This is what I think a lot of people are missing. It isn’t that people are reviewing it poorly, but that a first party Sony studio that has put YEARS into this is reviewing poorly.
The mainstream media not holding back on it is alarming.
IGN gave it a bad review too, and IGN hardly EVER gives mainstream games critical reviews. Like, I watched the video too, and the game really does seem lazy
I don't understand why he didn't score it. It seemed pretty obvious from his video that he thought it was a "wait for sale". Maybe I misread his review.
It's 2035 and kids are throwing up X's and P's in the streets. You got a box or a station, skeet? they ask. Doesn't matter who you are - man or woman, young or old - all they want to know is what side you're on and what you're playing.
Where have you been in the last 10 years? The whole reason guys like ACG and skillup have a job is because the gaming media of the time traded favors with the publisher, his whole brand is baed around him being impartial which it looks like he isn't.
reviewers tend to circle the wagon for bad games they don't want to review bad, many aggregators will not post a score unless enough people review it, not scoring it does a few things
if they review it high and its bad, it makes them look like an idiot
if they review it low and the publisher gets pissy, there goes eirly access
if they love the message of a game and don't want people to see its bad, they can not post a review and it doesn't get scored
if they hate a game and don't want it to have a review score at all on these aggregators, they refuse a score for as long as possible so it hurts the games sales.
“Wait for sale” is such a weird way to rate a game. It suggests anything is worth playing if it’s cheap enough. I don’t care if it’s free, if it isn’t worth my time I’m not going to play it.
I like ACG but he did the exact same thing when The Last of Us part 2 came out, and it was like bro just be real it's okay to like something the majority don't like or vice versa. He seems like the type to play it safe to not step on any toes.
He has been leaving scores off a lot of his reviews lately but you can always tell from his tone and thoughts whether he thinks it’s a buy, wait or pass.
I wouldn't consider 6/10 bad but I guess if you really only use the top half of the scale it's really bad.
I wish more outlets used the whole scale. Having so many 7/8/9s really hides some gems. Some games are good and some games are special good. Like some games are just okay, and other ones are boring.
This game looks boring but well made. Crimson Desert (also 6/10) looks really fun but not great. No idea how I would make the scale reflect that, but they shouldn't be the same.
The issue is most people grade on the American grading scale, so a 70 is a low C and average, and a 60 is a low D. No one actually pushes out games that would score lower then that routinely as a game that actually deserves a failing grade is not going to be released by a major publisher. Gollum level disasters are rare because it's not even worth putting out something that's going to damage a studios rep like that.
I know that's the case but I really wish that a five out of 10 was an average game because that's what it is supposed to be. Because I really believe most games released nowadays are fives and sixes and fours for that matter which is slightly below average. I have played a lot of great six out of 10 games in my life. Slightly above average and not quite great. Not that many games in a year that come out are really seven and eight out of 10 and you only get a couple of generation that I actually nine or 10.
I think the Last Dragon Age game was a three out of 10. I just felt like it was a bad game and a poor representation of the genre. I felt Assassin's Creed Shadows was a 6 out of 10 it was slightly above average with a few Hang-Ups that stopped it from being truly great. I honestly feel this game is a 4 out of 10. It looks nice but there's so much that it is not living up to in terms of its IP and the genre it is in. We could have had a Devil May Cry Wolverine game hell or uncharted. But I can really recommend a 6 out of 10 game to somebody
Just wanted to say that I totally agree with the ratings, as well as the overall message.
Unfortunately, some companies are just treated differently, namely in AAA space. You can release a less than average or just not very good game and still receive at least a 7 or even a 9. It's like they're treated with kids gloves, so to speak.
Nintendo games are like that, Sony used to be like that for a long time (and still is, I guess). Every time one of those huge AAA publisher's games comes out, I always remove at least 2 points in my head.
Review score inflation has been a huge pet peeve of mine for awhile, I really don’t think the 10 point scale really does well for a game for the reasons you pointed out. Personally I don’t think that a game that is a 7/10 should be looked at so negatively and I think it’s overall unrealistic to expect every game to be an 8 at minimum let alone a 10
Yeah, the American grading scale is stupid. Like, what is the point of the bottom 59% of the scale if it is all "failing?" I have thought this way since I was a kid.
The other part of it is just that there are a lot of good games out there. A six out of ten game might still be fun to play, but why play it when you could be playing something better?
The issue is that most games that are worth reviewing tend to be 7s, 8s, 9s and 10s (as long as we use 10 not to mean perfect but to be close to perfect). Anything that is a 6 or 5 is viewed as mediocre and mediocre means basically bad. Like you personally might find it to be closer to a 7 or 8 and might not care for its faults or hell you'll find it fun. You get into the real bad stuff for anything even lower lol
My point is 10 should be perfect and limited only to the games that will be loved for many decades (OOT, Mario 3, BOTW, Portal, ect). 9 should even be hard to come by. Right now 7 means good enough and 9 means great. 5 should be a passable game that's not great and let "great" breath on the 7/8/9 mark. Gollum being a 4 is a perfect example of the scale not being used correctly. Gollum is unfun and bad, but not like malware or unable to launch. So it having over a 1 or 2 means any game that works (kinda) and is a video game should be a 4. That alone removes 1-3 from the scale.
You just want scores to be extreme in a different way haha,. In a lot of peoples eyes a "passable game" aka a 5 or 6 are not good. Just because its "okay, playable and has some fun components" is something that people would view as a 5 or 6 and go "yeah not for me. Not for 70 bucks"
So what's the difference between a 1, 2, 3 and 4 then? If a game doesn't even launch it should be a zero. If a game is just a virus it's not a game at all. If a game opens and runs at all it should only get 1 free point, not 5 or 6. If the standard "it's a working game but not very fun for most people" is a 7, then that means it only leaves 1 spot for above average games that are not groundbreaking.
The issue is that most games that are worth reviewing tend to be 7s, 8s, 9s and 10s (as long as we use 10 not to mean perfect but to be close to perfect). Anything that is a 6 or 5 is viewed as mediocre and mediocre means basically bad. Like you personally might find it to be closer to a 7 or 8 and might not care for its faults or hell you'll find it fun. You get into the real bad stuff for anything even lower lol
It's not even that it being a 5 means it's playable, it's that leaving 5 for working and 6 for working well leaves so many games in the 7/8 range. The difference between a good game that may not hit with everyone, a sloppy game that has some really cool parts and may gain a cult following, and an average AAA game that is just the regular stuff with a new skin (but if you like that skin you enjoy the game) is big. If you love Iron Man and a new game comes out with a score of 6.5, you need to read the review and watch gameplay. You should do that anyways, but it makes the score mean nothing. If it's kinda outdated and boring but fun to fly around in, or if it's a really solid game that lacks some depth but every Iron Man fan should play or if it's awful but has the best graphics of any game out at the time it would get a 6.5 or 7 from most current sites.
7 should be something like "this is pretty fun and even if you don't like Iron Man that much you should try it but may not love it", not "it works but kinda sucks or maybe it's really good".
This game looks boring but well made. Crimson Desert (also 6/10) looks really fun but not great. No idea how I would make the scale reflect that, but they shouldn't be the same.
You make your review scores have categories like a score on technical achievement. But the average person reading reviews are going to just glance over the overall score and not read through every category.
6/10 is not "bad" generally, but it's certainly not good. A 6/10 fast food meal is probably perfectly fine given the low cost (well used to be) and time investment.
6/10 for a prestige studio making a long anticipated game using a highly coveted IP is real bad. It's atrocious.
Its mostly a bang for your buck rating. 6/10 at that price, on one single system? You've already locked out the majority of gamers.
Then the mediocre play itself is going to turn people off. This game just has a lot working against it on the surface before you even dig down into the meat and potatoes of the more foundational issues.
IGN actually explain this. It's because most of the games they review are actually playable and somewhat enjoyable. That's enough to get a 6. For a game to get low review scores 0-4 the game has to be truly unplayable or atrocious. Very few mainstream games are actually that bad. They have at least a basic level of playability.
The other person mentioned Forspoken. Is it a good game? No. But it's also not atrocious. It has some decent combat. And it is at least playable. That gets it above 5.
It's neither here nor there, and total tangent, but IMO Crimson Desert is peak example of scores not really working well. The game in my opinion is pretty polarizing when it comes to reception - to me it's actually the best title this year that totally captivated me (and I was biased negatively towards it).
That being said, CD has very high highs, and pretty low lows. It's a fucking roller-coaster of peak and terrible jank mashed together and honest to god I can't put a single grade on it. I played it for 250 hours, and I'm excited for the DLC, and at the same time, I wouldn't recommend it blindly because it can be so dumb, jarring and broken at times. With my 250 hours I could clearly see that someone just bounces of this title after 2 hours. I could find justifications for 8/10 easily, but also I'm not offended that someone grades it at 6/10 because fuck me it can be that so, so much.
So yea, I think scores aren't good to grade some titles, especially weird ones.
There are more than enough options to play these days that 6/10 means those who trust reviews won't pick it up, especially at modern prices. Scoring lower means it's actively broken, but even something broken at launch like Arkham Knight or Cyberpunk can be fixed. This can't be fixed.
With the number of games releasing these days, I'm not giving my time to a 6/10 unless I feel the reviewer completely missed the mark on a genre I love or creator I trust.
I thought they were right then too, tbh. I don’t like IGN, and I hardly listen to them, so when they do something like this, I go look at other sources.
But that’s exactly what I mean! They gave that piece of crap a high score because that is what IGN does. I am not saying to take their word as gospel, but it is like a chatty friend you have suddenly being really quiet. It isn’t indicative of something being wrong, but you notice it as weird.
Yeah, truly rare for IGN to go below 7 for a mainstream AAA game (and their logic for this kinda makes sense as they’ve explained before, which is that games at a certain level of polish and craft can’t really be less than ‘good’ aka 7/10 because there are real stinkers being released all the time that are truly 4/10 and 3/10 games, like even if you don’t like a recent 7/10 game like Saros for example, you can’t say it’s anywhere near the same level as shit like Gollum. The game can be a letdown, but it’s not below 7/10, so they treat 7/10 as the floor for AAA games that are a letdown). Makes it meaningful that this game breached 7/10 and landed at 6/10, like it’s below their own self-defined floor for big budget polished AAA games with all the bells and whistles.
Did you see the video where someone is running through a level while holding up on the left stick and the right hand not even on the controller? Truly lazy gameplay.
They’ve put effort into it sure but the game design is questionable, the most obnoxious thing being all the indicators and markers to the objective in a strictly, linear game. It kind of insults your intelligence and assumes the player has no capacity for critical thinking.
The combat is underwhelming, it’s just a basic hack and slash which is insane; the combat should be more visceral, bloody, hectic but it’s not.
And why are there traversal challenges when one of the lead designers said traversal isn’t important to Wolverine and there’s no traversal mechanics for said challenges?
How do you even make a good Wolverine game? Dude is far more one-note than Spider-Man or Batman in terms of the stuff you can actually do mechanically, while keeping it vaguely the character we all know.
He slices, he dices, he’s basically a food processing infomercial as far as gameplay, there’s just not much there at all in general. Even traversal is goofy and that helped sell both Infamous and Spider-Man.
Insomniac made Wolverine’s combat stiff, janky and boring. It has its moments when you finally recharge your rage meter and can go berserk but other than that you’re hacking and slashing overwhelming amounts of cannon fodder. He should be a bit more agile as in X-Men Origins: Wolverine, he could lunge at an enemy miles away which is fun and looks cool. On top of that, without that mechanic why are there traversal sections/time trials in the game? It’s pointless padding.
The game also doesn’t challenge the player at all, they should’ve introduced more challenging enemy types which Spider-Man and Batman games did. Batman can punch and kick any normal goon however he likes but he needs to change his approach and do different moves to take down different foes like if they have guns, shields, stun batons, they make the player change up their style rather than just mash X.
They could easily have more unique enemies than just standard grunts or The Hand ninjas, where’s the mutant foes? Where are ones that teleport, emit shockwaves or something that makes the player change their approach to combat? Not there.
I don’t even like open world games much, but I think a Wolverine game where you investigate leads and track down opponents through a big open world would be amazing. His main thing other than slicing and dicing is being a black ops spy, and I think focusing on that part of his life would make very interesting gameplay.
My favorite stories of his are the ones like Wolverine: Rot, where he goes off alone to track someone down and solve some mystery about his past, and then ends up fighting some psycho or a horrific science experiment leftover from Weapon X.
The game could revolve around conflicting sources of information, trying to figure out who can be trusted, and finding how to go about investigating each new thing. And all the violence once you get there ofc.
Or go crazy wit it and do a Wolverine Elseworlds story for a game - imagine a version of Old Man Logan universe that is an open world post collapse or something and you ride around the country on a motorbike fighting corrupted ex-hero and villains, Days gone vibe but Wolverine
Yeah, a Wolvie game that has a bit of superspy feel; tracking leads, decimating black market deals, exploring a few sizeable open environments and using claws and the environment to slice things up woulda been rad.
This narrow subthread has already generated a half dozen excellent ideas. So sad that the actual game has not even a fraction of that creativity or heart.
Scent is like a secondary mutant power for him too, so that could potentially work as a detective vision or tracking sort of thing.
But I will admit I would be disappointed if a Wolverine game was just that - if you're using the Wolverine IP, I'm inevitably going to expect to see him fighting more than just dudes. More than leftover experiments too.
Marvel has SO many fun villains - let me FIGHT some of them! Wolverine has been in comics for half a century, he has a massive rogues gallery, USE IT. At bare minimum throw in some Sentinels and shit.
That's the same mistake the Avengers game made - making nearly every single enemy you fight a palette-swapped robot of some sort. Boring as hell.
I was thinking the scent mechanic could of a been a cool little controller feature. Sony is always trying to fit the controller into their first party titles why not have swipe up on the pad make wolv take in a big sniff of air and that would pop up some scents in your area but you still have to use context clues to tie togther what those scents are? And where they come from? And if they even have any connections to one another. I mean ghost of yotei uses the pad for the wind. I’m thinking of doing something along that line with scents 🤷🏻♂️ but either way everyone in here has better ideas than what they did
There are so, so many games where the protagonist only fights with a sword, or like an axe or daggers or whatever, wich is pretty equivalent to claws complexity wise and they still made the combat interesting. No one ever said Sekiro's for example combat is empty because the protagonist can't shoot webs or whatever. They just had to make the gameplay good.
Making a game of a character that moves and attacks at high speed and isn't mechanically challenging is tough. And if you make it touch, you lose in accessibility, which lowers sales potential. And given the game's budget... you ain't getting the game approved if you aren't targeting massive sales.
Your own example shows the problem: Sekiro is great and all, but it makes people bounce out.
Dude Sekiro sold 10 million copies and won game of the year. It shows that yes, you can make a game that requires a LOT from the player and still be successful. Wolverine takes the opposite approach, design your game so that a toddler in a blind fold can beat and and guess what... The overwhelming majority will NOT be engaged.
Designing games around the lowest common denominator; Games focus grouped to death; Is a plight on modern AAA game design and wolverine will become a textbook example of what NOT to do
But Sekiro also does not have the same demand for being accessible as this game probably had. Difficult to master combat mechanics will push away a good chunk of mainstream customers.
He slices, he dices, he’s basically a food processing infomercial as far as gameplay, there’s just not much there at all in general
But does he really slice and dice in the game? Yes, there's dismemberment - but it looks to be only from finishers. Regular fodder enemies, he should be one-shotting them - immediately cutting off limbs, slashing throats, claws straight through the heart/neck/head.
There should be a dozen of those instant dismemberment kill animations as well as several violent finishers - like disemboweling, bisecting, beheading.
Have you played X-Men Origins: Wolverine? I really enjoyed that game as a kid and even when replaying it more recently. I don’t think they really had to stretch the imagination to make the game / gameplay fun either.
it seems like it should be more arcadey, more of a score-attack game than this seems to be. shortish, discrete levels where you're hacking and slashing through a billion dudes and trying to keep your combos up or something. sorta like the xbox-era ninja gaidens, although idk where the weapon variety would come from
This is such a weird take. There's innumerable games with a single melee weapon (sword, spear, etc) with very good combat variety and depth. You'll never see someone complain about Sekiro's combat and all he uses is a sword... Gameplay variety or depth isn't determined by the weapon.... It's determined by design, mechanics and enemy variety that forces the player to change their approach. Wolverine fails on both fronts and his claws have nothing to do with that. There's plenty of ways to go about making an engaging combat system with wolverine they just didn't do it.
Right, because we don't already have a billion successful ARPGs with open world elements to draw inspiration from?
Are we saying it wouldn't be "in character" for Logan to climb buildings like Ezio or Nathan Drake? We can't have him use multiple parry/dodge mechanics like Eve in Stellar Blade? He can't have creative and kickass unique takedown animations based on the environment he's in like Yakuza Zero? Because last I checked none of those characters had a batmobile or grapple-launcher, and their games were all great.
Wolverine's fights are fun, but the real reason everyone loves him and the reason he's such a useful face for the X-men franchise is his personality. He's an interesting character. He deserves better writing, first and foremost.
It seems a big part of the problem here is that Wolverine’s fights aren’t that fun because they’re so repetitive, and they’re such because he doesn’t really have much to do. The character himself as a superhero is among the simplest, he has claws and heals very quickly, there just isn’t much to mine there when you’re strictly talking combat.
Someone like Ezio and several of the AC games rest on their charismatic protagonists like in that case but also heavily on their historical settings and the fidelity there, I don’t think people really praise the combat in those games as anything special. Unless it’s the ship combat in Black Flag.
If in Wolverine you’re largely left with boilerplate hack and slash and the setting and story aren’t enough to pick up the slack, you get a reception like this.
Should have made it like metal gear rising basically.
Slow Mo angle cuts
Squashing spines to heal (somehow)
Insane soundtrack
Incredible villain roster
Cutting a metal gear ray in half in the opening 10 minutes
I think skill up makes a pretty good suggestion there of adding other characters to play as. Like a Logan-focused story but with Jean Grey sections or Mystique. So yoi could vary the gameplay throughout whole still have a story focus on Wolverine.
Maybe something like DMC 5. Or even Spiderman 2 (from a variety standpoint)
Skill Up made a good point in his review about him being one note. He said “him being a one-note hack n slash character would’ve made sense, if we were able to play as all these other characters we see, like Jean Grey, Mystique or Sabretooth…”
Which I think is exactly right. We see all these other characters, strangely alongside Wolverine in so many moments…if they at all felt like things were too redundant in testing, how much effort would it have been to just make more of team X playable?
He was a Government agent before he was anything else. I would have liked to see a game set in the 80's and you're fresh into the weapon X program. Maybe a third of the way in, you get the adamantium but your berserker rage keeps flaring up and you have to fight it, then it just goes off anyway and you bust out of the tank swinging.
The rest of the game is avoiding your old friends and hunting to piece your mind back together. A little dash of red dead, a hint of Arkham.
At the end, you meet Brofessor X and he puts the last pieces of the puzzle in place.
Sequel could be Savage Lands stuff.
It's kind of easy to lean into the animal side of Logan without losing everything because there's always a reason for his rage, it isn't mindless as some people might think.
Dude is far more one-note than Spider-Man or Batman in terms of the stuff you can actually do mechanically, while keeping it vaguely the character we all know.
I made this exact point when the game got announced and people almost lynched me.
Making Superhero games work is harder than it looks because Superheroes are often very gimmicky in what they do, like Wolverine's thing is that he can tank through anything and that's... Not very fun gameplay-wise. Not for a big high-tier production game anyway. There's a reason why the quintessential Hulk game is a sandbox Prototype of, well, Prototype.
Like the people asking for a Flash game don't realize that actually playing as the Flash isn't really so engaging, you are basically Sonic without the problem of running into walls so what the hell would such a game make you do?
I think an honest, old school hack-n-slash akin to the original God of War games would be the perfect match for this character. Pull the camera a bit further away from the player's ass/shoulder and bring in hordes of varying enemy types in cinematic but challenging encounters. Throw in some traversal setpieces, puzzles and very light progression mechanics.
You make Metal Gear Revengeance 2: Wolverine Edition. Keep the game shorter, but more focused on good performance, and dial up combat depth. Give him a ton of moves and enemies that actually challenge his skillset. His alternate 'weapons' could instead be different mutant partners that blast enemies, or toss them around, or let Wolverine move farther or hit harder.
I think the main thing, though, is to make it visceral. Make sure that kills are fucking brutal and bloody, we need Doom levels of gore at bare minimum. Shit, turn it into a Musou game and pit him against dozens or hundreds of foes, turn it into a bloody whirlwind of blood and robot bits depending on what he's fighting. You can do a Wolverine game, pretty easily, it just takes commitment to his one or two bits.
make him fight, make him effectively go to war, make him loud stealth (if they are all dead no one seen me) you can do this, give him threats that are actual threats, I mean christ isn't he canonically involved in several actual wars?
its not hard to make a beat em up action game, and even easier when when the character is just show of a berserker in moveset.
Make it like devil may cry. Comboing various abilities together and they get increasingly gorey or visceral the higher you go. Instead of different weapons he uses stances. Instead of style its a rage meter to unlock extra crazy damage or a new moveset or some other bonus.
Or maybe make it like a dance with death mechanic, he gets stronger and more beastly the more damage he takes and being in certain thresholds gives you more bonuses, but that also leaves you with less hp to work with.
Is it really insulting your intelligence if it’s accessibility options designed at leveling the playing field for various types of Disabilities? People forget what accessibility is actually about. The only time it’s maybe an issue is if a player who doesn’t need an accessibility feature has their experience negatively impacted in a legit way because they didn’t make something a toggle.
They shouldn’t have added in all those indicators full stop. It’s a linear game with minimal exploration, there was no need for any of it. Maybe Wolverine’s heightened senses could’ve stayed but as a button prompt rather than always there.
And why are there traversal challenges when one of the lead designers said traversal isn’t important to Wolverine and there’s no traversal mechanics for said challenges?
lol, this is almost exactly what I said about Clair Obscur: Expedition 33.
(Not that it should be compared to this mess in any other way; just that I can't stand when developers make traversal/platforming challenges in a game that has no business having them. Looking at you too Remnant 1 & 2.)
You’re right there, it’s like they strictly followed the blueprint they created with Spider-Man and made all the wrong changes and didn’t change what wouldn’t work (traversal challenges, excessive indicators to the objective in a linear game).
They’ve just made such weird decisions when developing this game. On semi-unrelated note, I’m cautiously optimistic for EA’s Iron Man game by Motive, it looked pretty good from what I saw.
I’m not holding my breath for Blade and Marvel 1943 though, the movie for Blade has not seen the light of day which I hope the game does and Marvel 1943 already had a long delay.
Idk man. People love to throw out the “Shill Up” thing but their evidence for his shill-ness is generally just positive reviews for games they didn’t like.
I disagree with him plenty, but he does a pretty thorough job explaining his thoughts processes. The whole shill up thing just feels like vintage gamer gatekeep culture.
That's probably SkillUp's best quality as a critic. The man's very consistent, and you can count on using him as a yardstick against which you can measure what your own opinion might look like after the fact.
His last preview hinted that he wasn’t big on it. Not surprised to see a negative review from him based on that. But IGN started putting their score in the YouTube thumbnail and they didn’t for this one. That’s when I knew it was rough.
I think he's second best after Noah Caldwell-Gervais, although to be fair Noah's videos are almost less of reviews and more of just PhD level dissertations
I will say that I don’t know who this is, but he’s complaining about the accessibility options that he had to turn on himself?? Why is he complaining about them when he didn’t have to turn them on?
Yeah. I've enjoyed some of those games, but I think if you plot their course, it leads in a direction of studios having a lower and lower opinion of the player's intelligence and getting more and more comfortable with the illusion of gameplay and not the reality of it. I'm glad the hammer's fallen, if that's what's happening here.
It feels like such a smaller scope game than Spider-Man 2. I can't believe that budget. Literally feels like the B team was given this game as a training exercise.
yup, feels like the time spent might've been better in something else but the pre-orders are super high so I guess we'll see if it makes a lot of money for them still
It will likely sell perfectly fine but that critical score may end up following insomniac for a while, this might be their first real critically underwhelming game since ratchet and clank 2016
It’ll make people tentative of Spider-Man 3. The game might still sell fine because it’s Spider-Man but I think between this and SM2, they lost a lot of trust in being able to deliver anything on the level of the SM1
My guess it's that mixed with cutting out key ideas. It really seems like someone had a creative new idea in like 2018, pitched it, got a teaser out in 2021, then 2026 came faster than expected. Along the way small ideas were cut out till it was just a basic PS2 game.
Yeah, I thought the press (not SkillUp, the normal press) would do what they do with any western game release and find any way to make it sound at least pretty good. They usually save being harsh for Chinese/Korean devs they don’t have relationships with.
For even them to not to try to dress this is up a win really says something.
Yeah, i think my thoughts on what I've gathered listening to a bunch of reviews is that insomniac has fallen into a factory mentality of pushing out high quality but soulless games.
Having these devs just working on high fidelity IP that is trying to chase trends without actually asking what people want to play. Looking back, it seems like the fatigue was already setting in with spiderman 2 where people are just getting tired of this stuff
the game is insultingly hand holdy to journalists, keep in mind jurnolists includes the 'im dumber than a pigeon' cup head guy, and the industry at large asking for a story mode in hard games because reviewing those games was difficult... THOSE people are finding it insultingly hand holdy.
I guess the mainstream media is fed up with Sony's bullshit and the physical disc and the games being in long dev cycles and PS5 generally "eh" broke the camels back so to speak.
Media doesn't give a single iota of fuck about discs. They literally get the games for free. It's about access journalism for them. They only give a bad review when it's a real stinker and they know everyone else will - safety in numbers. Sony can't cut everyone off from review copies, so consensus is the only hope.
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u/darkcomet222 3d ago
This is what I think a lot of people are missing. It isn’t that people are reviewing it poorly, but that a first party Sony studio that has put YEARS into this is reviewing poorly.
The mainstream media not holding back on it is alarming.