The German print-magazine PC Games does that. Not all of their reviews land on their website, however. You best take a look for yourself: http://www.pcgames.de/Artikel-Archiv/Tests/

Politicians are sandwitched between press and companies?

There was another good one too where Andrew Park on Gamespot got bagged for reviewing Planetside without having actually spent any reasonable amount of time playing it. I forget the details of that incident but soon thereafter, Andrew's video reviews were no more. He was replaced.

That said, I like Kevin Van Ord's reviews on Gamespot generally speaking. I do not always agree with him but they are intelligently written and he does point out reasons for his various opinions. So from those I can gather some useful information that helps me decide if I think I'd like a given game whether or not he happened to like it. That to me marks a decent reviewer, giving reasons for his opinions that help me form my own opinion.

I'm pretty much in the same mindset as you too. A review should go over what the reviewer did and didn't like, but explain the reasoning behind why they felt like that in an entertaining and clear way. For all the faults of Gamespot and IGN (and there are many) I don't know any other site that goes right into the details like they do. While sometimes this winds up reading like a checklist or a series of bullet points, if you have a particular question or concern odds are they cover it at some point in their three and four page write-ups.

I personally don't usually need that amount of detail in a review, as odds are I can figure that out from trailers, screenshots and press releases. I just like to read about how others enjoyed their experiences with the game. It's kind of a food for thought discussion starter for me.

As for scores, they're a necessary evil for Metacritic, but you should pretty much just ignore it until you've read the review. Or better yet ignore them completely.

Were I a more irritating egotistic person, I would give you a link to my own blog :3

I've learned to ignore journalists. Nowadays I ask the opinion of people I know, or I go to metacritic and check the user reviews - both the really positive and the really negative ones. It does make a world of difference if you know what the good points and bad points of a game are. Sometimes the bad points are things you know won't bother you, other times you can tell the "nitpicks" would ruin your fun.

In my mind it's not just that most real reviewers are crap / paid off; it's also that tasts can be very different.

Yes, but they call them "condoms", it's technical jargon;)

Well, I do try my best to be as unbiased and fair a reviewer as I can. And I've been told by many credible sources that I am a good writer. That's about all the bragging I can do :P

http://bit.ly/HxrAdk

I'd check out my written reviews first, not the LTAs. They're far more polished and "presentable." The LTSs are basically just recordings of me blabbing about stuff.

And yes, I realize that I do a lot of this whole "linking other people to my blog for any reason at all" thing.

Sorry for being late to the party - I had trouble finding my pitchfork... but my torch is burning bright ! Who were we lynching again ?

What do you mean we're not ? Isn't this the angry mob badmouthing a group of people with impunity ? I must have the wrong address...
- - -
I think game reviewers should (as they do) stay positive. Almost every game has it's "thing" that is enjoyable, unique or fascinating about it. A good review should bring this to light, explain what approach you have to take or what kind of person should you be to appreciate it. Of course - shortcomings need to be mentioned but unless they are truly unforgivable, they are more "keep-in-mind" sort of things than flat-out "warnings".
If you like a given game - tap into this satisfaction, try to elaborate upon its nature. It frustrations abound - notify the reader.
I've been recently browsing headphone reviews and they are full to the brim of clauses such as "if you like them sounding neutral, as I do, you will definitely appreciate (...)" - conditional statements that appraise the value of a given product based on different trade-offs. Since no game can be everything for everyone at once - trade-offs are inevitable and precisely the thing to fixate on (if on anything).
I'm sure there's much to point out that I've missed but as long as the review you're dealing with is comprised of text, screenshots or gameplay footage - it is likely to be filled with cold facts you can evaluate yourselves. As long as statements are reasonably specific - I'm fairly certain the review-writer is going to remain honest while making them, otherwise you could easily call him out on them. When it comes to bias, it's more likely to be in presenting certain facts while omitting others, embellishing the truth through overly high praise of strengths of a given title... but not downright LIES.
In conclusion - the READER should also have a mind of his own and know what information he can take away from a given review and what he needs to find out either by reading others, watching some gameplay footage, browsing forums, etc...

I think this thread is a fairly good sampling of why game reviews are hard to get right.

A lot of people mention the number scores, which are a part of the review which is extremely frequently focused on, but extremely low value. What does a 9/10 game mean? What does a 5/10 game mean? What if I would love one 9/10 game but hate another 9/10 game? I've played 5/10 games and had a ball with them. So what is this number for? It certainly doesn't tell me if I personally am going to be moved, challenged, entertained, or tickled by the game. Heck, it rarely even does a good job of capturing all those things for the general audience. The number conflates production values, pacing, mechanics, mood, and many other things. But yet, it's the most popular part of reviews.

Do people just want to be told what to buy from reviews, hence the desire for these numbers, or do they want to use them as some kind of measuring stick to see which game is 'winning'? Given the outpouring of anger in the worthless "comments" section of most game review sites, I'd bet a large number of people are just using it as a proxy for opinion validation. And where's the value in that?

Of those who want more than a number, they frequently want to be told enough to decide whether to buy it or not. That's a pretty valid desire from a review. But this is typically structured in a pretty awful way. Graphics: good, Music: great, Combat: so/so. Story: pretty good. Okay well, conveying those things is probably something you should do in the review, but what about the synthesis of them? How effective is the game? What works well vs what doesn't work well?

Basically when I look at game reviews, I compare them to reviews of other popular mediums: books, movies, music, plays. When I read those I get a sense of the tone, the context, the message, how the various aspects work together well or don't. I get a sense of cultural relevance if only by accident. I *also* learn whether I'd enjoy it, but largely from making that mapping myself from the themes, content, focus, tone to those I know I enjoy. In games the only mapping I can typically do is of the mechanics: Oh another JPRG with lots of hidden variables; pass.

But complaining about the missing depth from game reviews / criticism is something that's rarely done outside of academia or certain clusters of like-minded individuals. "Film buffs" are generally interested in this kind of depth, while "hard core gamers" are not.

So I posit that we (collectively) actually want shallow, uninteresting reviews, that tell us very little except whether to buy it or not. At that point you're not encouraging much of a profession and when they suggest buying something that you don't want, you can feel betrayed, but it's not like the medium has much of a way to convey the correct answer to the correct people.

And without any internal integrity over a good work, pride suffers, and thus integrity. No shock there.


Oh, and as a coda: that doesn't get into how complex games are. As the number of dimensions of a work increase, and the number of different things the audience is looking for tends to stray away from each other, it becomes harder to write a good coherent review that speaks to the audience.

I completely agree... and I thought I was the only one who thought this :P. I've only ever written one negative review, and I don't think that I exercised good journalism (I didn't finish the game, yet was presumptuous enough to write a review that implied that I had a clear, full picture of it). Almost every game I've ever come across had good elements, if you dug deep enough. And I believe that it's a reviewer's responsibility to dig that deep.

DWTerminator's review of STALKER Shadow of Chernobyl is a perfect example of how NOT to do a negative videogame review. It's aggressively judgmental, and seems to actively look for reasons to hate the game. To the point where it seems like he went into the game desiring to hate it. In a later video about STALKER Clear Sky (which was not a review, admittedly), he only played 20 minutes, and claims that there was nothing at all in the first 20 minutes that interested him. Not only that, he seems to think that his lack of enjoyment insulates him from any possible criticism (i.e, people pointing out that it's ridiculous to think that you've gotten a good picture of a game as massive as STALKER CS in a mere 20 minutes). Would this be fine for a regular gamer? Of course. Everyone is entitled to play what they like, and not play what they don't enjoy. But if you're going to put yourself out there as a reviewer and expect that people are going to want to hear your opinion about things, then it's your responsibility to make sure you take extra care in forming well-informed, fair judgements. If you don't do that, you're no different from any other meathead out there with an opinion and a registered version of Fraps. There's nothing wrong with that, per se... but it also doesn't deserve much respect. Not when there are genuinely insightful and unbiased critics (Waltorious being a prime example) out there.

DWT's extreme dislike of STALKER made me lose respect for him as a gamer, but it was his surprisingly bull-headed panning of it and refusal to acknowledge any good qualities that made me lose respect for him as a reviewer. Which is a shame, because he seems like a good guy, and I like that he covers a lot of old games as well as newer titles.

Even if all the OP writes is true, it's no worse then the kind of stupidity you get with "Fan" based Journalism".

Yeah, and the OTHER setback of this practice is that you've people + editors rushing through games and editorial quality assurance, which is the OTHER part of the explanation on why reviews are of dubious quality both as an accurate game review and as a more or less well written piece of prose.

I hate this argument and I have no idea why people always say this. The number is not supposed to indicate why or what they like about the game, it's just to indicate how highly they thought of the game as a whole.. If somebody in a "real life" conversation wants to be concise and briefly say they thought a movie/game whatever was excellent, do you go off on a rant on how silly that is, and how it doesn't tell you why they thought the movie was excellent?