It seems like 1up’s descriptions for the scale are kind of borked. 6 is “playable”. 5 is “competent”. 4 is “broken”. Maybe 4 should be “playable” and 6 should be something a touch more positive than “competent”.
Or people could get the idea of what the reviewer means from the review that he/she wrote and ignore the stupid number rating? But wait, that would mean that people would need to have reading comprehension. Sorry. numb3r2 FTW !!11onewon!
I totally agree with you 100%
Even better than a number at the end should be a brief summary of the article along with the reviewer’s overall thoughts and short, concise bullet points of the pro’s/cons of the game.
I guess numbers just look pretty.
Ok, how bad is this game I just bought? Did I just buy shit in a box? Is the combats worse than Oblivion?!
I would find out for myself, but it runs really bad on my 5 year old rig. It’s first in line after I upgrade.
Did your texture setting default to high? If so, for the love of god, put it on medium. I think high is supposed to be a joke by valve or arkane.
So 6 on the 7-9 scale still isn’t very encouraging. Is that 2 stars or 1.5? I get confused.
Anyway thanks for saving me money, sometimes being a reviewer is probably like being on the first boat to hit Omaha Beach.
Edit: Oh yeah and visceral was 2004 wasn’t it? Shouldn’t we all be saying “next gen graphics” by now?
Just by playing the Demo I figured the game would be shit. I think I got about 10 min in to it before I jumped over something and promptly fell through the world and had to restart.
Wow. I missed that rating system. That’s screwed up. If the wanted to get off the 7-9 scale, the should have gone for a 1-5 star setup. Doing a 1-10 scale that doesn’t, well, scale to anyone else’s is just confusing and annoying, and does a disservice to the reader.
I don’t get how you only gave the multiplayer one paragraph. If it has tactical potential, can’t you expand on it a little more?
And plus, what happened to reviewing for Yahoo Games?
(I don’t have DMoM&M yet but wanted to buy it until I read this)
I’d give it about an eight or a nine. Very arcadey, very nice looking, lite-rpg fun. The combat feels like what Oblivion was trying to do but just couldn’t get right.
I wish you luck. I remember one time I was working for somewhere, and there was a stated desire to move marking a notch harsher. I went ahead and did it, and no fuck else did noticeably. Verrrry annoying.
KG
I’m the only one who considered the review coherent?
You can agree or not on the evaluation, but he gave pretty solid reasons why he didn’t like the game, from technical problems, to the level and game design.
Imho, a game with those kinds of technical and design issues shouldn’t be saved, even if many players are disposed to close both eyes because at the end the combat is fun in a cheesy way.
Saying (quoting from the other thread):
how you deal with enemies is entirely up to you and if you take the easy cheesy way you will miss a good deal of entertainment imo.
… is utterly stupid. Because it’s just a declaration that the game design in this game is terrible. It’s like if in a RTS game you can win each match by just spamming a default unit and then other players tell you that the game is fun and challenging if you impose a limit on yourself so that the strategy isn’t overpowered.
It doesn’t matter if you have hundreds of possible moves if you can play the game from start to end using just one.
He commented about the poor level design (guards standing next to exploding barrels), he commented about the technical problems that crippled this game.
At the end it’s all about what you are willingly to tolerate to enjoy some fun at the bottom of the barrel.
Seriously, a 4 is actually quite generous.
Personally,I think I’ve spent more time staring at the load screen than actually playing the game.( and I’m running the reccomended system specs, P4 3.2Ghz, 1 GB ram, 7800GTX, Audigy 2)
I mean shit, 10GB install, and I still have to wait for stuff to load?
Huh WTF?
The last game that had this much load time I believe was Postal 2, and it got a bad score for this I think, as well as some other things.(but at least that game never crashed when I was playing it)
Even more fun, when staring at the loading screen for 5 minutes and the cursor arrow appears in the middle of everything, you realize, it has crashed!!
Guess what?
Yepper, you get to LOAD the game again and stare at the loading screen some more!!
Ooooh, looky a “scripted” and time chase sequence with a jumping puzzle to boot. (weren’t jumping puzzles “old” when Half Life came out?, and then Tron 2.0 added the timed jumping puzzle)
Here Dark Messiah of Horrific Shit adds them all together again!!!
Hooray!!!
Wow, somebody tranq my ass before I explode from having too much fun.
Yeah buddy, the Limited Edition was certain worth my $60.
http://www.1up.com/do/userReviewDetail?cId=3154749&r=7579422&ct=REVIEW&gid=3142946
MAYBE SOMEONE HERE (AHEM TOM) HAS A VENDETTA AGAINST THE GAME!
JERK!
Eh, it’s coherent, I just disagree.
First of all, kicking isn’t that good - which seems to be the entire core of the article. I mean, sure, if they come at you one at a time and you still have stamina and make sure to aim carefully you could probably kill everyone with kicks if they line up perfectly against some sort of spike wall or something, but it’s not the end all be all of attacks. While it’s instrumental to use in battle, it’s instrumental to use in combination with another weapon, and especially in battles with multiple people (which happens a lot) you’ll be using kicking a lot less simply because you don’t have the stamina.
Secondly, while a pure stealth class is not entirely viable, stealth is incredibly useful very often - it’s more of a role that supports your other skills.
Archery, as well, is not nearly as useless as Tom claims. Again, it’s a support skill - if you’re jumping in this game to be Robin Hood, the brave archer, you’re going to be disappointed. Sometimes you’re going to need to use the bow, sometimes you’re going to need to use the sword, sometimes you’re going to need to use stealth. This is not an inherently bad thing.
Thanks for the review Tom. It saved me a purchase. Truly I could care less about the numeric value, it was the wording of how the game played that spelled it out. There’s too many genre-lite games out there already, I’m more of a traditionalist.
For me anything that’s going to add (of Might and Magic) to it’s title and not be a kick ass RPG or kick ass turn based strategy is bargain bin fodder anyway. They worked hard on it I’m sure, I’m just not their audience.
I agree you can exploit it if you work at it Hrose, but honestly you’re just limiting your own enjoyment by doing so and that’s what I’d really call “stupid”. Paying fifty dollars to basically ignore a boatload of combat options to hump a design flaw while determined to ignore other viable options doesn’t really strike me as a time well spent and that’s where my opinion differs from a lot of the reviews.
You can apparently find some of the most powerful gear in Morrowind and become damn near invincible in well under an hour I’m told if you know where and how to do so. Does that mean you have to do it or would for some reason want to do it? Does that make the entire game crappy? No it doesn’t, and that’s the same idea here even though the games in question are very different.
If someone goes out of their way to become godly in Morrowind in no time flat and this makes it boring to them, is that the game’s fault or Bethesda’s fault for providing the tools to go do so even if they didn’t intend that you should so early?
I’m sorry if a normal gaming Joe’s opinion seems dumb to a wannabe designer, but there garsh I guess I must be plain silly to play a game to play instead of over analyzing every little bit and byte.
Setting textures to Medium drastically improves load times and isn’t much of a visual hit. Load times on Medium for me aren’t any worse than most games out there. And the rest of my performance is great at 1280x1024 (P4 3.0Ghz, 7800GS).
If someone goes out of their way to become godly in Morrowind in no time flat and this makes it boring to them, is that the game’s fault or Bethesda’s fault for providing the tools to go do so even if they didn’t intend that you should so early?
I think you can chalk it up to a design flaw, with the admission that the more open ended a game is (and Morrowind was very open ended), the harder it is to plug up all possible exploits without constraining the very open endedness that is a selling point for the game. I’d think striking the right balance would be easier to do in a game like DMOM&M which is presumably smaller and more linear. But, I haven’t played it so what do I know.
I agree that such a design flaw doesn’t inherently make the game worthless, but neither should it be glossed over by reviewers. The amount of emphasis it should be given is the question I suppose.
Personally, I seem less inclined to zone in like a laser beam on the “optimal” path of a given videogame than some people are. So when there are possible exploits, I often don’t even notice them. (Except fhe chameleon suit in Oblivion, but I made that after winning the main quest so it almost seemed more like a cool reward than anything else, and I still enjoy booting up that game to revel in my own omnipotence from time to time.)
To me the enjoyment is in the playing, not in doing the easiest repeated action you possibly can to get to the end. If you are that sort of player then clearly it isn’t a game for you. It’s less about getting to the end than the journey itself since the story isn’t that spectacular.
My only real beef with some of the reviews is that they could really turn off some people to the game that would really like it and thereby be doing a real disservice to those people where this game is concerned. It’s not the best thing since sliced bread, but it’s certainly above average and still the best first person melee combat I’ve ever played by far.