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Sunday, December 25, 2011

How To Write An Effective Video Game Review?

Basically, writing a review on anything is subjective because you are appealing to your own ideas, appreciation or impression. While it is given a review writer should base what he writes about something he had first-hand experience with, he should be able to give objective facts and not depend on his own thoughts.

Again, writing a review is subjective but a reviewer should base his subjective perception on the objective facts and confirm or deny them based on his experience.

The best example of this is when you are reviewing a car in which the engineers who designed it say it can reach up to 200 miles per hour. The reviewer should, if allowed to do the test drive, see if it can indeed reach up to that top speed. If so, only then a reviewer could confirm that the car lives up to the expectations.

So, how will you review a video game?

You Should Play - there is no way you can produce a good and honest review of a video game if you haven't played it. Therefore, you should spend some time to play it and discover about the things you heard about the game and compare them to your own gaming experience.

Evaluate the Graphics - for modern video games, the graphical representation is very important because they give life to a game; hence, the name "video" game. Evaluating the graphics would require you to switch to different resolution and screen size and see if the performance is affected by every setting. You should also see if the game provides what the developers promised regarding the video.

Listen and Criticize the Audio - listening is definitely different from criticizing. You should first listen so that you will know how the audio is being recorded and put into the game. If you have heard enough, criticize it and extract some facts from your experience.

Learn the Controls - playing a video game well means you should also learn how to effectively use the controls then be mindful of the sensitivity of every button or keys. Some games are just not so responsive than others. If you need to differentiate the control sensitivity with other games, then do so but don't overdo it.

Learn the Gist of the Story - learning the story of the video game is easier than you thought but evaluating whether it is competitive is difficult. However, you have to be honest about this because most of the gamers base their interest on the storyline of the game. If you're playing a sequel, for example Mass Effect 3, you should research about the storyline of the first two iterations and see if there is continuity.

1 comment:

  1. Nice post. I've posted a few news articles and misc ones, but I've been a bit nervous about writing my blog's first game review. So really appreciate this guide.

    I'll definitely be adding a link back to this on my blog. Hope that's fine. ;)

    www.OgreJungle.com

    ReplyDelete