Negative Review: 223 Hours Played

Absolutely.

I played Fallout 4 for 158 hours and gave it negative review.

I played it for this long because despite all its issues, I did enjoy it for the atmosphere and Fallout vibe.

But finishing the story, it left such a totally sour aftertaste, with its shitty cutscene, I could not recommend it. Despite my enjoyment, it kind of felt like I wasted my time. There was no satisfaction in finishing it, no catharsis, nothing.

A scale rating out of 10 maybe?

Or do away with thumbs up and down, and introduce a default format for review, asking the following:

  • What did you like?
  • What did you not like?
  • You experience (in 100 words or less?):

Don’t post a review.

If you can’t either recommend someone buy a game, or not buy a game, then putting up a Steam review serves no purpose that I can see. :)

Sometimes you just want to give your thoughts on a game. There have been many games I have reviewed where I had wished I could give a “meh” rating instead of a thumbs up or down.

As far as lots of hours played before writing a negative review, I can see that too. While I do think I gave DO:2 an thumbs up, I could have easily given it a thumbs down too. Perhaps it was a Meh review game.
I had several starts where I did play a long time, but then re-rolled because I was getting stomped.
Ultimately Act 1 and 2 were great. Act 3 as very short, and Act 4 was tiny and extremely difficult in places compared to the other acts. By the time I got there, I probably had over 100 hours played.

In those cases, ‘meh’ sounds to me like a thumbs down. If you can’t recommend to me that it’s worth playing, then it’s not.

You’ll notice that Tom’s ratings system here doesn’t include one where he can’t decide whether he likes something or not. ;)

I’d consider a ‘meh’ as neither good nor bad, but maybe more so just not for that individual person.

But Steam’s rating system is not ‘good’ or ‘bad’, it’s ‘would you recommend this game’. Yes or no. Would you recommend a ‘meh’ game?

If you can’t decide whether or not you would recommend something, or even whether you like it or not, why are you even reviewing it on Steam in the first place?

If someone has 200+ hours in a game and they give me a non-ranty breakdown of what they find engaging and what they think doesn’t work, I’m probably going to value their judgment a bit more than some guy that posts a review after 30 minutes of play. If that 200 hour review ends with an overall negative, and there’s some really good reasoning of how they got there, sure, why wouldn’t that be valid?

Oh I agree a more detailed rating then thumbs up or down would be better. I was asking the question assuming we are limited to a thumbs up or thumbs down.

What DeepT says. Sometimes you want to give your thoughts on a game and you need to pick thumbs up or down to do it.

I’d recommend posting the same review twice, once with a thumb up, and once with it down…

As for the original question: I very much hope I will not sink that many hours into a game only to find out, ultimately, that I really didn’t like it all that much. But I can see how it could happen, how you could slowly but surely find out the game isn’t as good as it appeared to be. In my personal experience, after all those hours, it would probably still result in a (slightly) positive review, but that’s just me…

To some people. There are games/books/movies/whatever that I thought were ‘meh’ that I emphatically recommended or disrecommended to people because I think they would love or hate it.

As a reader researching where to spend my time and money, I would expect a recommend if it does something worth experiencing within whatever niche the game is in. If it’s saturated, then I expect recommendations for the most interesting of the bunch and not so much for the rest. If it’s not, then it’s more easily recommended if there’s a unique something that makes it worthwhile.
Either way, you’re going to have to fill me in on what’s interesting/badly done about it so that I can understand the context of your score, same as with a professional review. Scores are useful for quick filters, but, ultimately, we’re all going to vary on our tastes and opinions and we’ll all be gone long before we play all we’d like to.

And getting hung up on the binary nature of the thumbs up/down nature of Steam’s user reviews is just as much of a sucker’s game as the (highly entertaining, I must admit) bizarre comments in Tom’s reviews that only care about how many stars he gave the game. You’re not going to learn much of anything from it, the body of the review, whether it’s Tom’s or Roger Ebert’s or some joker’s who couldn’t get past the Meat Circus, is where all the information is contained.

The ratio of positive to negative reviews is what determines the user rating prominently displayed on the store page (Very Positive, Mostly Positive, Mixed, etc.) From what I understand, this rating also has implications for how the game is surfaced to potential buyers via Steam’s discoverability algorithm.

For smaller games it can only take a couple of negative reviews to knock them down into a lower score bracket. It’s not meaningless.

No, it’s not without consequence. That’s not the same thing.

Putting a thumbs down on a game isn’t faulting the developer. I guess it is sometimes, but I usually only see that with games like Gone Home that get thumbs down because of something a developer said on twitter.

I think the thumbs are entirely whether I would recommend others play a game.

I’ve put a lot of hours into a game and regretted having done so. I’ve put a lot of hours into a game and substantially appreciated the experience. My personal thumbs up or down would relate to that more than anything else.

Some games always give you this feeling that you’re on the brink of enjoying it. I thought the Crusader Kings example is a great one. I keep feeling like I’m going to understand it at some point that never comes. I’ve also had this experience with MOBAs where I’ve put in tons of hours only to find out playing the game well wasn’t actually enjoyable.

This is also not the reviewers problem. There is no right or wrong way here. The best approach is to read the review.

You’re right, this was clumsy wording on my part. Sometimes a review is explicitly used as a cudgel against the developer but that’s not what I’m talking about.

I’m just (personally) uncomfortable with the idea of giving a game a negative rating because you eventually grew tired of it, in the way that people grow tired of anything after long exposure. That feels unreasonable to me.

Of course, if something about the game itself triggered or hastened that feeling then I have no issue with calling that out.

It’s a reason to be thoughtful and honest in your appraisal of a game. That’s all I’m saying.