal choice by Graeber, it certainly may have impacted his view of the game and also leaves him without valuable knowledge regarding a large chunk of game play.

During this video review Graeber also states "Survival in We Happy Few involves managing mild penalties to health and stamina. You won’t die from starvation, but there are definite downsides to neglecting your body’s needs..." This is incorrect information. You can in fact drop dead on your own or be taken down in one hit by an enemy if your health or thirst go too low. What Graeber neglects to say in the video (although it is briefly mentioned in his longer review on the IGN website) is that survival has it's own difficulty settings that can be set lower if you don't want to babysit all your meters the whole game. I would bet that Graeber was referring to a lower survival difficulty when he says you "won't die from starvation" but he should have stated this in the video as it is pertinent information for people thinking of buying this game.

Overall, Graeber has a very positive experience with the game and conveys through the video that the game has some repetition and flaws, including upgrades such as running that make the stealth elements of the game obsolete.

Now, let's contrast this with some independent channels on YouTube. We'll beginning with Jim Sterling, a sometimes controversial game reviewer who posted his thoughts about the game to his Jimpressions series. Jim's video titled, "We Happy Few—A Joyless Broken Disaster" focuses namely on all the bugs and glitches that he encountered while playing the game. Jim even goes so far as to recommend the game be recalled because the bugs and glitches are simply overwhelming and unacceptable in a AAA title charging full price.

These, often times, game-breaking bugs were not noted in the IGN video review. This may be because many of the bugs and glitches are tied to the side quests, which Graeber admits he did not play, and other extra NPC interactions. Clearly, Jim spent more time playing the game and was able to delve deeper into the game than Graeber was able too.

To mitigate these two extremes, let's look at another independent reviewer on YouTube ACG who posted a review to his "Buy, wait for sale, never touch?" series. In this series ACG breaks the video down slowly going into all categories such as graphics, game play, characters, and story. By taking the time to hit each of these categories ACG covers exactly what a potential buyer would want to know about a game. The result may be a 17 minute video, far longer than IGN's four minute video, but the viewer gains far more valuable information about important topics such as pervasive background pop-in and stellar voice acting.

In this comprehensive overview, ACG points out many unfinished aspects to the game. While the story, characters, and voice acting are all noted as highlights, the flaws get plenty of time to be explained. Many of these flaws include game-breaking bugs that Jim also encountered such as NPCs being unable to recognize that you collected all the quest items. In the end ACG gave the game a verdict of wait for a sale, he even goes so far as to say "wait for a deep, deep sale." A much better marker of the games pros and cons than an arbitrary number (I mean .3? really?).

After delving into both IGN and independent reviews for the same video game, it's now clear to me why that ex-IGN employee would chose to plagiarize from a small independent game reviewer (insert whatever emoji shows that this is a joke here). All joking aside, the independent reviewers are doing something right. Perhaps its the amount of time they have to play the actual game or the fact that they are allowed to express real, honest opinions without a large corporation breathing down their neck, or maybe they are just gamers at their core like us viewers and know what we want when dissecting a game. Whatever the reasoning, I know that I can be confident in a great score from independent reviewers because they aren't afraid to come out and say when a game has issues. Unlike IGN who will give a broken game a 7.3 (which is "good" on their rating scale).