A week or so ago I made a dumb thread called “10 Commandments of GOG Reviews”, a post just meant to be a joke whilst mentioning common flaws in Gog reviews. After hearing some constructive (and not so constructive) criticism, I figured I would try and make an actual serous thread discussing common mistakes in GOG reviews I have seen.

Please give details on how a game is “innovative” or “unique”. Many games have shown us that a unique game is not necessarily fun, nor even an innovative game. Don’t assume these work as compliments, so be sure to explain why you think these are indeed receiving the game for the better. For that matter, don’t just call the game a Classic and be done, tell us why you think it deserves this title.
Example: LadderInTheBox calls Sim Coral Reef innovative, but remembering the game Soviet Tycoon was innovative but also kinda crappy he made sure to distinguish why Sim Coral Reef’s innovation is something worth experiencing

Please don’t title the review “Best _ ever”. I hate to break it to you, but no game is perfect. Using hyperbole like this is just going to deter people, I don’t think I need to say how unchecked hype can ruin someone’s expectations.
Example: BillyBob calls Ultima 21/7 is the best RPG ever, but in the end he never explains why and some fans who have already played other great RPGs really can’t see why he would say this

Try to keep criticism of modern games to a minimum. You can praise something without putting down something else. Plus it’s not fair to dismiss the progress of an entire industry because of some design decision you don’t agree with. The fact is, the industry has come a long way and complaining how “modern gaming” is ruined is just going to put off a lot of people. For that matter, don’t put down old games when reviewing a new game. Old games laid down the foundations for new games to build off of and even the ones that have aged badly deserve some respect.
Example: DrWahwee loves the old fighter Nuke Dukem and finds it much better than most fighting game he has played today, but he also knows these newer games have their fans and doesn’t want to annoy them. He also remembers Super Smash Bros Ultimate exists.

Don’t just make a review that is just “this game is good” or “you owe it to yourself to play this game”. Hooboy, there are a LOT of these. You are given a substantial amount of letters for a reason, use them and clarify what you actually like about the game. As mentioned above, the more descriptive the better.
Example: XxEdgarRiceGallowsxX in his supreme arrogance, called Kung Fu Quest good in this review without elaborating. It was then the high and mighty powers above came down and grabbed him by the neck and said “go back and make an actual review you little twit”

Try to keep about how you grew up with the game to a minimum. If you want to tell us fun experiences you’ve had with the game, then go right ahead. This can help explain why the game is special to you and why you would recommend it to someone else. But try to stay within reason, you can gush about a game without giving your whole life story
Example: ArmyOfDryBones talks about how the game Reading Raptor changed how he viewed video games, but he eventually realizes he talked more about his childhood than the actual game itself. He makes sure he only mentions how the game impacted and increased his overall love of the genre or games as a whole.

Be sure to talk about a game’s flaws. I repeat: A perfect game does not exist. Each game has something wrong with it, so you really need to talk about it. Even if you think it is something minor, still mention it. Some problems bug people more than others. Plus one man’s trash is another man’s treasure, some flaws you mention may actually be something people are looking for.
Example: AGoombaWithNoName talks about the game Monsters and Machinations 4, he really likes the game but is frustrated with how linear the game is. Someone browsing the site though sees this criticism and is pleased, they’ve been looking for a straightforward game without a lot of non-linearity and ends up enjoying it greatly.

Fee free to supply more don’ts and some do’s. Suggestions on how I myself can improve these criticisms would also be greatly appreciated.

Don't: Make a review stating about how the game doesn't run or you can't figure out how to open it.

Look, some games, even with the persistence of GOG, are crotchety and hard to run even under the best of circumstances. On the other hand, if you can't even find the executable or figure out if the game is actually installed, consider taking a remedial class in basic computership. That's on you and you cannot expect all of us to hold your hand when it comes to 30 year old games.

Dont: Make a review just to razz or pass commentary to another user.

Even if it is in the vein of, "Hazzduude lies! You can indeed enjoy Chocolate Mime 4!", these sorts of things are just not the sorts of places to try and duke it out with another user. Especially since reviews currently are static.

Don't complain about the character limit. Yeah it sucks, but your complaint is only eating up space.

I couldn't agree more. Nowadays, everything is "epic" or "masterpiece" and deserve 6 stars out of 5.

Excellent points. Regarding "the best/worst ever", it is as if some people didn't understand the point of reviews, and are overly subjective. They install the game and are dazzled at first by its unique mechanics, gameplay, pretty graphics etc. So they come here and write a gushing review, forgetting that they should step back from the experience and look at it objectively. Surely they'd find a lot of crack in their "perfect" experience. Similarly, some people find that a game offends their social/political sensibilities, and so they declare it "the worst ever", even though many of the aspects of that game are totally fine.

It's like the media, which tell us how we should feel about a certain piece of news, except game developers use trickery to enhance our experience. Which is a positive thing overall, but we need to retain the ability to look at a game objectively, comparing it to other games in the same genre.

To be fair if a "review" is unfair shilling or bashing of a title and one knows such they should be able to mention such if only in passing/slightly to make sure others know which reviews are not worth their salt.

Other than that I don't think people should target other reviewers too much.

=========If a reviewer only posts that and not much else this is a fair point, but if someone backs it up with the why of why they thought such then it is fair to say such, if somewhat hyperbolic.

Ooh, here's a Don't: Don't base the core of the review on being a modded experience. One might claim that yes, Skyrim is greatly improved by mods, but that's not what the game was designed or coded as.

Allow me to make a clarification here, as suggested by the rulings of the following posts; what this means is that one shouldn't use mods to excuse the flaws of a base game. One can indeed state that mods are a vital part of the experience, but to put my idea into an example:

I can't say Skyward Sword is better because I installed a patch to make the text instant and disable Fi. Those are just workarounds for vexing decisions the game designers thought good; and should count as a minus.

I would say not every game needs to be "innovate or unique", but half the reason many modern games (especially AAA's) get down-voted (which isn't specific to GOG) is because they've swung too far in the opposite direction of "safe sequel spam" and end up little more than a wall of remakes / reboots / remasters / IP recycling driven by "double standards" marketing. "Compare our new sequel to the old ones only for positive talking points" during a long marketing hype build-up period followed up by "And now it's released you shouldn't compare old games to this new one when it comes to criticising dumbing down / what's been removed" tends to not work in practise for obvious reasons. Likewise when developers / publisher themselves call their own games, eg, "rogue-like", "souls-like", "old school", "metroidvania", etc, that is a literal invitation for reviewers to naturally compare them to their older namesakes.

What if the modded experience IS the baseline/majority experience for most people, or the proper way to play(for games that needed fan "love" to get right and the like)?

I think if one mentions what version they are judging then such a review should be fine as that would be transparent and not trying to hide anything.

I don't think it's a problem to review "the" modded experience that you get when you install an unofficial patch that fixes problems the original developers never bothered with.

However, there are big games where there is no "the" modded experience, but a bazillion different modded experiences. And then there are games with mods that dramatically alter gameplay & balance, or completely rework the graphics (or even the entire engine). That's the territory where it gets annoying for someone thinking of purchasing the base game and wanting to hear how it is.

Also, something I've run into personally: friend says that I should play game X which is awesome (he's in love with mods). So I get game X and find it boring and ask about it. "Oh yeah, the base game is kinda boring but it's awesome with mods." So I ask, OK, give me that awesome mod. Friend asks, "okay, so what do you like?"

See where this is going?
"I know a superb movie, you should totally watch it!"
"ok, sure, give me the movie"
"so what would you like to watch?"
"dude, you told me you had a good movie in mind.."

People make a recommendation by hyping some game with mods, and when you want that oh-so-awesome experience, you get put in the place of someone about to ask for a specific sort of recommendation. It's happened more than once and I find it quite irritating.

How are such reviews or recommendations a problem if they clearly state you need x or y mod to make it as they claim it is for the ratings they gave?

And if they don't what is stopping people from doing a bit of research to verify what they meant with their review(modded vs unmodded)?

As I said I find it would be ok if someone reviewed a game and said what they liked about the base game and a modded version and clearly listed which version they were praising and why.

But they don't. They don't clearly state which mod it is that makes it so awesome. They just gush about how awesome the game is.

The friend's point is probably that the game is awesome precisely because it offers so much freedom and variety with regards to mods that there's something to be enjoyed for everyone. But if you're not into that sort of thing, I can understand that such recommendations are useless to you.

DON'T DO THIS:

I don't fully agree with people not saying that a game is "the best ever". Of course there is no game that is "objectively perfect" but that doesn't mean that people can't reason why they feel a game is amazing or not. In fact, not doing so would deny the purpose of ranking games (into categories of any kind) itself. Of course no reviewer is "objectively correct" in any of the sentiments they state, because doing so would lead to huge reviews that require "proof" with screenshots to boot.

I 100% agree that simple one liner reviews don't help anyone. At least people should slightly elaborate why and how much they like a game or not for any reason they can provide. You wrote this because of me :P? Never did that in any of my reviews without contextualizing exactly what modding accounts for compared to the "regular" experience. At any case, lets make something clear. Modding in general is in itself an extrinsic extension of the game (you put things upon things from people who try to access and modify the existing files which is unintended of what the developers wanted). However, in some games you can add things within already established things, if the developers enabled you to do it (for instance, overwrite code with other code), which may break things if you don't know what you're doing. Some games do invite you to let you do this, because thats what the developers wanted and intended users to do (or in other terms, the devs designed the game based around these ideas). Even if your statement is a simple and very innocuous statement, saying that Skyrim was not designed in this way is simply not true, because in this regard the developers put effort to make modding an intrinsical as like it is already a thing that the engine accounts for. Simply because it is designed with modding in mind.

Besides this, I also partially agree to anything the user clarry has stated (mods create a difficult to describe a quantifyable experience as modding is a more personal experience than just playing through since with modding there are more processes involved than just playing and experiencing the game which is also a hugely appealing to modders), even though movies and games aren't exactly same in their philosophy (you can't really interact with a movie the same you can with a game). In all honestly, even a "fixated" game that always plays out in the same way, one that is also unmodable can let different people experience different things even if the experience plays out in the same way for anyone, simply because it involves interaction. I'm refering to the essence of criticism regarding judgement here. Not every experience is experienced in the same way, if you get what I mean. With that in mind, it leads into making modding more appealing but it also depends for instance what mods (and kind of mods) are talked about within the contents of your review. For instance, there is nothing wrong in including certain mods inside your review if you establish this before typing about it, so people understand what the writer means and implies.

In general though I have a vast tendency of agreeing with most of your (refering to Darvon here if that was unclear) sentiments you wrote, however the last part of the last sentence you put is simply just objectively wrong and since I have some experience with TES games I feel to point it out. Bethesda absolutely programmed and intrinsicially designed (it is part of the game itself even if you don't want to access it) the game with modifications in mind and have stated that they put considerable effort into making it so (Skyrim is far more sophisticated than Oblivion and Morrowind in that regard of course).

I mean even without knowing this its not difficult to figure out how the structure of the game itself is and how to change things (SKSE implementation included, it simply just another indication that shows how the devs though ahead in letting players include extrinsic tools that incorperates established frameworks of the game). They would've never structured the way the game is coded (I don't mean the gameplay itself, but how the data is structured and labeled inside the game and how it is read) the way it is. So with this is mind I could argue that at least Skyrim is primarily made to be modable rather than it is not.

So are Morrowind and Oblivion also included or excluded by the same rules, because they're somehow different? I honestly think that Morrowind and Skyrim share more similarities in the way it is designed. For instance, both implemted ways to make data structures in their games more humanly readable and stuff like that, however Skyrims updated engine is far more stable and sophisticated than Morrowinds engine (for instance, Skyrim breaks down far less if you apply sophisticated mods, and the FO4 code used to power Skyrim: Special Edition runs them even more stable) but some of the foundation Skyrim is of course already built around Morrowinds coding and design philosophies. You can compare the Morrowind editor compared to the FarCry/Crysis editor which is in itself a more userfriendly iteration of original development tools, etc. As for Oblivion, I believe its honestly a little bit stagnated and probably less stable than Skyrim, compared to just how the game is created around the ease of changing stuff within the game (via an editor or otherwise).

If you look though the game with a reader like TESxEDIT you can probably see most of my points here and that it could be a interesting introduction for you into how the game works. So no, at least Skyrim was build around the philosophy to let users mod it, and it is in fact a instrinsic part of the game compared to building a game that players much throughly hack first in order to modify it, which there are lots of examples as well, such as Dragons Dogma. So you can't say that the developers didn't thought about modding since in reality they simply thought about it and implemented ways for people to mod it. Another example, even before the Skyrim Creation Kit came out people were suprised how easily readable stuff was and thus people made mods a year prior before it "officially" became modable.

If you disagree, at least state why modding isn't allowed to talk about if the devs themselves put considerable effort into letting players to modify their game (conpared to letting players figure things out it themselves while developers completly ignored that aspect, otherwise you simply just cheaply consider things from an outsiders standpoint without at least looking into the subject matter yourself. This might be true on many other games but not this example), based around how the game is structured with low-level modding in mind rather than being almost unreadable and unmodifyable whenever a skilled third party developer attempts to modify a game. And those ones are the kind of games which the developers didn't put any thought into if we take what you wrote into consideration, because those are the ones that aren't designed around these mentioned concepts that I've indicated and described.

At any case, sorry that I wrote too much to read but I could've easily wrote "you're wrong" or trying to be snarky for no good reason but then I honestly wouldn't have even bothered to explain why Skyrim might be a different than the other games you could've choosen which would more accurately apply to your statement, all while giving people a reason to actually discuss your point. Responding in a short and snarky way would just be disgusting and bad behavior on my end and I don't want to insult people over silly things like these, which is why I want to provide a different viewpoint while elaborating. And you (or me or anyone else) don't combat falsehoods or false claims with that sort of simplistic one sided approach of being snarky because that can further lead to ignorance. I'm not saying you're ignorant or anything like that. Besides, you've probably have very profound reasons to say the things you say, but even then you don't state anything that brings anything substantial nor benefits anything that may underline why you're stating and thats inside a thread that basically implores people to elaborate on their points :P. So in my opinion, the best way to get the facts straight so you understand why you're wrong is to try to modify the game yourself and look up the data, try to make sense of it, read the official documentation (which wouldn't exist if the developers didn't design the game around these methods), understand how the game itself behaves when you mod it and how the engine itself may works. And if you want a more complicated approach, look up modding tutorials and download mods while trying to make the most stable modding experience that you can have. For instance, try to create your own and own stability patches, which is more difficult than you might think (or easier, once you understood how modifying stuff works with that specific game and got the hang of it).

EDIT: Elaborated a bit and made things slightly more readable. Its a subject with quite a lot of variety, at least when it comes to nuances. Talking about these things is very much a philosophical discussion, some people talked about this subject thousands of years prior before people even had computers, if you ever dived inside the subject of objective/subjective criticism which should happen quite often around the internet but thats just what I assume :P. I also hope that clarry sees this statement. I didn't quote clarry simply because I didn't want to clutter this post with even more stuff. Also thats quite a lot of stuff I wrote, but that was stuff that I had to elaborate on further.