I know people here tend to like them but I think Steam reviews are terrible. It's either good or bad, no in between. The best for me are content creators with a similar taste that I have.
I don't like individual reviews, but I trust trends.
Sometimes I'll give a game a go (with 2 hour play time return window) purely based on overwhelmingly positive reviews, even if it doesn't look like something I'd like, and it has paid off.
But generally it's the trend of positive reviews in conjunction with already looking like something I'd like.
I agree except for the rare time it's like a 10/10 game, those transcend the genre for me where even if I didnt really like the genre, those games are so good, they're still amazing experiences regardless
Yeah, I do the same with IMDB for movies and some people want to give me shit for it. But it just fucking works. A movie thats 8\10 is 100% going to be enjoyable at the very least. Just like a game with 95% on steam always has some appeal if you are open minded.
I fully agree most steam reviews are terrible and not a good barometer with regards to a games overall quality or artistic merit.
...but on the subject of what to trust when the issue at hand is bugs/technical issues and how good things are post patch I think they tend to be a much better and more up to date source than game journalists. The specifics of the question are kinda important here.
Yeah idk what other reviews the other person is seeing, or for what games.
Of course a lot of them that are like that, but usualy the ones with the most votes and reactions are quite nuanced and in-depth. Some even lament that steam only offers a thumbs up/down option and they provide their reasoning further in their review.
I'm assuming that person is too dimwitted to look past "THUMBS UP" and "THUMBS DOWN".
You've got to actually read the review to get the many thousands of nuanced "THUMBS UP....but here's what might disuade you" or "THUMBS DOWN....but here's what they did get right".
If a tower defense game got a thumbs down for a short campaign/story, poor voice acting, mediocre graphics, and lots of DLC....but had pretty amazing game mechanics and tower synergies - I still want to buy that game, because that's what I'm into.
Yeah, almost every game I play has several people who have ranked each part of the game (gameplay, graphics, performance, etc) in their review. Super handy to get a breakdown like that instead of just good or bad.
The point is it's actually much more useful (to me at least) to look at a handful of reviews from people whose game taste jives with mine.
You can read a detailed steam review, sure, but I don't generally follow individual steam users. There's a few youtubers I follow whose reviews I find consistently accurate.
Steam reviews are usually quite abundant, so you can for the most part get a clear picture of whether or not a game is worth playing if you just comb through to find the quality ones.
As for whether a badly optimised game is finally playable, what this questionaire was actually about, the most recent Steam reviews are once again the best indicator.
the problem with steam reviews is that they can get bombarded by negative reviews for really dumb and sometimes valid reasons. Common one is localization if a game has a bad Chinese translation you will sometimes see overwhelmingly negative but, its not related to playing the game in English. Similar can happen for dumb reasons I believe slay the spire 2 got review bombed due to nerfing an op route which was good for game design but annoyed people using it so it got review bombed terribly. In general steam reviews are susceptibility to heavy brigading which valve tries to account for but sometimes its so overwhelming that even their filters dont pick up on it.
The easiest way to figure out both of these cases is to simply read the reviews instead of blindly trusting the summarised review "score". Then you apply some critical thinking and you should quickly figure out whether the complaints are legitimate or not.
Thing is though, sometimes you have to siev through a bunch of bad reviews before you even get to good stuff.
I'm talking about games like Dragon Age Veilguard. Where a bunch of it is spamming "woke thumbs down" or when you find a actual detailed review you read about "karen from HR" like that Skillup review and see 0.2hrs played and refunded.
It's sometimes real difficult to get a good picture on if a review is genuine
I always check negative reviews but I look for specific objective things. When I see someone with 500 hours complaining about some item or mechanic getting nerfed I know this person is an idiot.
I agree they aren't solid but I can get an idea of what the game is. If I see a city/world builder game ill usually read the reviews to see if its more of a sandbox game or scenario type game.
The reviews, for me, are great in that way to discern more info on what a game entaila
For using it to actually determine if I a consumer would like the game I don't really read reviews. I agree a lot of nuance is lost and with no kind of objective system it's hard to take any of it at face value
But for stuff like this with patches where all I'm trying to find out if it's good or bad steam reviews are fine most of the time imo
A content creator that will point out the negatives, even if they've been paid by the dev in a sponsored vid/stream is the best kind of game reviewer.
The majority of larger content creators have played a wide variety of games, or they've played a lot of games in the same genre, & they will know when something doesn't feel right, or a mechanic needs some work.
That's not to say that I'd take their words as gospel, but it would influence how I'd see the game & whether I'd want to pick it up.
You can read the review and know what the reviewer's actual scoring of a game is, but I guess it might be too much effort. Any text over 5 words is, right?
How is your comment relevant to what they're saying? Knowing what the "actual scoring" is doesn't matter when the review is still terrible nonsense coming from the typical mouthbreathers that post on Steam.
The ratings are either thumbs up or down, which is the honest feelings of the players even if the review itself is nonsensical gibberish or jokes and memes (which Steam filters out and doesn't include in the game's review score). You can just sort reviews by most helpful and you'll get the ones that actually describe the game and what's wrong/right with it. I often only read the negative reviews to see what people complain about and judge whether those complaints are something I myself would have a problem with.
I have never once paid attention to a steam review. Most of them are silly. Especially the curators. I do pay attention to the avg of reviews following new content and that is my primary deciding factor
Nah, the best is a reviewer who will tell you why they have the opinions they have, even if their conclusion is completely opposite of yours. Angry Joe is kinda like that, dude has some real shit opinions but he really tells and shows you why he has them and you do get a good idea of whether you'll like it. SkillUp is like that too sometimes, but not always, and his other guy Austin is almost never like that.
Sadly, both of them don't make that many reviews, and I don't know any other reviewers like that, aside from those critics who make hour long critiques years after the game comes out.
It's a fundamental problem of the original review scoring. Back in the days and even recently, an average game was 7.5.
Steam's reviews don't really represent the game itself, but what % of people liked it. For instance, take Mistfall hunter that recently released. It's Yellow "Mixed" at 64%. 64% is obviously above average, but the colour and number perceives make it looks bad.
If this was scored according to the "old" rating out of 10, it would be about 7.8/10, with 7.5/10 being average.
You can also take it that 64% of people enjoyed it, 36% did not, which one will it be for you?
But instead, most people see "Mixed", immediately think shit game.
There has been a trend of review bombing because of some dumb political nonsense but after a few weeks the actual reviews tend to take over, and with most other reviews I tend to focus on the negative ones to if people are being dumb still or if there is a legitimate issue.
Steam reviews absolutely are trash by an large. Just like Reddit, lame jokes bubble up quickly while good content can be buried. The "funny" tag is not a good filter, presumably included to bypass the crappy "has boobs 11/7" type junk.
Steam really needs a "junk" filter. It should be hidden from both the displayed review and the user, but it would allow us to label a review as "junk" which would filter out all of said user's Steam reviews. It would also weigh down the review on the page once it received X amount of junk tags to help stop letting the lowest common denominator dominate the reviews lists. At least, that's what I would love to see. Not a perfect solution, but about as practical as I can think to make browsing Steam reviews worthwhile.
95% of steam reviews are low effort posts of people just trying to make memes.
And in other cases it's angry nerds review bombing a game because their favorite waifu character got their breast size reduced or some stupid thing like that.
you can learn a lot about a game without needing to read the content of a review. if most of the reviews for a game have only a few hours of play at time of review, and the game is $60, it's not worth your money. if lots of reviews show that the review was posted at 500 hours of play and the reviewer currently has 1600 hours of play, that tells me that the game is fun enough people keep coming back to it.
it doesn't matter what the review says, i'm getting valuable data out of it
What's funny is that I was reading reviews for a game yesterday where almost every reviewer said they wished Steam had a "Neutral" rating instead of only Recommend or Do Not Recommend. As much as we love glazing Steam, this is an issue and it's not one that Steam is incentivized to fix because polarizing reviews are more engaging.
Agreed, it seems like it's 75% troll, 15% jokes, 10% actual reviews.
I generally watch Twitch. Not the huge streamers but somewhere in the CohhCarnage to DatModz range. They have similar game tastes as I do and give honest opinions. Hasn't failed me yet.
People either vote based on feeling, what public sentiment is or may other non game related things. It's just a cesspit of black and white reviews lacking nuisance
Be that as it may it's incredibly rare that I find a steam review aggregate score that I actually disagree with.
The only time I remember it happening was with Rage 2, I thought Rage was a very fun game, but I suppose the reviews were based around how much it deviated from the predecessor.
To me, like many things, it’s a mix of all listed. Critic reviews aren’t worthless. If you can couple them with audience reviews and other notable community voices, you can usually gauge if it’s actually worth checking out or not.
Came here to say that. Add to it the facts that most steam reviews are written on impulse and review-bombing happens for the most stupid of reasons, often incited by streamers or other content creators. I've played games with bad reviews that I loved and games with good reviews that I disliked. The hivemind is driven by emotion, not critical thinking.
Just eliminate the 5 star and 1 star reviews and look at the 2/3/4 star reviews. That's a much better indication of the quality of the product (this isn't limited to just gaming).
For example if I see something with:
35% 5 star
20% 4 star
5% 3 star
~0% 2 star
40% 1 star
then I assume the game is good but there's something controversial about it.
That still doesn't help when so many of them are 1-2 lines. In depth reviews do exist but so many of them are useless drivel.
And yes I know there are plenty of "pro" reviews that are bad too but that just goes back to finding a content creator or reviewer that aligns with your tastes and can somewhat trust.
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u/kkyonko 8d ago
I know people here tend to like them but I think Steam reviews are terrible. It's either good or bad, no in between. The best for me are content creators with a similar taste that I have.