I'm a diehard Doom fan, and when the Doom 2016 reviewer said "fixed power-up placements and shortcuts give experienced players who know the map an advantage," it just made me laugh. Yes bud, that's exactly how its been since the 90's.
@@biggooba6706 I wasn't talking about the multi-player quality. Yeah its probably the worst in the series. I was just talking about his "captain obvious" statement
I mean, that's how DOOM speedrun works since the 90s. Speedrunners memorize weapon, ammo and powerups placement as well as secret areas so you know what you're during your speedrun
Alien: Isolation is still to this day one of the best horror games to ever be made. It's got the creepy atmosphere, it's got the feeling of hopelessness, it's got a monster that you can't kill. The game literally forces you to be paranoid at every possible turn or you will die and it is amazing. Not sure what the journalist was smoking that day when he reviewed Alien: Isolation, but I want a lot of it.
It's the perfect Alien game and a love letter to fans. It just captures the feeling of horror and claustrophobia of the original movie so well. It'll forever piss me off IGN fucked over the game and any chance it could've had for a sequel.
@@dampking IGN isn't meant to be subjective, or so they claim. They're supposed to be an unbiased rating system on how good games are. If IGN was subjective, corporations wouldn't flaunt their ratings if they were high.
Not to mention that game has one of the most detailed ai systems for the alien out there. Its like someone makes a beautiful dessert but some ass hat is like "oh it has meringue in it" and throws it away. And they get to be a reviewer, what a sick joke
To be fair it really depends on the diffculty settings chosen for the game. Like on the harder difficulties the AI for the alien really just is complete BS and you essentially have to exploit game systems to the max plus rely on some rng to make it through the whole game
@@noahboddie3482 And they get to leave reviews?! What a sick joke! We should’ve stopped them when we had the chance! And you! You have to stop him, you….
I love seeing all the replies and thinking that there is a worth while discussion in the thread, then the bots😒, IGN has been a smokestack for about a decade
I feel like the review for Wolfenstein: The New Order sums of IGN the best. They judge games based on what they want them to be, not what they are. That game got about a 7.5 or so, and their main complaints were that it felt “stuck in the past” and that you had to pick up items manually. My god.
That Alien Isolation review hurts. I love that game so much and the AI for the alien is incredible. It's one of the most immersive and terrifying horror games I've ever played. You always feel like you're in constant danger. I feel like that IGN reviewer was just salty cause they kept getting killed by the alien. Just because you're bad at a game does not equal bad game design.
The AI and the fear it makes you feel is a standout feature still not mirrored by any other game. I do agree with their pacing con tho. But 5.9 is abysmal
I used to be real into ign around the time that game was coming out. Listening to the podcast nonstop reading the website. One thing that a lot of them were saying leading up to that was “oh alien isolation is probably gonna be a nice 5 -8 hour horror game” and they kept repeating that. The reviewer no doubt bought into that and tried to beat it as fast as he could and it turned out to be an actual long game. Isolation was an incredible game it was a shame what he tried to do with it.
I used to be real into ign around the time that game was coming out. Listening to the podcast nonstop reading the website. One thing that a lot of them were saying leading up to that was “oh alien isolation is probably gonna be a nice 5 -8 hour horror game” and they kept repeating that. The reviewer no doubt bought into that and tried to beat it as fast as he could and it turned out to be an actual long game. Isolation was an incredible game it was a shame what he tried to do with it.
14:03 is a solid point. Gameplay is awesome, but had the story included more thoughtful decisions for Ellie in her revenge plight and have her pull back on some of those stabbings, I think it would have been better. There should have been more gamed decisions in more alternate routes or actions in the Hillcrest driving portion, the theatre chase scene, or the bit with Mel.
I disagree, he says things were out of order but could u imagine playing as a character half the game but you don’t know why and suddenly she kills Joel, that had to be the worst take off all time by charlie
@@architdewan6717 I wouldn't call the opening hike that "snowballs" into a run where we play as Abby as thoughtful game design, but it was entertaining with the setpieces and cinematic. If only they had taken the MGS2 route and replaced Joel with Abby without flinching and made an anthology, I would have watched the skippable cutscenes more.
@@architdewan6717it would worked if they showed, before she kills Joel, the fact that she's the surgeon's daughter, we would know why she would do that, they could even make the game all about Abby and her quest for vengeance, ending in her leaving Joel alone after finding Lev and realizing that she didn't really needed to kill Joel, as that would only continue with the cycle of violence and death
"The way he leaps off of rooftops and flips backwards to face the camera before falling into a head first dive is just full of the exaggerated swagger of a Black teen." Will forever be the weirdest line I've heard from a video game review. Edit: To clarify, this is NOT from IGN. It's from Gamespot's review of Miles Morales.
Not to mention conflict of interest with games publishers and monetization and organizational access to games effectively discounts a lot of their reviews
No one really does fair scoring though. A mediocre game by all accounts should be a 5/10. Instead just about everybody on the internet ranks a mediocre game as a 7, which is to say anything below 7 is bad. So why does the scoring 1,2,3,4/10 even exist when no one even uses it?
>“As dude” >assumes it could be anything beyond plain filtered water, presumably implying it could possibly be ethanol (of any percentage below 96%) This your first exposure to critikal?
The "Too much water" complaint reminds me of a review of a hotel I stayed at a few years ago. Their only complaint was that the swimming pool was too big. Seriously? It might have actually been that guy from IGN and he has a deep seeded hatred for large bodies of water
The actual review I recall explained it better and was a more fair criticism on having too many water sections, and too many water pokemon throwing off the balance.
Have you ever actually played a Pokemon game before? Water sections in Pokemon games take forever, are incredibly boring and the random encounters are all the same. It's a perfectly valid complaint.
That Alien Isolation review still enrages me, even all these years later. It remains one of my all-time favorite games, and the third-best piece of media in the franchise after the first two films.
I’ll never forget the absolute tragic review they gave to Pokémon mystery dungeon explorers of sky and the reviewer only got to Apple woods which was LITERALLY the 3rd mission out of an amazing story with dozens of hours of fulfilling post game story and content.
This video (this actual video, not the one being reacted to) is a far better example as to how the gaming community should approach their opinions. It’s fine to have strong opinions, but it’s incredibly important to understand nuance and variance in differing takes and styles.
Which goes down the drain immediately after he says playing death stranding is miserable... He doesn't say that it's miserable for him, he outright says the gameplay is miserable and that there's nothing there that's fun or enjoyable, which is not for A LOT of people by a long shot, including myself.
@@3rdWorldGamer He does say "I thought the game was miserable to play", which is very different from saying "this game is objectively miserable", though I see where you're coming from
You know you don’t have to say in my opinion before every opinion, saying “blank game is annoying” is an opinion, and you should assume it is stated as one, and assuming that everything that doesn’t start with “in my opinion” is objective fact is exactly the issue at hand
"too kid friendly" for SpongeBob made me laugh out loud not ONLY because it's SpongeBob, but because it's one of the few medias of SpongeBob that you'll ever hear "a huge *murderous robot* shaped like a squirrel."
Being too simplistic and easy is a valid criticism. You can't excuse a game being too easy with it being "for kids" because the NES era was explicitly for kids and all those games were hard as balls.
I wrote reviews a while ago for one of the biggest sites in my country and also wrote reviews for other media, like comic books. It was never really said outright, but the consensus was "Don't be too harsh or the publisher won't send us games in the future and we'll be on their blacklist". I gave a game 4/10, wrote the whole text for a 4/10 but when my boss published my review he changed the score to a 6/10
Reminds me of the review of Kane and Lynch that led to Giant Bomb becoming a thing. Except there it was ORIGINALLY a 6/10 and the dude still got fired for being "too harsh".
that's the sad truth about being a videogame reviewer, most companies hate when they're told their game is bad. and the fact that you literally depend on them to send you their (often over-priced) game makes it a whole lot shittier
Alien Isolation is a masterpiece. Horrible how it got shit on by IGN which likely affected some sales. Would have loved to see a sequel or spinoff game of it.
@@UnclePhil1112 It's because they have multiple reviewers of varying quality. While some do a good job and are experienced enough to know when the game messes up vs. when they mess up, they also have lots of sketchy staff. Remember the dude who literally plagiarised other reviewers and got caught on his Dead Cells review? It's clear that their hiring standards are rather low, but that doesn't mean they can't hire quality people, even if accidentally.
@Professional Milker the alien once corned me against a wall, acted like it was about to kill me, then walked out of the room while staring at me. I'm aware it was a glitch but it was still scary as shit lol
IGN's Review of Alien Isolation is one of the biggest crimes in gaming history. I feel sorry for whoever thought 5.9 was a good score for such an amazing, terrifying game.
Yeah it really shows how bad that person is at their job. Even if the game does nothing for you personally you ought to be able to recognize what it achieves. THATS THE JOB!
Wish I could have a better, more informed opinion, but the game made me shit a brick about 90 minutes in and I don’t have the courage to continue. So 10/10
They probably built a culture of internal peer pressure where you had to choose between giving a honest opinion or being in the good graces of the office/advertisers
When people complain about reviewers not playing through an entire game, I wonder how much time they even get to write a review and how many they have lined up at a time. I can imagine the workload to be pretty harsh. Not that that would excuse their poor reviews, but I think the responsibility should be sought more with the organisation as a whole than individual reviewers.
@@Smonsequenses true. I could imagine not having a chance to just take in the moment of the game really sucks. It’s like speedrunning then saying the game is too fast. You’re not really playing as intended then give a bad review.
I remember I was really excited for Alien Isolation and looked forward to it for a year. The night before it released I decided to look at the reviews at was met with IGN’s notorious review. My heart sank. I ultimately decided “screw it, I’m going to play it for myself and find out” that is still one of the best choice I’ve ever made. I’ve played through it like 12 times by this point and Even got the platinum trophy. I still to this day won’t even consider IGN reviews and when I do for games I’m unsure about, I check out immediately after I see Ryan’s name
I dont know why anyone would listen to reviews. That shit has never made sense. No one is like you, so listening to someone else play a game is dumb because they might not find something fun that you would consider fun.
@SirLucifer reviews can be helpful for finding out if a game has released broken/unfinished. No reviews at all only help publishers because they can just push out bug filled trash and not worry about reviews exposing said trash. Reviews arent the problem, its people taking reviews as gospel instead of the reference it should be used when deciding if a game is to be bought
@@LuciferWrld999 The idea behind a review is that someone who is critical and self-aware of their own bias provides details about the game that allow you to make a more informed opinion for yourself without spending the money on it. It isn't supposed to purely be an opinion piece that says "game stinky i no like." Of course, it's always been corrupt, even in the very early days of gaming when every review was published in a magazine, but there are more competently written reviews. IGN has always been notoriously aloof with its reviews. There is a very old one for a PSX shooter (I can't remember which one specifically, might have been Disruptor) where the reviewer complained incessantly about the "awful controls." Those controls? You use the left stick to move and right stick to aim and triggers to shoot. Yeah, he was really complaining about the standard controls for every modern console shooter, which weren't so standard at the time. Still, that wasn't even the first game to feature them -- Goldeneye had a similar control layout.
No review is perfect, there is no review that everyone will agree with. Even here I don't agree with everything Charlie says, because we all enjoy different things. For example I really enjoyed Death Stranding, but it's ok if Charlie doesn't. This is also why I think it's dumb when people only listen to one guys' reviews and hold up his opinions as holy fact, especially when they themselves haven't even played the game in question.
I remember when GameFreak trolled IGN in the next gen of pokemon games. Sun and Moon had a sort of camera mini game where you could try to snap photos of pokemon. You could share them online and citizens of the pokemon world could comment on your photo. Every once in a while no matter what you posted you would get a comment that says "too much water -.-"
People like to joke about it because it is a really dumb sounding line but if you have played every pokemon game gen 3 is the one game that hasthe most water
Sword and Shield for me was like being addicted to cigarettes. In the moment, I knew it was bad but I couldn't stop playing and now I dont know why I gave my life to that game so much
That’s actually a great point when talking about the order a story presents itself in and why scattering flashbacks in your game or film just stops the pacing entirely to start you on something new.
I think it was very purposeful about why and when everything happened. I understand not liking the whole "forcing" you to play as Abby but I think that was almost a fourth wall level choice. They wanted to see how far they could push YOU the player, not the characters. I don't think it worked all that well, but it was a very interesting idea
I personally felt like it helped strengthen the themes of the game so even if it was frustrating at points I get why they did it and I think the trade off over all was worth it for me (although most dont seem to feel the same way so I guess I get it)
The most frustrating part of the game was when half way through the rising action of the showdown between Ellie and Abby immediately stops and the game starts all over again for 10 hours of nothingness.
okay, i genuinely laughed when charlie said “i’m gonna try and avoid spoilers” the SECOND the spoiler countdown showed up. some editing comedic genius imo
@@crediblesalamander8056 And Jason Schreier used to work for them. He did some hard-hitting big boi journalism even back then and is kind of that one source everyone believes in now. Like when the Bayonetta VA fiasco happened, he just came out with "you are lying, here are the facts, you were offered much more than what you claim."
15:45 I wouldn't say that they're afraid of fan backlash, what I think is way more likely is that they never say anything too bad about a major AAA game because they want to make sure that they keep getting review copies from major publishers. I've watched other reviewers talk about being blacklisted from receiving review copies because the company didn't trust them to give the game a favorable enough score.
@@ShaCaro It's not even about having to pay for a copy. It's about not getting an early copy and getting a review out as soon as possible. If they have to get the game on release day, then they can't get the review out until well after, and by that point a lot less people will be interested in their review.
YEs, I think this is the major reason. And it's not only review copies. You just could get blacklisted in the whole industry. You can see that happening in Hollywood too. If you want to keep working in the gaming industry, you better be not to confrontational against the big players. Not everyone can launch a successful UA-cam career if nobody wants to hire you anymore.
I definitely agree with charlie's closing statement, about reviewers being scared of fans into giving dishonest reviews, instead of being paid off. Though some companies marketing will also blacklist your media outlet if you give them low scores.
Some, yes, but not as bad as it used to be with, say, print magazines. Rise of the Robots pretty much branded a distrust of the gaming media into a generation of gamers, but now, saying anything bad about a loved game (or saying anything good about a hated game) will get you mobbed by terminally online freaks.
I think part of the problem is people view IGN reviews as one solid monolith of perspective and don't recognize that it's been hundreds of different writers with hundreds of individual perspectives
"I still don't understand what exactly happened there because Deathloop literally just plays itself" That's exactly why they reviewed it highly. You cracked the code.
First off, I'm early in the game and don't understand the whole it plays itself deal, but I think the biggest reason why it got a great review was that it was also a PS exclusive.
I think the articles about the color and gender of.htr main characters should tip people off as to why it scored so high. Game reviews at major publications are no different than movie reviews. Everything is politicized and everyone is exhausted from it.
One of the most famous one people where pissed about was God Hand getting a 3.0, meanwhile being one of the most complex and stylish beat em ups to ever release lol
I played it for the first time after seth reviewed it. Graphically it's almost down there with nintendogs, exception made for the main characters, but goddamn it's one of the most compelling character action games ever, the definition of a diamond in the rough. And IGN is one of the reasons why the IP is dead and buried. Yeah, that stinks.
The person who reviewed God Hand also had a few other contentious reviews. IGN also re-reviewed it, basically called it a great game, but didn't give the game a score. And that is the whole point of IGN. Even though they wanted to give it a proper review because the previous one was wrong, probably complaining about how difficult it is, they still didn't want their opinion to override the original reviews, which is at odds with re-reviewing it in the first place. A lot of older reviews are barely reviews, but truncated synopsis just because they wanted to have the review out with a score. This is why a lot of older reviews are useless. At least the IGN ones.
@@arkraith4148 You're right, but the dude presenting the list also went out of his way to insult IGN on every point regardless of how deserved the criticisms were. It's one thing to list controversial videos but it's another to say the controversy is valid and IGN was on the wrong side every time.
@@penttikoivuniemi2146 exactly. i saw this video a week or 2 before and was annoyed at the guy by the very first entry with bo3. bo3 isnt a 9/10 based on every other game out there, but bo3 is definitely a top contender, top 5 at least, for best COD game that came out the past decade. feel like the guy making the video just hates everything cod. also not saying bo3 is a 9/10 among cod games even when considering IW, WW2, and vanguard didnt exist when review was made, i wasnt a fan of the multiplayer and campaign wasnt that good, although it was one of the best zombie titles to come from the series. but it wasnt nearly as bad as this guy makes it out to be
Love how the ign noob playing sonic unleashed isnt even using the boost the right way. Your supposed to hold the button down, not just repeatedly press it.
the biggest problem is that the grading system does nothing. games are rated basically on a 7/10-10/10 scale anything else is rare so you basically have an out of 3 system, its just weird they use out of 10 but only give bad games arbitrarely low scores
If they were able to review every game released, they would make much more use of the lower end of the scale. But since they have limited staff and resources, it makes sense that they only review games that are anticipated by gamers, which inherently will be 6-9 scoring games generally. No one cares about a review for a 1-5 rating game that was probably already expected to get that score if anyone knew about it in the first place.
7/10 = 70% = a C (at least according to American grading scales) = Average. This is the basis for most 1-10 scale reviews. and on that same scale anything below 6 is technically a D or F of varying degrees of failure. When approached from this angle, it makes perfect sense. When approached from an emotional angle 7/10 is either too low or too high dependent on what the person complaining personally feels.
Yeahhh that does kinda make sense, on the one hand games that are anticipated are way more likely to be in the "more than mediocre" part of the rating, but at the same time, there are other scales they can use that better use the whole scale and tell an accurate rating.
Let us never forget that IGN complained about ORAS having "too much water" for a region based on a freaking island Edit: Didn't know my joke was so controversial, Dear lord
I get where they're coming from. Random encounters are a bitch on the oversea routes. I don't think it should have been docked so many points for that though.
Ruby/Sapphire do have too much surfing, and too many other water HMs as well. I don't know that it's a big enough problem to put in the bullet points though, and "too much water" is a pretty silly way to phrase the issue. So I see why it became a meme.
People complaining about that part of review are suddenly pretending that majority of community wasn't saying exact same shit for years. If you don't like water themed region that forces you to traverse on water for large portion of the game, it's perfectly valid complaint.
People beat the idea of comparing review scores from different people and different genres into the ground when talking about IGN. Charlie is one of the few people who point out the opposite.
As memeable as that phrase is, its definitely true that the HM overuse in Emerald was valid criticism, too bad Gamefreak never improved on region design after gen 5..
@@islandboy9381 Yeah, I'll dunk on the phrase to eternity, but it was actually a valid criticism at its core -- ORAS had the perfect opportunity to fix some of the biggest issues that RSE had, but simply... didn't. Having Surf, Waterfall, and Dive all return as mandatory HMs was frankly unforgivable, but to sum it up as "too much water" is laughably misleading. 7.8/10 is an accurate score at the end of an awful review.
Their review for Pokémon Mustery Dungeon: Explores of Sky is one of the best examples of why I don’t trust IGN reviews anymore. They didn’t even get past the first chapter of the game. This is a very story focused game and they didn’t even bother finishing it before reviewing it!
The SMT5 review always cracks me up "It felt like Persona 5 without the heart." Uh, yeah that's SMT. The story is usually really depressing. They clearly have never touched an SMT game if they picked it up and immediately expected Persona.
I am a big Persona fan and even I think it's supremely stupid to expect the same thing when going into SMT. It's supposed to be Persona's edgier older brother. Why would they make them separate game series if they were the exact same?
@@J-D i totally disagree with a game cant be just atmosphere, not gonna discuss anything else, but a good example is playing paintball, whenever I’ve played paintball you have teams of about 16 people, you’re gonna have a couple friends at most. Long story short, you don’t give a shit about the win, half the time you have no idea what’s going on and the other half you’re just chatting shit with friends, so the whole experience is just the atmosphere of it, and its very fun. As a-pose to playing call of duty having a strategy optimising classes, most of the joy comes from getting the win.
Alien Isolation even now holds up really well both by graphical standards, AI, and just scaring tf out if you. Like we really went from an Alien that starts looking to where a noise maker was thrown after you use it too much to Deathloop’s AI that will run into the same hallway like a meat grinder every time
Yea I'm a big fan of the Aliens franchise, mostly the first movie which is still horror. The game played really well and had me on the edge of my seat and proved to be difficult at times. Actually never saw the bad reviews of it. Just knew I wanted to play it.
@@MorganKlasen and sadly the review drove some people away from buying the game- many still did, but it still drove people away and caused lower sales.
Reminds me of how they gave rain world a 6.2, saying it was one of the most beautiful platformers they've ever played but that it was too hard. They never even made it past the first area out of a total of sixteen.
I was going to comment that. It’s a skill based game that takes a shit load of time to learn and the reviewer just wanted to speed through it. I fucking LOVE rain world so I hate that review. Such a beautiful environment and world.
as a classical studies major, a lot of my professors who don't play games LOVE AC odessy because they do an amazing job brining the ancient world to life. While I think 9.2 is a bit much, it's still quite great and enjoyable and the work and research put in the Polychromy (colour in the ancient world) and rebuilding ruins is outstanding.
I am a big, bug sucker for Ancient Egypt. I was reading about Egypt from (children) encyclopedias when I was 7, barely a year after I learned to read. I didn't like Origin's gameplay (I still think that stealth is too dumb and difficulty slider just affects damage numbers instead of awareness of enemy AI like in Dishonored 2 with its 50 different difficulty sliders), but damn, I was just charmed at the game's visuals and its huge world. My childhood passion was living before my eyes, even though it was Ellinistic Egypt and not the Ancient one. It's a very subjective reason to like this game, but it's nevertheless my favorite "modern" AC game.
Oh yeah! Monster hunter with guns. I really really fkn want a lost Planet 1 and 2 remake. Xbox fkn ruining it all because they bought the timed exclusivity as always and killed the franchise as nobody new wtf lost Planet was when lost Planet 2 came out. Making lost Planet 1 and 2 coop would SERIOUSLY be as big a game for me as resident evil 2 remake. And they could also focus more on the multiplayer and it would another reason to play it. I miss when games had so much content and a multiplayer mode.
@@kato093 monster hunter with guns AND MECHS? sign me the hell up. Bro the railway gun mission and the mission with the vagabonds and the Lazer canon was so fun
I still think about the Alien Isolation review and the fact that Ryan Mcaffrey put the game on hard and complained that it was hard. I wonder how that can be read by an editor and taken seriously 🤦♀️
that wasnt his biggest mistake. He actived the pulse beep and wondered why the Alien would track the sound and find him. He considered that cheating by the AI and not being dumb as a rock by the gamer. 😆 But I am really thankful for that review. Before I would check out IGN from time to time. After that review I never watched one of their reviews again.
8:45 I love this response. You clearly would've given it like a 2 or 3 out of 10, but you refuse to actually score it here because you didn't actually experience the entire product as intended. We really need more reviewers with that kind of integrity. Common Charlie W
i love charlie but you are giving him too much credit with this comment lol He didn't like it and didn't finish it. Therefor no score. Only time he scores a bad game is if it's a complete flop and feels like it needs to be discussed. The integrity thing is reaching a bit lol
@@LuciferWrld999 There isn't. You can't compare scores from two entirely different genres, given by two entirely different reviewers. It makes zero sense.
To be fair to IGN (Which is a sentence I never thought I'd find myself saying), I remember the 'too much water' complaint floating around back when the ORIGINAL Ruby and Sapphire games came out. It wasn't like it was just something they made up. It was a legitimate complaint people had all the way back in 2002.
Exactly. That review could have been worded better, maybe if they said too much empty space because even if the water was grass, it's just lenghty routes with trainers.
@@chaudspieler fans of games can be so blind and hateful towards criticism. It's bad that she quit but it's also bad if she made the review without actually playing the game.
I think the true issue is that, while they may not be getting paid directly for reviews, all of these review sites are dependent on game publishers for their livelihoods. You need to have working relationships with game studios to get things like interviews, behind the scenes/development news, on-site advertising, and early review copies of the games, and there are definitely studios that would cut off that access if they were constantly getting 6/10 reviews.
Or in the case of The Last of Us 2, the reviewer that gave the game a 10 was later hired by Naughty Dog. Gaming journalists are almost always intentionally disingenuous because they'll either be blacklisted by a studio/publisher for a bad review or they're getting bought that studio/publisher to give a raving review.
@@yuh42011 They re-reviewed it a few years ago and actually got someone who enjoyed the game to re-review it and he shat all over IGN's original 3/10 score. Unfortunately, by then it was too late.
It's not just fear of being attacked that causes inflated scores. A lot of it is the rush of trying to publish too quickly and the inherent nepotism of the industry. Games journalists are desperate for early access to game titles if they're going to compete with the review releases of one another, so they build friendships in the industry in order to secure early game copies. Those friendships inherently incentivize positivity and unearned praise, or at least an aversion to harsher criticism, if they want to keep that early access to titles. The flip side of this is the harsh criticisms of the typical gamer, ironically fostered at least in part during the 90's and 00's by the overtly positive video game journalism environment, which incentivizes reviewers to occasionally flip the script and become overtly scornful when they believe that gamers might likewise hate on a title. It's just an attempt to fit in with gamer attitudes, despite having a completely different incentive towards what they play -- instead of BEING gamers, they're trying to study and emulate gamer attitudes as fast as possible. That's why they occasionally miss the mark so badly. The end result is that most video game reviewers are prone to unnecessary extremes and rushing through with their assessments, rather than just sitting with a game's experiences the way a gamer typically would.
same with hardware reviewers as well, that is why Hardware Unboxed got blacklisted by Nvidia a while back when they didn't have much favorable to say about them and they had to buy the cards themselves instead of receiving the card from Nvidia for reviewing.
IGN's review will go down as their absolute worst review in my eyes. They actually had the arrogance to say Alien Isolation was a 5 just because the player thought the AI was "infuriating".
I mean...I love the game but I get it. The first major Alien encounter took me ages because the Alien just would not fuck off. Hide in a locker, wait for it to leave, take 5 steps outside of the locker and it's already coming back, rinse repeat.
@@tvirusgetz in all honesty that’s how they wanted it. the AI was like basically aware of its own existence lol. one part knew where you were at all times but the other part didn’t, and they gave hints to each other to find out where you were at. even the slightest bit of noise would alert it in your direction and it used clues around the area to find your exact location. def hard as hell tho
i actually agree with the 'too much water' con. unfortunately, the reviewers didn't convey their issue with it well. having as much water as ruby and sapphire have coupled with requiring 3 hms just for water travel and exploration is very tedious especially on repeated playthroughs.
@@OtherWorldAmbience you’re still forced to fight a shit ton of trainers that all use the same one fucking type it is very tedious and boring af and it just completely overlevels your party thx to the exp share
Whirlpool is such an awful HM too. Surf, Strength, and Fly at least have some utility. I actually had a lot of fun in Sun/Moon where they had specific Pokemon for those actions and I could adjust my team better. It always felt like I had two slots filled up at all times for an HM slave
@@MacabreDaymare polygon just can't help themselves. Their need of constantly looking smart, 'woke', pretend video games are as significant as cinema. and try to shove politics into their writing at every turn bored the shit outta me. Games in general are as politics as they come (and anyone claiming otherwise is fucking delusional) but all we want to know about the game is whether it's worth my money or not. We don't care about the games's artistic merit, representation and why it matter or whatever. Your can write your own opinion puff piece in another article. When we read review. We just wanna know about the goddamn fucking game.. So just give us straight whether it's broken or not. That's all we care about! Jesus.
@@MacabreDaymare yeah like, my brother in christ, the sexualization is part of the appeal. Good thing Japan doesn't give a fuck what "game" "journalists" think.
@@kotzpenner fan service and sexualization is normal in Japan, that's why you see it in a lot of titles. but it seems like they forget that when you get a game made in another country, there's going to be differences based on what is okay/normal there compared to here
"Game journalists really like death loop for some reason" "death loop basically plays itself"
Well that sure does explain it
Payed reviews are another reason.
No it doesn’t, it’s a great game
@@RIPandTEARB1TCHES not that great though
@@polyphonydigital no, it’s great
@@RIPandTEARB1TCHES not as great as they say
I'm a diehard Doom fan, and when the Doom 2016 reviewer said "fixed power-up placements and shortcuts give experienced players who know the map an advantage," it just made me laugh. Yes bud, that's exactly how its been since the 90's.
Yeah, right ? That was the whole point, you learn the map, you learn the weapons, you get good. That's literally most multiplayer games.
They probably went on to be a die hard fortnite fan.
and its trash?
@@biggooba6706 I wasn't talking about the multi-player quality. Yeah its probably the worst in the series. I was just talking about his "captain obvious" statement
I mean, that's how DOOM speedrun works since the 90s. Speedrunners memorize weapon, ammo and powerups placement as well as secret areas so you know what you're during your speedrun
IGN probably ended Alien Isolation’s chances at a sequel with that review. One of the best horror games of all time.
No not really it all mostly comes down to sale numbers
Goofy ahh bots
Why does anyone even care what IGN has to say
Im not better than penguinz0
So true, what a good and beautiful game. So weird it doesn't get one
Alien: Isolation is still to this day one of the best horror games to ever be made. It's got the creepy atmosphere, it's got the feeling of hopelessness, it's got a monster that you can't kill. The game literally forces you to be paranoid at every possible turn or you will die and it is amazing. Not sure what the journalist was smoking that day when he reviewed Alien: Isolation, but I want a lot of it.
It's the perfect Alien game and a love letter to fans. It just captures the feeling of horror and claustrophobia of the original movie so well. It'll forever piss me off IGN fucked over the game and any chance it could've had for a sequel.
You know it’s subjective right?
@@dampking IGN isn't meant to be subjective, or so they claim. They're supposed to be an unbiased rating system on how good games are. If IGN was subjective, corporations wouldn't flaunt their ratings if they were high.
@@lordpumpkinhead265 No game has a true score. The reason they flaunt reviews is to show that people like it.
"subjectivity" and its consequences have been a disaster for reviewing entertainment media@@dampking
You know they're unqualified when they put "frustrating AI" as a con for a literal survival horror game.
Not to mention that game has one of the most detailed ai systems for the alien out there. Its like someone makes a beautiful dessert but some ass hat is like "oh it has meringue in it" and throws it away. And they get to be a reviewer, what a sick joke
To be fair it really depends on the diffculty settings chosen for the game. Like on the harder difficulties the AI for the alien really just is complete BS and you essentially have to exploit game systems to the max plus rely on some rng to make it through the whole game
@Noah Boddie they passed the bar
It's not like the AI can't be frustrating just because it's survival horror.
@@noahboddie3482 And they get to leave reviews?! What a sick joke! We should’ve stopped them when we had the chance! And you! You have to stop him, you….
IGN went from a major juggernaut in game reviews to a footnote in a game's legacy
DONT READ MY USERNAME
DONT READ THE SPAM COMMENTS
They went woke
what the actual fuck are these spam bots
I love seeing all the replies and thinking that there is a worth while discussion in the thread, then the bots😒, IGN has been a smokestack for about a decade
This man seriously went into battle for bikini bottom rehydrated looking for the dark souls of platformers
Yeah I'm still mad about that.
Get the guy who could barely beat the cup head tutorial to review that one
I still think the Gamespot review was worse cuz they had the audacity to give the game a TWO OUT OF TEN!!!
Just because fans wanted a faithful remake of a mediocre platformer doesn't mean it shouldn't be graded as a mediocre platformer.
@@boertush the guy said it was too kid friendly. it's fucking spongebob
As a Sonic fan, I think IGN rating Sonic Unleashed that low was just the guy reviewing having a skill issue
honestly yeah, it's kinda Common for IGN to just have Skill Issues, Just look at their Cuphead Review
I feel like the review for Wolfenstein: The New Order sums of IGN the best. They judge games based on what they want them to be, not what they are. That game got about a 7.5 or so, and their main complaints were that it felt “stuck in the past” and that you had to pick up items manually. My god.
sounds like most gamers on the internet tbh. From what ive seen most gamers are just after that nostalgia.
“it felt stuck in the past” my brother in christ Wolfenstein IS in the past
It's set in an alternate 1960s. Are they stupid?
Yeah, around the 1940s to be specific
@@shawno8253 It's reasonable to expect slightly higher critical analysis skills from a _professional journalist_ though.
That Alien Isolation review hurts. I love that game so much and the AI for the alien is incredible. It's one of the most immersive and terrifying horror games I've ever played. You always feel like you're in constant danger. I feel like that IGN reviewer was just salty cause they kept getting killed by the alien. Just because you're bad at a game does not equal bad game design.
The AI and the fear it makes you feel is a standout feature still not mirrored by any other game.
I do agree with their pacing con tho. But 5.9 is abysmal
That reviewer was a run and gun CoD gamer. Not a good match for the best survival horror game of all time.
he said it was too long, when they are on a deadline and feel rushed to finish the game that can hurt the enjoyment
I used to be real into ign around the time that game was coming out. Listening to the podcast nonstop reading the website. One thing that a lot of them were saying leading up to that was “oh alien isolation is probably gonna be a nice 5 -8 hour horror game” and they kept repeating that. The reviewer no doubt bought into that and tried to beat it as fast as he could and it turned out to be an actual long game. Isolation was an incredible game it was a shame what he tried to do with it.
I used to be real into ign around the time that game was coming out. Listening to the podcast nonstop reading the website. One thing that a lot of them were saying leading up to that was “oh alien isolation is probably gonna be a nice 5 -8 hour horror game” and they kept repeating that. The reviewer no doubt bought into that and tried to beat it as fast as he could and it turned out to be an actual long game. Isolation was an incredible game it was a shame what he tried to do with it.
14:03 is a solid point. Gameplay is awesome, but had the story included more thoughtful decisions for Ellie in her revenge plight and have her pull back on some of those stabbings, I think it would have been better. There should have been more gamed decisions in more alternate routes or actions in the Hillcrest driving portion, the theatre chase scene, or the bit with Mel.
I disagree, he says things were out of order but could u imagine playing as a character half the game but you don’t know why and suddenly she kills Joel, that had to be the worst take off all time by charlie
@@architdewan6717 I wouldn't call the opening hike that "snowballs" into a run where we play as Abby as thoughtful game design, but it was entertaining with the setpieces and cinematic. If only they had taken the MGS2 route and replaced Joel with Abby without flinching and made an anthology, I would have watched the skippable cutscenes more.
@@architdewan6717it would worked if they showed, before she kills Joel, the fact that she's the surgeon's daughter, we would know why she would do that, they could even make the game all about Abby and her quest for vengeance, ending in her leaving Joel alone after finding Lev and realizing that she didn't really needed to kill Joel, as that would only continue with the cycle of violence and death
"The way he leaps off of rooftops and flips backwards to face the camera before falling into a head first dive is just full of the exaggerated swagger of a Black teen."
Will forever be the weirdest line I've heard from a video game review.
Edit: To clarify, this is NOT from IGN. It's from Gamespot's review of Miles Morales.
Yea but the guy who said it is black so it's not weird
@@Yea___ Still weird
@@Yea___ It's still weird given someone's personality isn't inherently a byproduct of their race.
@@warbossgegguz679 💯
Wait is this where that meme came from?
The problem with IGN is that they have far too many people doing reviews so their isn't a consistency across scores and grading
Not to mention conflict of interest with games publishers and monetization and organizational access to games effectively discounts a lot of their reviews
No, the problem is they don't do reviews.
Exactly what dunky pointed out in his old video about game reviews.
No one really does fair scoring though. A mediocre game by all accounts should be a 5/10. Instead just about everybody on the internet ranks a mediocre game as a 7, which is to say anything below 7 is bad. So why does the scoring 1,2,3,4/10 even exist when no one even uses it?
@@Cycableach Which pissed off many game journalists because they know Dunky was right.
15:17 I love how TOO MUCH WATER sounds in perfect synch as dude takes a sip of, what is presumably (or looks visually like), water
>“As dude”
>assumes it could be anything beyond plain filtered water, presumably implying it could possibly be ethanol (of any percentage below 96%)
This your first exposure to critikal?
The "Too much water" complaint reminds me of a review of a hotel I stayed at a few years ago. Their only complaint was that the swimming pool was too big. Seriously? It might have actually been that guy from IGN and he has a deep seeded hatred for large bodies of water
The actual review I recall explained it better and was a more fair criticism on having too many water sections, and too many water pokemon throwing off the balance.
Your analogy doesn't make sense at all. It's a valid criticism, water routes in Pokemon games fucking suck.
Have you ever actually played a Pokemon game before? Water sections in Pokemon games take forever, are incredibly boring and the random encounters are all the same. It's a perfectly valid complaint.
Wonderful complaint.
@@HeavenKnight it wasn't an analogy of the game, I just said it reminded me of the complaint about the hotel. Mostly the way Charlie spoke about it
That Alien Isolation review still enrages me, even all these years later. It remains one of my all-time favorite games, and the third-best piece of media in the franchise after the first two films.
Isolation is by far the best alien video game.
Never forgive. Never forget.
Every few months I go back to that review because the comments are funny af
IGN gonna IGN
You should see UnderTheMayo's review. It's actually EVEN WORSE.
I’ll never forget the absolute tragic review they gave to Pokémon mystery dungeon explorers of sky and the reviewer only got to Apple woods which was LITERALLY the 3rd mission out of an amazing story with dozens of hours of fulfilling post game story and content.
I thought it was the same Guy who couldnt get past the cuphead tutorial
@@ivanalves8506 dean takahashi i think
@@ivanalves8506 It's not.
I did not like PMD:EoS up to that point. After playing through the whole game, I would give it a solid 9/10. It is incredible.
at least they introduced me to the mcelroys
This video (this actual video, not the one being reacted to) is a far better example as to how the gaming community should approach their opinions. It’s fine to have strong opinions, but it’s incredibly important to understand nuance and variance in differing takes and styles.
Which goes down the drain immediately after he says playing death stranding is miserable... He doesn't say that it's miserable for him, he outright says the gameplay is miserable and that there's nothing there that's fun or enjoyable, which is not for A LOT of people by a long shot, including myself.
@@3rdWorldGamer He does say "I thought the game was miserable to play", which is very different from saying "this game is objectively miserable", though I see where you're coming from
You know you don’t have to say in my opinion before every opinion, saying “blank game is annoying” is an opinion, and you should assume it is stated as one, and assuming that everything that doesn’t start with “in my opinion” is objective fact is exactly the issue at hand
By the way I meant to respond to the top reply but UA-cam doesn’t let me reply nor edit comments for some reason
@@3rdWorldGamer almost like the gameplay is objectively miserable. srry your fav game got shted on by literally everyone but a minority of people
You can’t spell ignorant without “IGN”.
Good heavens the bots are wilding
@@ManWithTheCow bro my notifications inbox is getting wrecked by these bots
what the fuck are these replies
you cant spell champaign without it either
@@GeremyG bots have gotten way too crazy lately
"too kid friendly" for SpongeBob made me laugh out loud not ONLY because it's SpongeBob, but because it's one of the few medias of SpongeBob that you'll ever hear "a huge *murderous robot* shaped like a squirrel."
TBF, SpongeBob isn't exactly know for being the most kid friendly cartoon
That same idiot gave The Last of Us Part 2 a 10/10 score. He's full of it.
Being too simplistic and easy is a valid criticism. You can't excuse a game being too easy with it being "for kids" because the NES era was explicitly for kids and all those games were hard as balls.
spongebob has a gore montage on youtube lmao
@@VioletteZero but that wasnt the criticism lol
I wrote reviews a while ago for one of the biggest sites in my country and also wrote reviews for other media, like comic books. It was never really said outright, but the consensus was "Don't be too harsh or the publisher won't send us games in the future and we'll be on their blacklist". I gave a game 4/10, wrote the whole text for a 4/10 but when my boss published my review he changed the score to a 6/10
Reminds me of the review of Kane and Lynch that led to Giant Bomb becoming a thing.
Except there it was ORIGINALLY a 6/10 and the dude still got fired for being "too harsh".
It's like games advertize game rating websites now instead of the opposite..
that's the sad truth about being a videogame reviewer, most companies hate when they're told their game is bad. and the fact that you literally depend on them to send you their (often over-priced) game makes it a whole lot shittier
cant they just buy the fucking games lol
Yeah just not early
Alien Isolation is a masterpiece. Horrible how it got shit on by IGN which likely affected some sales. Would have loved to see a sequel or spinoff game of it.
It’s amazing people still listen to anything IGN says, occasionally they’ll get it right (Elden Ring) but it’s very rare
@@UnclePhil1112 and hollow knight but yea it is very rare
Alien Isolation did have a spinoff. Sadly, it was a FNAF styled spinoff and people immediately ignored it from that point on
@@UnclePhil1112 It's because they have multiple reviewers of varying quality. While some do a good job and are experienced enough to know when the game messes up vs. when they mess up, they also have lots of sketchy staff. Remember the dude who literally plagiarised other reviewers and got caught on his Dead Cells review? It's clear that their hiring standards are rather low, but that doesn't mean they can't hire quality people, even if accidentally.
It's such an amazing game and easily makes it into my top 3 favorite horror games
Never understood why reviewers dont just do this:
-Overall score
-Genre score
-Series/franchise score if applicable
That score for Alien Isolation is criminal. That game was incredibly well made and so imersive.
I agree man that game is seriously a technical marvel.
@Professional Milker the alien once corned me against a wall, acted like it was about to kill me, then walked out of the room while staring at me. I'm aware it was a glitch but it was still scary as shit lol
they like to low rate good games
@Professional Milker I have beaten the game on nightmare.
@@Sci-Fi_Freak_YT 😮
IGN really just throws out numbers at random
Fuck you bots.
Dam these bots are fast
Best game of all time!
Uhh, idk, a 7
You really throw out comments at random
@Don't read profile photo ok, I sure wont
IGN's Review of Alien Isolation is one of the biggest crimes in gaming history. I feel sorry for whoever thought 5.9 was a good score for such an amazing, terrifying game.
Yeah it really shows how bad that person is at their job.
Even if the game does nothing for you personally you ought to be able to recognize what it achieves. THATS THE JOB!
5.9, too much horror
Wish I could have a better, more informed opinion, but the game made me shit a brick about 90 minutes in and I don’t have the courage to continue. So 10/10
Isolation perfectly captured the atmosphere and tone of the first film while being an unrelated story
It would have been a much better movie than 3 and all its successors
Charlie has really started innovating, hes reviewing reviews
reviewing a review of reviews
IGN review tier list in the future maybe? 🤔
review reviewer
That's called running out of content my friend
They probably built a culture of internal peer pressure where you had to choose between giving a honest opinion or being in the good graces of the office/advertisers
When people complain about reviewers not playing through an entire game, I wonder how much time they even get to write a review and how many they have lined up at a time. I can imagine the workload to be pretty harsh. Not that that would excuse their poor reviews, but I think the responsibility should be sought more with the organisation as a whole than individual reviewers.
@@Smonsequenses true. I could imagine not having a chance to just take in the moment of the game really sucks. It’s like speedrunning then saying the game is too fast. You’re not really playing as intended then give a bad review.
It should be illegal to do the latter
this^ it would make sense that the unexplainably high scores if they were being paid for by the game companies.
@@Smonsequenses i wouldn’t call playing and then writing a review of a game hard work
I remember I was really excited for Alien Isolation and looked forward to it for a year. The night before it released I decided to look at the reviews at was met with IGN’s notorious review. My heart sank. I ultimately decided “screw it, I’m going to play it for myself and find out” that is still one of the best choice I’ve ever made. I’ve played through it like 12 times by this point and Even got the platinum trophy. I still to this day won’t even consider IGN reviews and when I do for games I’m unsure about, I check out immediately after I see Ryan’s name
I dont know why anyone would listen to reviews. That shit has never made sense. No one is like you, so listening to someone else play a game is dumb because they might not find something fun that you would consider fun.
@SirLucifer reviews can be helpful for finding out if a game has released broken/unfinished.
No reviews at all only help publishers because they can just push out bug filled trash and not worry about reviews exposing said trash. Reviews arent the problem, its people taking reviews as gospel instead of the reference it should be used when deciding if a game is to be bought
@@LuciferWrld999 The idea behind a review is that someone who is critical and self-aware of their own bias provides details about the game that allow you to make a more informed opinion for yourself without spending the money on it. It isn't supposed to purely be an opinion piece that says "game stinky i no like." Of course, it's always been corrupt, even in the very early days of gaming when every review was published in a magazine, but there are more competently written reviews.
IGN has always been notoriously aloof with its reviews. There is a very old one for a PSX shooter (I can't remember which one specifically, might have been Disruptor) where the reviewer complained incessantly about the "awful controls." Those controls? You use the left stick to move and right stick to aim and triggers to shoot. Yeah, he was really complaining about the standard controls for every modern console shooter, which weren't so standard at the time. Still, that wasn't even the first game to feature them -- Goldeneye had a similar control layout.
No review is perfect, there is no review that everyone will agree with. Even here I don't agree with everything Charlie says, because we all enjoy different things. For example I really enjoyed Death Stranding, but it's ok if Charlie doesn't.
This is also why I think it's dumb when people only listen to one guys' reviews and hold up his opinions as holy fact, especially when they themselves haven't even played the game in question.
@@LuciferWrld999 exactly anyone who listens to game reviews at this point is just setting themselves up for disappointment.
I remember when GameFreak trolled IGN in the next gen of pokemon games. Sun and Moon had a sort of camera mini game where you could try to snap photos of pokemon. You could share them online and citizens of the pokemon world could comment on your photo. Every once in a while no matter what you posted you would get a comment that says "too much water -.-"
It was actually "7.8/10 Too much water. `\_(' - `)_/`"
So they actually mentioned the score as well which is even funnier
@@andrewg.3281 your word placement fucked up the face lolol.
People like to joke about it because it is a really dumb sounding line but if you have played every pokemon game gen 3 is the one game that hasthe most water
@@devastatheseeker9967 I never liked it either, but because it made the map feel too split up, other than that I feel it's better than fire red
@@devastatheseeker9967 that doesn't mean it's a bad thing
Sword and Shield for me was like being addicted to cigarettes. In the moment, I knew it was bad but I couldn't stop playing and now I dont know why I gave my life to that game so much
That was persona 5 for me but if cigarettes were health food
Me with XY...
Id argue XY was the worst. But I stopped after Arceus which I liked.
And then we got Scarlet Violet as the crack, you get addicted but you feel your braincells slowly rotting away
@@MrSkeltal268 Bruh, XY was good! What are you on?
That’s actually a great point when talking about the order a story presents itself in and why scattering flashbacks in your game or film just stops the pacing entirely to start you on something new.
True. While I still think the TLOU2 make some serious narrative mistakes. It would have been a much better story and if it was ordered better.
I think it was very purposeful about why and when everything happened. I understand not liking the whole "forcing" you to play as Abby but I think that was almost a fourth wall level choice. They wanted to see how far they could push YOU the player, not the characters. I don't think it worked all that well, but it was a very interesting idea
I personally felt like it helped strengthen the themes of the game so even if it was frustrating at points I get why they did it and I think the trade off over all was worth it for me (although most dont seem to feel the same way so I guess I get it)
The most frustrating part of the game was when half way through the rising action of the showdown between Ellie and Abby immediately stops and the game starts all over again for 10 hours of nothingness.
Book of Boba Fett moment
According to IGN when they give a game 7/10 it means it’s a Masterpiece.
10/10 makes it a grandmaster-piece
SO MANY BOTS HOLY
@Juan 🅥 that's disgusting ! 🤮
WTF WHY ARE THERE SO MANY BOTS
@Juan 🅥 actual discord mod moment.
okay, i genuinely laughed when charlie said “i’m gonna try and avoid spoilers” the SECOND the spoiler countdown showed up. some editing comedic genius imo
Their review of Alien Isolation is the reason why I hate IGN.
Seriously appreciate the method used for spoiler warnings. Keeping it on screen until the spoilers are done is the way to do it.
Golf
@@spoon4598 football
Joel dies
@@stevenstokes6306 soccer
@@TBL7133 *football
IGN, Kotaku, and Polygon are the whole reason the "game journo" meme exists
The whole reason the game journo meme exists is because gamers are morons
@@Umbojug journo sighted
tbf, Kotaku had Tim Rogers writing for them for a while, so at least one good thing came out of them.
@@kenny187ful average gamer
@@crediblesalamander8056 And Jason Schreier used to work for them. He did some hard-hitting big boi journalism even back then and is kind of that one source everyone believes in now. Like when the Bayonetta VA fiasco happened, he just came out with "you are lying, here are the facts, you were offered much more than what you claim."
During the Alien Isolation review the reviewer died hiding from the Alien while using a noise making motion tracker and called it unfair.
They should show The human centipede to children in elementary schools each year and tell them if they don't behave this is what will happen.
It reminds me of this one internet post from a while back where the person mentioned they died because their Xbox Kinect heard them fart lol
Charlie getting a RuneLite notification when speaking about how much he plays RuneScape was great comedic timing
15:45 I wouldn't say that they're afraid of fan backlash, what I think is way more likely is that they never say anything too bad about a major AAA game because they want to make sure that they keep getting review copies from major publishers. I've watched other reviewers talk about being blacklisted from receiving review copies because the company didn't trust them to give the game a favorable enough score.
They should show The human centipede to children in elementary schools each year and tell them if they don't behave this is what will happen.
This is the reason. If you don't kiss publishers' asses, you have to buy your own copy. That terrifies them.
@@ShaCaro It's not even about having to pay for a copy. It's about not getting an early copy and getting a review out as soon as possible. If they have to get the game on release day, then they can't get the review out until well after, and by that point a lot less people will be interested in their review.
YEs, I think this is the major reason. And it's not only review copies. You just could get blacklisted in the whole industry. You can see that happening in Hollywood too. If you want to keep working in the gaming industry, you better be not to confrontational against the big players. Not everyone can launch a successful UA-cam career if nobody wants to hire you anymore.
@@Vaultboythefightingmachine yeah cuz that'll do anything good.
Man, the guy doing the top 10 really downloaded his personality from twitter gaming threads
Wtf are you talking about. Are you like 12? This dude literally sounds like the classic UA-cam reviews and countdowns between 2007-2010.
Lol
Moreso got Reddit vibes but yeah lol, felt like he was channeling 2016 GamerTM energy
@@braydenlynch4655 that's becuz your whole personality I'd also from Twitter gaming threadd
Has the personality of a man who hasn't touched a vagina since his ma gave birth to him 30+ years ago
I definitely agree with charlie's closing statement, about reviewers being scared of fans into giving dishonest reviews, instead of being paid off.
Though some companies marketing will also blacklist your media outlet if you give them low scores.
Some, yes, but not as bad as it used to be with, say, print magazines. Rise of the Robots pretty much branded a distrust of the gaming media into a generation of gamers, but now, saying anything bad about a loved game (or saying anything good about a hated game) will get you mobbed by terminally online freaks.
I think part of the problem is people view IGN reviews as one solid monolith of perspective and don't recognize that it's been hundreds of different writers with hundreds of individual perspectives
"I still don't understand what exactly happened there because Deathloop literally just plays itself"
That's exactly why they reviewed it highly. You cracked the code.
Same reason game journalists were shitting their pants trying to play Elden Ring
First off, I'm early in the game and don't understand the whole it plays itself deal, but I think the biggest reason why it got a great review was that it was also a PS exclusive.
I think the articles about the color and gender of.htr main characters should tip people off as to why it scored so high. Game reviews at major publications are no different than movie reviews. Everything is politicized and everyone is exhausted from it.
Charlie getting frustrated about alien isolations bad score makes me love him that much more
I mean it's what most of the people think anyway...
Oh shit, you just reminded me that I now have a PC that can play Alien Isolation. Thank you
Its literally the best pure horror game I've played in the past 10 years, what the fuck is that grade.
yea but then he called days gone trash and hard to play when it was way better than Alien Isolation
@@horeshack1226 exactly, absolutely incredible game
Watching IGN reviews really make you feel like you are watching an IGN review.
They should show The human centipede to children in elementary schools in each year and tell them if they don't behave this is what will happen.
@p who asked?
Funny?
I appreciate how balanced Charlie’s reviews are, it’s nice
One of the most famous one people where pissed about was God Hand getting a 3.0, meanwhile being one of the most complex and stylish beat em ups to ever release lol
hell yeah
god hand is awesome
seeing ign give it such a low score hurt my soul
I played it for the first time after seth reviewed it. Graphically it's almost down there with nintendogs, exception made for the main characters, but goddamn it's one of the most compelling character action games ever, the definition of a diamond in the rough. And IGN is one of the reasons why the IP is dead and buried. Yeah, that stinks.
They should show The human centipede to children in elementary schools each year and tell them if they don't behave this is what will happen.
The person who reviewed God Hand also had a few other contentious reviews. IGN also re-reviewed it, basically called it a great game, but didn't give the game a score.
And that is the whole point of IGN.
Even though they wanted to give it a proper review because the previous one was wrong, probably complaining about how difficult it is, they still didn't want their opinion to override the original reviews, which is at odds with re-reviewing it in the first place.
A lot of older reviews are barely reviews, but truncated synopsis just because they wanted to have the review out with a score. This is why a lot of older reviews are useless. At least the IGN ones.
I mean, I love it, but it's not really complex. Kind of the exact opposite.
There's a lot of customization, but combos are literally non-existent.
I like how he always has these youtube tabs for when he needs to watch a video but theres another video he wants to watch, very relatable.
It even reaches 30 tabs if the recommendations system worked
They should show The human centipede to children in elementary schools in each year and tell them if they don't behave this is what will happen.
@@Vaultboythefightingmachine is that legal my lord?
I currently have 15 tabs on my PC.
@@_Cetarial i'll do you one better, i have 78 tabs open rn
Ironically, the list is actually about as hit or miss as IGN
To be fair, the list is "most disliked IGN reviews". So the list itself is accurate and on point, just people mass disliked some reviews poorly
@@arkraith4148 You're right, but the dude presenting the list also went out of his way to insult IGN on every point regardless of how deserved the criticisms were. It's one thing to list controversial videos but it's another to say the controversy is valid and IGN was on the wrong side every time.
@@markymark7247 Yeah, I was kind of more annoyed with the presenter than anything in the video.
@@penttikoivuniemi2146 exactly. i saw this video a week or 2 before and was annoyed at the guy by the very first entry with bo3. bo3 isnt a 9/10 based on every other game out there, but bo3 is definitely a top contender, top 5 at least, for best COD game that came out the past decade. feel like the guy making the video just hates everything cod. also not saying bo3 is a 9/10 among cod games even when considering IW, WW2, and vanguard didnt exist when review was made, i wasnt a fan of the multiplayer and campaign wasnt that good, although it was one of the best zombie titles to come from the series. but it wasnt nearly as bad as this guy makes it out to be
Funny how a guy critiquing other peoples bad opinions, also has bad opinions. It’s almost like opinions aren’t facts. Crazy stuff.
Love how the ign noob playing sonic unleashed isnt even using the boost the right way. Your supposed to hold the button down, not just repeatedly press it.
A daily reminder to everyone that this is the same company that said “Sonic was never good” yet they gave pocket adventure a perfect 10
sonic has actually never been good though
@@arosbastion7052 the og games were pretty fun but it was never meant to be 3D
Goddamn. Nearly ever reply to this comment is a bot.
3d sonic is rough around the edges but that doesn’t mean bad
@@staringcorgi6475 True ?
the biggest problem is that the grading system does nothing. games are rated basically on a 7/10-10/10 scale anything else is rare so you basically have an out of 3 system, its just weird they use out of 10 but only give bad games arbitrarely low scores
If they were able to review every game released, they would make much more use of the lower end of the scale. But since they have limited staff and resources, it makes sense that they only review games that are anticipated by gamers, which inherently will be 6-9 scoring games generally.
No one cares about a review for a 1-5 rating game that was probably already expected to get that score if anyone knew about it in the first place.
7/10 = 70% = a C (at least according to American grading scales) = Average.
This is the basis for most 1-10 scale reviews. and on that same scale anything below 6 is technically a D or F of varying degrees of failure.
When approached from this angle, it makes perfect sense. When approached from an emotional angle 7/10 is either too low or too high dependent on what the person complaining personally feels.
Yeahhh that does kinda make sense, on the one hand games that are anticipated are way more likely to be in the "more than mediocre" part of the rating, but at the same time, there are other scales they can use that better use the whole scale and tell an accurate rating.
anything that isn't a 9/10 or better is a flop in the eyes of gamers
Literal shit could get a 7/10 from them
This is the greatest review of bad reviews of all time.
Haven't even watched anything
@@juhati20 he doesn't need to
They should show The human centipede to children in elementary schools in each year and tell them if they don't behave this is what will happen.
I don't know. Dunkey has a pretty good one
@@jsgoated I thought for a moment all the replies were from bots lol, some even commented more than once
This video was great, nay, nearly perfect. Loved the commentary. I give this video a 7/10
Let us never forget that IGN complained about ORAS having "too much water" for a region based on a freaking island
Edit: Didn't know my joke was so controversial, Dear lord
I get where they're coming from. Random encounters are a bitch on the oversea routes. I don't think it should have been docked so many points for that though.
Ruby/Sapphire do have too much surfing, and too many other water HMs as well. I don't know that it's a big enough problem to put in the bullet points though, and "too much water" is a pretty silly way to phrase the issue. So I see why it became a meme.
They should show The human centipede to children in elementary schools in each year and tell them if they don't behave this is what will happen.
@@VitalVampyr but nobody complains about too much land.
People complaining about that part of review are suddenly pretending that majority of community wasn't saying exact same shit for years. If you don't like water themed region that forces you to traverse on water for large portion of the game, it's perfectly valid complaint.
Alien isolation was the biggest outrage of ign ratings
People beat the idea of comparing review scores from different people and different genres into the ground when talking about IGN. Charlie is one of the few people who point out the opposite.
Imagine creating one of the greatest AI every conceived in a video game just for the fun police to say it’s “frustrating” and that your game sucks😭
sun and moon referencing the "7.8 too much water" review made me laugh so hard the first time i came across it
They should show The human centipede to children in elementary schools each year and tell them if they don't behave this is what will happen.
As memeable as that phrase is, its definitely true that the HM overuse in Emerald was valid criticism, too bad Gamefreak never improved on region design after gen 5..
@@islandboy9381 Yeah, I'll dunk on the phrase to eternity, but it was actually a valid criticism at its core -- ORAS had the perfect opportunity to fix some of the biggest issues that RSE had, but simply... didn't.
Having Surf, Waterfall, and Dive all return as mandatory HMs was frankly unforgivable, but to sum it up as "too much water" is laughably misleading. 7.8/10 is an accurate score at the end of an awful review.
It literally takes a few seconds to look into the history of persona and figure out that SMT literally came first
Literally
Their review for Pokémon Mustery Dungeon: Explores of Sky is one of the best examples of why I don’t trust IGN reviews anymore. They didn’t even get past the first chapter of the game. This is a very story focused game and they didn’t even bother finishing it before reviewing it!
Yeah that's one of the worst ones
It's babi's first roguelike, who the fuck cares about the plot.
@@warbossgegguz679
Literally everybody.
@@warbossgegguz679 Cries in Grovyle and Darkrai
@@s.e.111films3 Then you need a life. Rogue, Angband, and Nethack literally have 0 plot and have managed to do pretty alright anyways, lol.
"Multiplayer in Doom is unfair because more experienced players know the map better."
....yeah? Thats how multiplayer works, you baked bean.
The SMT5 review always cracks me up "It felt like Persona 5 without the heart." Uh, yeah that's SMT. The story is usually really depressing.
They clearly have never touched an SMT game if they picked it up and immediately expected Persona.
They found out Persona is a spin-off of SMT so they came in thinking it would be the same thing.
I am a big Persona fan and even I think it's supremely stupid to expect the same thing when going into SMT. It's supposed to be Persona's edgier older brother. Why would they make them separate game series if they were the exact same?
Alien is straight up one of the best horror games to be made. It is oozing with atmosphere and the AI is excellent, especially the Xenomorph.
the story in hindsight is stupid. its just back n for fetch quests. atmosphere does not make a game, its a solid part of one though.
They should show The human centipede to children in elementary schools each year and tell them if they don't behave this is what will happen.
i swear when that game came out youtube was full of terrible ai compilations from it
@@thekroomfster It still is, but patches ruin preservation of critique.
@@J-D i totally disagree with a game cant be just atmosphere, not gonna discuss anything else, but a good example is playing paintball, whenever I’ve played paintball you have teams of about 16 people, you’re gonna have a couple friends at most.
Long story short, you don’t give a shit about the win, half the time you have no idea what’s going on and the other half you’re just chatting shit with friends, so the whole experience is just the atmosphere of it, and its very fun.
As a-pose to playing call of duty having a strategy optimising classes, most of the joy comes from getting the win.
Alien Isolation even now holds up really well both by graphical standards, AI, and just scaring tf out if you. Like we really went from an Alien that starts looking to where a noise maker was thrown after you use it too much to Deathloop’s AI that will run into the same hallway like a meat grinder every time
Yea I'm a big fan of the Aliens franchise, mostly the first movie which is still horror. The game played really well and had me on the edge of my seat and proved to be difficult at times.
Actually never saw the bad reviews of it. Just knew I wanted to play it.
@@MorganKlasen and sadly the review drove some people away from buying the game- many still did, but it still drove people away and caused lower sales.
So we just gon ignore that “HAWK” 13:06
The old joke with IGN: "Can't spell ignorant without IGN"
11:19 that timing of the RuneLite notification couldn't be better
Reminds me of how they gave rain world a 6.2, saying it was one of the most beautiful platformers they've ever played but that it was too hard. They never even made it past the first area out of a total of sixteen.
I was going to comment that. It’s a skill based game that takes a shit load of time to learn and the reviewer just wanted to speed through it. I fucking LOVE rain world so I hate that review. Such a beautiful environment and world.
playing through hunter mode right now and holy shit do i want to throw my controller straight out of my window
WHY THE HELL ARE THERE SO MANY DROPWIGS
Rain World is an immensely difficult game but a great one with a bit of a following.
IGN should call themselves "I love Gaming as a Noob".
"Spongebob is too easy"
*immediately walks into the water
as a classical studies major, a lot of my professors who don't play games LOVE AC odessy because they do an amazing job brining the ancient world to life. While I think 9.2 is a bit much, it's still quite great and enjoyable and the work and research put in the Polychromy (colour in the ancient world) and rebuilding ruins is outstanding.
I am a big, bug sucker for Ancient Egypt. I was reading about Egypt from (children) encyclopedias when I was 7, barely a year after I learned to read. I didn't like Origin's gameplay (I still think that stealth is too dumb and difficulty slider just affects damage numbers instead of awareness of enemy AI like in Dishonored 2 with its 50 different difficulty sliders), but damn, I was just charmed at the game's visuals and its huge world. My childhood passion was living before my eyes, even though it was Ellinistic Egypt and not the Ancient one.
It's a very subjective reason to like this game, but it's nevertheless my favorite "modern" AC game.
I explored the world. Didn't play the game that much, but loved it.
They've also added a sort of museum to the game aswell that you can walk arou d and explore which is pretty cool
I don't believe that your college professors that don't play video games have done more than had a quick glance of AC Odyssey and gone "wow nice"
Imagine that thinking assassins creed is even remotely within the realm of a good representation of historical times
I'll never forget how they gave lost planet 2 a rating of 6. Lost planet 2 is super underrated
Oh yeah! Monster hunter with guns.
I really really fkn want a lost Planet 1 and 2 remake. Xbox fkn ruining it all because they bought the timed exclusivity as always and killed the franchise as nobody new wtf lost Planet was when lost Planet 2 came out.
Making lost Planet 1 and 2 coop would SERIOUSLY be as big a game for me as resident evil 2 remake.
And they could also focus more on the multiplayer and it would another reason to play it.
I miss when games had so much content and a multiplayer mode.
@@kato093 monster hunter with guns AND MECHS? sign me the hell up. Bro the railway gun mission and the mission with the vagabonds and the Lazer canon was so fun
100% agreed, i played that game to death
Lost planet is a hidden gem also if we’re on the subject of Xbox hidden gems shadowrun anyone?
In fairness, a lot of critics shat on Lost Planet 2
0:30 yet they gave Doom 2016 a lower review by criticising it's multiplayer
I still think about the Alien Isolation review and the fact that Ryan Mcaffrey put the game on hard and complained that it was hard. I wonder how that can be read by an editor and taken seriously 🤦♀️
that wasnt his biggest mistake. He actived the pulse beep and wondered why the Alien would track the sound and find him. He considered that cheating by the AI and not being dumb as a rock by the gamer. 😆 But I am really thankful for that review. Before I would check out IGN from time to time. After that review I never watched one of their reviews again.
Isolation being panned by reviewers while being praised by everyone else sounds in line for horror.
8:45
I love this response. You clearly would've given it like a 2 or 3 out of 10, but you refuse to actually score it here because you didn't actually experience the entire product as intended. We really need more reviewers with that kind of integrity. Common Charlie W
Nah, his take about not comparing 2 different games and reviewers is stupid. Because it means there isn't a criteria that anyone has to follow.
@@LuciferWrld999 not what the original comment was about lol
i love charlie but you are giving him too much credit with this comment lol He didn't like it and didn't finish it. Therefor no score. Only time he scores a bad game is if it's a complete flop and feels like it needs to be discussed. The integrity thing is reaching a bit lol
@@LuciferWrld999 There isn't. You can't compare scores from two entirely different genres, given by two entirely different reviewers. It makes zero sense.
@@LuciferWrld999 reviews aren't objective, they're all biased. Therefore you need to know the reviewer to know what the number means
11:10 The way a Runescape popup spawned just as Charlie started talking about Runescape. Matrix is real.
Was looking for this comment 😂
Charlie's reaction for the Alien Isolation Review sums up everything.
The bots 💀
I'm surprised that he wasn't aware of that review.
Bots🤡🤡🤡🤡🤡
They should show The human centipede to children in elementary schools each year and tell them if they don't behave this is what will happen.
This comment section is hell
To be fair to IGN (Which is a sentence I never thought I'd find myself saying), I remember the 'too much water' complaint floating around back when the ORIGINAL Ruby and Sapphire games came out. It wasn't like it was just something they made up. It was a legitimate complaint people had all the way back in 2002.
Exactly. That review could have been worded better, maybe if they said too much empty space because even if the water was grass, it's just lenghty routes with trainers.
@@and-a-bell And that reviewer got mocked into quitting. She didn't even play the game anyway from what I was told.
@@chaudspieler fans of games can be so blind and hateful towards criticism. It's bad that she quit but it's also bad if she made the review without actually playing the game.
I'm almost shocked at the lack of a mention of God Hand getting a 3. Which is like, actually criminal.
totally forgot about that. that’s an 06’ game? a 3 is insane
A 3? that's insane
I came to say exactly this. I'm sure that played a big part in Clover Studios' demise
7:00 No! Sword and Shield are actually really fun! At least in my opinion.
I love how it's become an insult to be called an "IGN" playtester 🙏
They should show The human centipede to children in elementary schools each year and tell them if they don't behave this is what will happen.
I think the true issue is that, while they may not be getting paid directly for reviews, all of these review sites are dependent on game publishers for their livelihoods. You need to have working relationships with game studios to get things like interviews, behind the scenes/development news, on-site advertising, and early review copies of the games, and there are definitely studios that would cut off that access if they were constantly getting 6/10 reviews.
Or in the case of The Last of Us 2, the reviewer that gave the game a 10 was later hired by Naughty Dog. Gaming journalists are almost always intentionally disingenuous because they'll either be blacklisted by a studio/publisher for a bad review or they're getting bought that studio/publisher to give a raving review.
@@mikehall8911 you can, jf it becomes inaccessible and expensive
If the company has to buy a 80$ game, that's coming out of the reviewers paycheck
They need to pick their battles carefully
I love how Charlie manages to get his videos in trends almost every time.
algorithm jesus
Ok
IGN's SMT review literally created a permanent rivalry between Persona players and mainline SMT players 💀💀💀
This is the same guy that gave smt iv a low rating, and called smt's music forgettable(b2 will always be the best boss theme in the series)
I remember watching SpongeBob’s review and being absolutely dumbfounded at his gameplay.
Alien Isolation is the most criminal to me....that was a masterpiece
the most criminal is god hand, but alien isolation is a close seconds
They should show The human centipede to children in elementary schools each year and tell them if they don't behave this is what will happen.
Not really.
It was never a UA-cam video but IGN's God Hand 3/10 review lives on in infamy.
God hand is so good, hate ign for how they basically ruined any hope for a sequel
@@yuh42011 They re-reviewed it a few years ago and actually got someone who enjoyed the game to re-review it and he shat all over IGN's original 3/10 score. Unfortunately, by then it was too late.
I don’t hate Sword/Shield, but giving that game a 9.3 was ridiculous
"Deathloop plays itself" oh so it's the perfect game for Game Journalists
It's not just fear of being attacked that causes inflated scores. A lot of it is the rush of trying to publish too quickly and the inherent nepotism of the industry.
Games journalists are desperate for early access to game titles if they're going to compete with the review releases of one another, so they build friendships in the industry in order to secure early game copies. Those friendships inherently incentivize positivity and unearned praise, or at least an aversion to harsher criticism, if they want to keep that early access to titles.
The flip side of this is the harsh criticisms of the typical gamer, ironically fostered at least in part during the 90's and 00's by the overtly positive video game journalism environment, which incentivizes reviewers to occasionally flip the script and become overtly scornful when they believe that gamers might likewise hate on a title. It's just an attempt to fit in with gamer attitudes, despite having a completely different incentive towards what they play -- instead of BEING gamers, they're trying to study and emulate gamer attitudes as fast as possible. That's why they occasionally miss the mark so badly.
The end result is that most video game reviewers are prone to unnecessary extremes and rushing through with their assessments, rather than just sitting with a game's experiences the way a gamer typically would.
same with hardware reviewers as well, that is why Hardware Unboxed got blacklisted by Nvidia a while back when they didn't have much favorable to say about them and they had to buy the cards themselves instead of receiving the card from Nvidia for reviewing.
IGN's review will go down as their absolute worst review in my eyes. They actually had the arrogance to say Alien Isolation was a 5 just because the player thought the AI was "infuriating".
Honestly IGN kinda has a skill issue
They should show The human centipede to children in elementary schools each year and tell them if they don't behave this is what will happen.
I mean...I love the game but I get it. The first major Alien encounter took me ages because the Alien just would not fuck off. Hide in a locker, wait for it to leave, take 5 steps outside of the locker and it's already coming back, rinse repeat.
@@tvirusgetz in all honesty that’s how they wanted it. the AI was like basically aware of its own existence lol. one part knew where you were at all times but the other part didn’t, and they gave hints to each other to find out where you were at. even the slightest bit of noise would alert it in your direction and it used clues around the area to find your exact location. def hard as hell tho
They recently gave The Penguin a 5
i actually agree with the 'too much water' con. unfortunately, the reviewers didn't convey their issue with it well. having as much water as ruby and sapphire have coupled with requiring 3 hms just for water travel and exploration is very tedious especially on repeated playthroughs.
But, why? Repels exist. Otherwise it’s no different to running around
Pokemon fans would complain bout anything omdzzz
@@OtherWorldAmbience you’re still forced to fight a shit ton of trainers that all use the same one fucking type it is very tedious and boring af and it just completely overlevels your party thx to the exp share
Whirlpool is such an awful HM too. Surf, Strength, and Fly at least have some utility. I actually had a lot of fun in Sun/Moon where they had specific Pokemon for those actions and I could adjust my team better. It always felt like I had two slots filled up at all times for an HM slave
Charlie: criticizing the gameplay loop of runescape
Runelite notification: "You talking about me?"
"I can think of much worse. Polygon." - And this is why Charlie is so god damn based.
I remember, out of all the platforms, Polygon gave Bayonetta 2 the worst score. Why? The reviewer was so mad over the sexualization.
@@MacabreDaymare polygon just can't help themselves. Their need of constantly looking smart, 'woke', pretend video games are as significant as cinema. and try to shove politics into their writing at every turn bored the shit outta me.
Games in general are as politics as they come (and anyone claiming otherwise is fucking delusional) but all we want to know about the game is whether it's worth my money or not. We don't care about the games's artistic merit, representation and why it matter or whatever. Your can write your own opinion puff piece in another article. When we read review. We just wanna know about the goddamn fucking game.. So just give us straight whether it's broken or not. That's all we care about! Jesus.
@@MacabreDaymare yeah like, my brother in christ, the sexualization is part of the appeal. Good thing Japan doesn't give a fuck what "game" "journalists" think.
@@kotzpenner fan service and sexualization is normal in Japan, that's why you see it in a lot of titles. but it seems like they forget that when you get a game made in another country, there's going to be differences based on what is okay/normal there compared to here
I think destructoid is worse personally, but when was the last time anyone saw a destructoid article 🤣
that one IGN reviewer definitely got stuck on Eggman Land