It isn’t a review unless you’ve played it

An all too common phenomenon among game reviewers is this:

They don’t actually play what they’re reviewing. These are the people who get review copies on the day they are released and then post a review hours later. Want two examples? Adamant Entertainment’s ICONS and Third Eye Games‘ Wu Xing: The Ninja Crusade.

I know that Adamant and Third Eye put out great stuff. But these two games are new. It is an injustice for someone to read through a brand new game book and post their thoughts based on an hour or two read at maximum. That’s almost the very definition of “judging a book by its cover” – and when it is a game that needs to be played first before you can decide if it is good or not, it does not one iota of good for anyone.

Case in point: I got a copy of ICONS and thought that the fonts and art were poor – in my opinion. These things didn’t make me want to play the game so very much – and based on that alone, I would have given it one star. Having had the time now to run through a couple of games, I’d give it a three. Big difference.

Eloy from Third Eye Games sent me a review copy of Wu Xing to review some time ago, and he knows that the system will be run through the paces before it sees the light of day on this site – even though based on the art and layout alone I’d probably give it a 4.5-star review. After we play it a few times? It might not be that great (even though I seriously doubt that is the case).

Note, this doesn’t mean you have to play every single expansion of a game and own all of the varied core books in order to critique something. It just means you make sure your criticism is valid. Being a “featured reviewer” is far from being authoritative, and it often leads to blatantly false information.

Game reviewers can sometimes be lazy people who cannot be bothered to do proper research on subjects relevant to the product they have been offered to review. At other times, they just do not have the time to playtest a game before they write something. In other cases, some reviewers seem to feel that putting in too much detail would be distracting and annoying. In any case, the research does not get done, and the publishers and customers both get the shaft.

Often these blurb reviews will be so glaringly obvious to anyone with any sort of basic knowledge of the subject that it will make the entire work seem completely ridiculous.

I get approached by various companies sometimes on a daily basis to do reviews on their products. With RPGs, card games, or board games – I personally feel that if you do not give a game a trial by fire, you have no business writing about it. It can sometimes take weeks or months – before I get the chance to actually use the product, and it is not fair for me to write four lines or more of babble and post it without doing so. It is a disservice to the company and to the customers. I just as often say “no” to reviewing products as I do “yes” – if not more – because if I am not familiar with something, there is no point.

My point? If you want to comment on the quality of something, try to actually read and play at least a substantial part of that work.