omg this game is an almost 10, this reviewer is lame ...
I'm pretty sure it's just a troll review, nobody would've written these things seriously.
I've certainly thought about it, Jeremy. I love, for instance, that Andrew Sullivan did that for The Daily Dish. It makes for a different reading experience.
But for the most part, I think the comments section here is still valuable. You can easily avoid the noise because it tends to cluster in very predictable places. But if that noise ever threatened to bleed out into other places, I would absolutely consider closing the comments section and just taking the conversation to the forum.
And thanks for the kind words.
Why you are indexed in a metacritic score is beyond me.
For my sensibilities, this review on PCgamesn (a site I just discovered) does a much better job of approaching HotS with some level of interest and willingness to poke around outside of their narrow "feel" of the game. Instead of being wildly disinterested (which, though I like with Tom in other reviews where I know nothing) strikes me as the wrong way to do an expansion.
HotS had a duel mission of providing a fun singly player campaign (lore not being important to how fun the individual missions are to play) and providing ENERGY to the multiplayer scene by adding some variability to play and visibility to the eSport. Honestly, having played through (and viewed on the esports side) the impact thus far I think they've hit on all cylinders. The new arcade and leaderboard features make multiplayer even more addictive, and single player was tons of fun just blowing the crap out of everything with banelings.
So, as much as I love Tom I think his review was for shit in terms of useful opinionating this time around. There was no attempt to inform the reader, or a prospective buyer who is wondering if there is anything new and fun to get from the game.
I really find these kinds of claims very odd. As I've noted before: reviews are not scientific instruments attempting to measure the objective "quality" value of a particular product. Questions of accuracy are entirely irrelevant to the discussion. A reviewer should be precise (in that they should have consistent tastes and a consistent point of view). But there's no such thing as an "accurate" review. (using the technical definitions of accurate and precise):
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A...
There's a couple points being conflated here, and we should disentagle them.
A review isn't an "objective rating" of a game, like there's a single true "quality" value that it's attempting to detect. Reviewers don't have better or worse "qualit-ometers", Every review is a different expression of that reviewer's subjective experience.
I suppose I could see complaining if you think a reviewer's text is lying about his or her experience. But if you acknowledge that somebody might not enjoy the game, then the review's only mandate is that it accurately reflects that level of non-enjoyment. Knowing what I do about Tom's process, and his preferences, and what the text of the review provides, I don't think he's trolling for page hits. But that's somewhere we can agree to disagree, I suppose.
Sorry about your brain tumor, Tom.
Just someone that hates people who undermine a game simply to get tons of views on their site. I've never been to this place until I saw this review and I honestly don't think I'll ever visit it, this was blatantly a cash-grab, meant to earn this craphole of a site more views. Sadly, it worked, it would seem, because tons of us just can't bare to see something as dishonest and hurtful to gaming as this. The good side is that the credibility of this reviewer is down the drain. Possibly forever.
That is what you assume is true, I believe it is not. I have been following Tom Chick's work for years now, he has been working in this industry for probably 15 years, perhaps longer, and he is if anything earnest and sincere in his reviews. He writes what he thinks and damn the consequences.
I think too many people are used to cookie cutter reviews where the language is either very positive or very cautious, as people don't want to damage their relationship with certain big publishers.
So maybe you shouldn't judge Tom Chick or his website if you've never read it before.
Personally, it's the general uneveness that bugs me the most. The controls are tight. The mechanics are excellent and polished. The graphic design is superb, but I've read better-written fanfictions.
Seriously, they could picked a random undergrad majoring in english, and gotten a better result.
Well, Mr. Chick, I direct you to MLG Winter Championships Ro 16 Game 1 Sen vs Parting. Amazing viper pulls into mass hydra destroys void ray/collusus army http://tv.majorleaguegaming.co...
to be fair, they kind of "fixed" hydra's. They were a vastly underpowered unit due to their slow speed in WoL, and the expansion has fixed that. I feel this is less of a HoTS strength and more of a WoL weakness. they shouldn't have been so bad in WoL in the first place. I am happy i get to use them now though.
I have no issue with your assessment of the single player experience; I think its spot on. I can even sympathise with your lack of enthusiasm for the new units, even though I wholeheartedly disagree; I think they completely alter the game, and the Viper's Abduct especially makes the game more viscerally exciting to play and watch. I do wish, however, you would've have addressed the other improvements that Blizzard added on, specifically, the multiplayer training mode, non-ranked play and the start-replay-from-anywhere feature. Surely these features greatly decrease anxiety and help in getting new players interested in the ladder? In my opinion, these features alone warrant a higher rating from you, Tom.
Mr. Striker, this is a review of Hearts of the Swarm and it's clearly labeled as such. None of those features were added in Heart of the Swarm.
Seriously?!? I stopped playing 6 months ago and have only recently come back to the fold. I had assumed they were all HotS improvements...My apologies.
Such a shamelessly obvious attempt to drive up traffic for this piss poor website. I'll admit, it did the job of getting me in the door, if only to see just what kind of unscrupulous drivel the reviewer could be spouting. Suffice it to say, never, ever clicking on any links or articles related to this website.
What actually irks me about this whole fiasco are the people who actually attempt to defend this blatant sellout who could at least have attempted to do a better job at disguising his designs - I bet more than a few of them are either him or some friend/colleague of his, but what about the rest? Woe, woe.
Admittedly, I find clear issues with this expansion, but to go as far as to knock an RTS game's score down to 2 stars on story? Really? With all of 7 paragraphs to support it, most of them spent in a lame attempt to justify the dismal job he does in the review as simple lack of interest, experience, or some strange compromise of both.
Whatever it is, I'm out for good, and gamers looking for reviews which at least try to go through the motions of informing the reader about the many facets of a game with some semblance of ethics and professionalism.. well, steer well clear of this particular mess.
Nothing to see here: first class Blizzard hater at work. Apparently someone at Irvine killed his mother.
You know when you are proven wrong ? When ALL the rest of the reviewers give it a rating of 4/5 stars or more. See Metacritic. Even the "gamers" gave it (which normally means masses of 1/10 but this time they are complete absent).
Does the world really need your shitty reviews??
The campaign story is not so and so it utterly sucks. It's really really bad. The missions are fun? It could have been so much better... streamlined missions that tell you exactly what to do difficulty is too easy even on brutal.
You simply can't connect to the characters and feel that what you're doing is real and has an impact. It's like the story is happening somewhere in outer space and there are about 6 characters in it(not counting the sorry excuses for dialog on board the leviathan), there is no connection to the masses to the inhabitants of the Koprulu sector to your impact on the lives of many...
It's one of the worst stories in video game history I can imagine. Predictable and boring. But hey we've got "polished" cutscenes and "streamlined" gameplay like those are the two aspects that are really important today... not story, not immersion and creative missions.
So having said this the new additions to the multiplayer are few and could have been patched in via an update. So then why pay for the expansion? The excuse would have been that it has a solid campaign(it's shorter that WoL by the way), which it does not.
With streamlined game mechanics fancy explosions and "cool" cutscenes and of course the gullible masses of casual "I want to click a button and win and see cool gfx" players we are moving forward into the dark ages of gaming.