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No, not the Call of Duty kind, but the modern descendants of Space Invaders. For instance, one of my favorite genres are shooting games (STGs). Especially when it comes to niche games they don’t seem know what they are looking at. Jim Sterling’s review of Vanquish may be an egregious example, but the average games journalist is hardly an expert. Enthusiastic reception of this game by actual players, like on NeoGAF, seems to indicate that I’m not the only one who had been very impressed by it. Frankly, I thought that Vanquish was absolutely fantastic and that it reaches a high-water mark for action games. I found the game mechanic to be highly satisfying, and with some practice, it’s quite easy to get into a state of flow. This is not as bad as it may sound since the energy meter replenishes very quickly. The core mechanic is therefore to find a rhythm for your attacks. You then have to allow it to cool down, which makes you vulnerable to enemy attacks since you can neither defend yourself properly nor quickly evade. If you completely replete the energy meter, your combat suit overheats. However, there is a risk/reward mechanism built in. The issue is that the energy meter that enables you to perform more powerful attacks depletes as you do your little tricks. Several times, I punched an enemy, failed to kill it thanks to Sam’s inability to aim his punches properly, and was killed because I could neither defend myself or swiftly escape. Sam actually needs energy to punch his opponents, and once he’s landed a single successful punch, he can’t glide away since the energy meter completely drains. This was seemingly too much effort for Jim Sterling, so he wrote:

The game is a bit more complex than in, say, Call of Duty, but you’ll get amply rewarded if you spend a few minutes to learn the controls. Vanquish isn’t a “cover-based shooter” in the vein of Gears of War but instead puts heavy emphasis on offensive play.

METACRITIC SOULCALIBUR IV HOW TO

He gave the game a 5 out of 10, and every single word he wrote indicates that he just didn’t get how to play this game.

Here is a prime example: the Destructoid review of Vanquish by Platinum Games, written by Jim Sterling. It’s also quite obvious that many mainstream reviewers don’t understand particular genres or, well, just plain suck at playing video games. Also, I couldn’t help but notice that gaming websites are plastered with ads, so the obvious assumption is that those sites don’t want to bite the hand that feeds them and therefore promote “AAA titles”, while they spend little attention to games that cater to a niche audience. I also noticed that some games I tremendously enjoyed, such as Vanquish, received a rather lukewarm reception. Thus, I wondered how legitimate video game journalism really is. I’ve now had about a handful of experiences were the glowing reception of the games by reviewers didn’t at all match my subjective experience. Games like Red Dead Redemption were great, but others didn’t quite live up to my expectations. Some of my buying choices were influenced by reviews on websites. I recently bought an Xbox 360 since I was interested in playing a couple of recent games.

Metacritic soulcalibur iv