21h ago

Let's Talk About Game Reviews

I love watching game reviews on YouTube, but I find many reviewers sharing these annoyances:

Loud background music making it difficult to listen to the actual review
Spending way too much time talking about the story. I only want to know the theme of the story, not the entire plot
Making it a game tutorial. It is helpful to briefly describe the game mechanics so I can find out whether the game is for me. But it becomes excessive when you explain it in detail.

What I want to hear more:

Whether the game is good
How it compares with other games in the genre
How is the music in the game?

Game channels I like/recommend:
TheKisekiNut, JohnRiggs, MortismalGaming, davidvinc, gameranx, ircha

Can someone recommend other good gaming channels? I especially like retro games.

10 comments

I only play 3 genres, so I probably won't be of much help:
1. For action games, my go to is Combat Overview.
2. For shmups, TheElectricUnderground.
3. For fighting games, I don't watch anyone in particular, but you can't go wrong with Sajam/Max.
My only rule is: the reviewer's level of interest in/knowledge about the genre has to match mine.
Caveat: this list isn't really for OP, as my tastes for video game content seems pretty removed from theirs (based on their list of pet peeves), but I always like to recommend compelling video essayists when I find them.
Grim Beard - Resident head of Goth Gamer Nation. Specializes in movie length retrospectives of primarily 90s-2000s action and adventure games of a certain trenchcoat wearing persuasion. Typically breaks things down into production history, story breakdown (with a spoiler break to allow folks to skip any big reveals), mechanics review, and bitter recompense (in which he dredges up contemporary reviews and responds to them, good or bad). Interstitial skits break up the sections.
TehSnakerer - another video essayist, he has less of a defined style than Grim Beard (unless English is a style). He's been doing breakdowns of the Yakuza series for years now, and he has a fair amount of content about Sonic, eastern European FPS jank, Watch Dogs jank, and a smattering of other types of games as well, mostly occupying the AA market space. Again, VERY thorough breakdowns is the name of the game.
Avalanche Reviews: From what I gather, a weeb who lives or lived in Japan and focuses on the survival horror genre. Typically goes into more detail than most surrounding A/V details and port comparisons, if that's of interest.
Research Indicates: Not so much a channel recommendation, as I believe it's been mostly dark for like a decade now, but his "Let's Play" (back when that was still a phenomenon mostly constrained to the Something Awful forums) of Jurassic Park: Trespasser set a standard for the format which no one else has touched as far as I'm concerned. Intercutting clips from the movies, passages from the novels, production history, and so on, it feels like a docudrama at times.
Sphere Hunter: occupies the same sort of space as Avalanche Reviews (i.e. Japanese survival horror), but with a very different presenter style.
Accursed Farms / Ross' Game Dungeon: You may know him from the Freeman's Mind series of machinima videos, or, more recently, from spearheading the Stop Killing Games initiative, but he's been cranking out videos looking at retro oddities for years now.
SsethTzeentach - schizophrenia simulator masquerading as a review channel, but, for all of the editing gags and left field references, he still manages to assemble decent recommendations and rationales for why you might check out the game being profiled.
Mandalore Gaming - Sseth, but he's on his meds. Any of his Warhammer game videos are a good intro to his style, but I've got a special place in my heart for when he's taking on batty 90s adventure games, so I'll recommend his Limbo of the Lost video.
Hope someone finds something of interest.
Call me a dinosaur, but I actually prefer written reviews. Like, I don't need 20 minutes+ of talking about something to know if I should buy it or not.
One channel I will shout out though is Graeldon because I think the gimmick of reviewing every Steam game in alphabetical order is quite funny.
- Noisy Pixel reviews are usually less than 10 minutes long. Some channels are more like video essays instead of just reviews.
  Thanks for the suggestion on Graeldon. It really is unique.
I'd much rather read a review. Takes 2 minutes. I don't want to listen to some randomer trying to be funny and dragging out their video for way too long.
I'm a big fan of Second Wind ever since they split from The Escapist (you may be familiar with the long-running Zero Punctuation review series, now "Fully Ramblomatic"). Reviews of big name and indie games from an employee-owned business
- That's a great suggestion thanks. I've almost forgotten about Zero Punctuation. Liked ZP but didn't like how fast he talked. Seems to have improved a little bit with Ramblomatic.
  
  I mean he does talk about the story a lot.
I love seeing activity in this community, I really like this one even though I'm bad at contributing personally (though that's not just in this community but in general).
I share your frustrations but I don't know that I have any great recommendations. These days I'm mostly a patient gamer, so I can largely forgo reviews and simply play games that have an easily accessible consensus on their quality.
I tend to look for like a "first hour playthrough" type videos and just skip to some gameplay.

10 comments