How long before you can rate a game and why don't you stop?

A

akachan ningen

Member
I'm still pretty blown away by how many people say that you have to play a game to completion to rate it or even talk about it.

I remember when I played Brutal Legend, I played it for a few hours and it was so boring but people kept saying "it has RTS elements later" and shit like that so I played a little more. It didn't get better and actually, I felt like it got worse when I got to those RTS-like battles.

I feel like some people play a game they don't like all the way through so that they can slam it later without being called out for not finishing. As though a good finale is enough to redeem a bad game. I don't see how it could ever be enough.

Other times people will stick it out because they spent money on it but that's just as bad. It's like adding insult to injury. It's not enough to have wasted money, now you're going to prolong the torture on top of that?

If a game doesn't even begin to entertain me or interest me after a few hours, isn't that enough to decide that it sucks and I don't want to play it anymore? I guess it's better not to think about it in terms of hours because game lengths vary so much.

I guess what I would say is that a game should show you 80% of what the gameplay is like within the first 20% of the game or something close to that. And that should be enough to give your opinion on it.
 
It definitely depends on the game, some games you can figure out everything you need to know by watching a trailer and some games are Spec Ops: The Line.

I personally never feel compelled to finish a game I'm not enjoying.
 
in my country games are very expensive,like 90-110 dollars for a game,so if i buy any game here i fell obligated to play it to completion.This happened to me with Watch Dogs,to a point that when i finished it i wanted to never more look to that game.
 
Honestly when I started playing Monster Hunter back on the PS2 I quit because I thought it was a terrible game. When the third game was released on Wii I had a friend who thought it was fun and wanted to hunt with me, I disgruntledly got the game and played a couple of hours with him still insistent that the game sucked. In my books it was a 4/10 "avoid".

But then, it must of been at least 20 hours in that something finally ticked. I think it was around the time I couldn't beat the Lagiarcrus in the single player mode so I was essentially walled from continuing the game but then when I played online with my friends we scraped and skimped and barely made it through, beating the Lagiarcrus with less that 5 minutes left in the mission. It felt so good. So very good to beat it and all be screaming on Skype "WHOOP WHOOP OH MAN IT'S DEAD WE GOT IT" and then as we returned to the city lobby we all ran as fast as we could down to the black smith to immediately see what sort of weapons and armor we unlocked. We needed 'horns' and 'tails' so we figured out you needed to bash the head in and cut the tail but that added a whole other degree of difficulty to the hunt- then we all went down the rabbit hole. 200 hours of multiplayer later we beat the game and all had Alatreon armor (even though it sucked for it's skills it still felt good to wear it, like a badge of accomplishment)

It was quite a magical experience. Can't wait to replicate it with Monster Hunter 4.
 
mp1990 said:
in my country games are very expensive,like 90-110 dollars for a game,so if i buy any game here i fell obligated to play it to completion.This happened to me with Watch Dogs,to a point that when i finished it i wanted to never more look to that game.
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Damn, dude. If it's that expensive, wouldn't it be better to sell or trade while it's still worth something? Or maybe there are options to rent?
 
I don't know, maybe 30 minutes after the tutorial. I'm sure it's different for others, but I've been gaming over 30 years and find it quite easy to figure out what a game is like. I hear others say you can't judge a game by youtube or twitch which is completely false. As for the second part, I do stop playing a game if I'm not enjoying it.
 
If you're a game reviewer, more than a few hours.

The problem is that publishers know that reviewers will only play the first couple hours, so they concentrate in making that part of the experience good and ignore the rest of the game. For example, the new Sim City and Bravely Default.
 
I try to make an effort to finish every game that I start, it's not so much to cover my own ass if somebody calls me out for not finishing something before slamming it but it's more like a mild OCD / personal challenge kind of thing.

There's only one game I've started that I've never actually finished, and that's Splatterhouse. The game continually froze and wiped my progress for roughly six hours straight so I just gave up and returned it.
 
Depends on the genre, I'd say. RPGs should be given a fair amount of time as they frequently take a while to really get going- Persona 4, one of the most beloved JRPGs of the past decade, arguably has the slowest start of any RPG since Dragon Quest 7. With an action game, on the other hand, you can pretty much figure out if you're going to like it or not in the first hour or two.

As my backlog has piled up I've personally come to feel less guilty about leaving games unfinished. For a while I'd put off gaming at all because I felt like I had to knock out the chore of finishing the game I was on despite not really being into it before moving on to something that I might find more interesting.
 
You cannot rate an entire game based on the first sequence, any more than you can rate a film by the opening act. Sure, a film with a shitty opening act is unlikely to recover by the end, but there are loads of films that start slow and build to something great, or start out great but fall apart towards the end.

If you rate a game while you're still in the honeymoon phase, you're not going to be objective. That's how we get bullshit like "oscar-worthy script" (GTAIV) or "perfectly engineered to dispense the maximum amount of fun in the most efficient way possible" (Sim City).
 
akachan ningen said:
If a game doesn't even begin to entertain me or interest me after a few hours, isn't that enough to decide that it sucks and I don't want to play it anymore?
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No, playing a few hours of a game isn't enough to decide that the entire game "sucks."

You can say "The game was so horrible in the first few hours that I couldn't stand playing any more of it" and provide feedback on those few hours - as long as you're up-front about the fact that's all you're doing.

But, if you haven't at least played through the game, then no, it's not enough to be able to provide any sort of judgement on the game as a whole.
 
By your own reckoning, Brutal Legends was a worser game overall than the beginning so you needed to play that far to give your overall opinion. If you had only played the beginning you may have been more favourable in your rating, thus misleading for the overall game!
 
i'll put it this way. you better make clear where the effort was put. single player or multiplayer. no one has both and never will, except for the original modern warfare.

second, i'm always looking for a game where i can rest my hat every single time. if your creating a game and not an environment, your doing it wrong. if i cant put 100 hours into a game, you fell short. plain and simple.

too many developers putting out hype and no substance. even most AAA games dont cut it anymore. thats why these indie games hold more weight than big titles. they care and they are actually trying.

best games of my lifetime: bad company 2, burnout 3, morrowind...end of story. everything else has been a fly by night experience.
 
If I bought it, I'm gonna play it. The only games I've retired early are fighters I couldn't get into or that were killed prematurely (eyes on you capcom).
 
akachan ningen said:
Damn, dude. If it's that expensive, wouldn't it be better to sell or trade while it's still worth something? Or maybe there are options to rent?
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there are othee options,but i really have this itch that i like to have the games on my stand,so i can't ger comfortable selling the games.
 
You don't need to finish it but I do think it's not a good idea to play half of a game and then make a full glowing or full scathing judgement.That said, I won't continue to play a game I'm not enjoying, that's a huge waste of time.
 
gblues said:
You cannot rate an entire game based on the first sequence, any more than you can rate a film by the opening act. Sure, a film with a shitty opening act is unlikely to recover by the end, but there are loads of films that start slow and build to something great, or start out great but fall apart towards the end.

If you rate a game while you're still in the honeymoon phase, you're not going to be objective. That's how we get bullshit like "oscar-worthy script" (GTAIV) or "perfectly engineered to dispense the maximum amount of fun in the most efficient way possible" (Sim City).
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Yeah, but If you are already becoming biased against it during that honeymoon phase, then it isn't going to recover for you. Pointing out the failings, which will be repeated throughout the title (since that's how games work with re-used code for things like interface, controls, timing, etc). I mean, if you are looking at it from a plot only perspective, then sure you have to tough it out, but from a mechanics and play perspective not really.
 
Gotdatmoney said:
That said, I won't continue to play a game I'm not enjoying, that's a huge waste of time.
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Which is certainly fair enough for someone playing a game for themselves, or for casual conversation on a message board.

But if someone is purporting to provide a "review" of the game, putting up with that stuff is part of the expectation (albeit not part of the reality - and is one of many reasons why most online "reviews" are fairly worthless).
 
Half an hour, if it doesn't death grip my balls and make me want more by then it's out. I may keep my mind more open if it comes highly recommended by trusted droogs, but I'm a busy man.
 
Sometimes you have to either learn and understand the mechanics of the game before you "get" it. Two of my favorite games this gen -titanfall and BF4- I didn't like at first because I just didn't understand how to play it and with no real idea how to play initially they are very intimidating


On the other hand sometimes you just have to get past the point in the game where they stop holding your hand and let you explore and get an idea of how the game operates before you can make a judgement. Some games that come to mind in this regard is the batman series and the recent tomb raider game.
 
I generally know if I like a game or not within five minutes of actually playing, but I have to finish a game before I feel comfortable assigning a score or giving a recommendation one way or the other.
 
The second a reviewer mentions that he's only played the first few hours of the game, I stop reading right there. I enjoy reading early impressions, positive or negative, but if you have not completed the game, you have no business giving it a rating, IMO.
 
We're not getting paid to write reviews here. As long as you're up front about it, it shouldn't be a big deal. Meaning, if you only played an hour and you hated it, at least say that you only played an hour, and base your critiques around that hour. But don't play it for an hour and then act like you've played the whole game.

"I played it for an hour, and I hated it so much I couldn't keep playing." - A valid comment. Nobody should reasonably expect you to continue playing a game you hate just so you can talk about it on message boards.

"I played it for an hour, and I hated the core game mechanics so much that I couldn't see myself ever enjoying anything else the game had to offer." - Also valid.

"I played it for an hour, and I could tell by that hour that the whole game sucks." - Not so valid.
 
terrisus said:
Which is certainly fair enough for someone playing a game for themselves, or for casual conversation on a message board.

But if someone is purporting to provide a "review" of the game, putting up with that stuff is part of the expectation (albeit not part of the reality - and is one of many reasons why most online "reviews" are fairly worthless).
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For a review I expect them to play a large chunk of the game or at the very least disclose what they did play. You don't have to play all of it though. It can be irrelevant at times to play all of it if the general idea of the game has already set in. I don't expect a reviewer to play 150 hours of Monster Hunter to review it. That's unreasonable.

I haven't read a review to make a decision for a game in like 4-5 years. I don't really find them necessary for me personally. That said, I don't think they are useless.
 
Gotdatmoney said:
I don't expect a reviewer to play 150 hours of Monster Hunter to review it. That's unreasonable.
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I disagree, unless part of their review is pointing out they couldn't bring themselves to play to the end of it, and so can't provide a judgement on the material toward the end, how things come together toward the end, the ending, and such like that.
 
If I give a game an hour or two and it's ass, I think I should be allowed to call it ass (without having to qualify my statements with "I only played it for a couple hours" or whatever). I honestly can't think of any game where I plodded through hours and hours of terrible and then the game magically became good. I mean, in this theoretical "shitty game becomes amazing 2 hours in" scenario, how could a game developer who was capable of making the good game that makes up the latter part of the game not recognize that the opening portion of the game is ass? Hell, even if a game was terrible for 5 hours but became fun to play later, I would still say the game is ass. There are an absurd number of games available to me to play at any given moment (not to mention other forms of entertainment)- a game that wants me to waste some amount of my time to get to the actual part is ass- period.
 
However long it takes a person to come up with valid points for both the good and bad parts of the game.

"The controls sucked" is not an objectively valid point.

"The controls sucked because when I pressed X to jump, it would take literally half a second to respond to my button press" is a valid point.
 
Not every experience in life rewards you with instant gratification. Games are no different. Some games show you everything they have to offer in the first hour and other games are Monster Hunter where it's only about 15-20 hours into the game that you start to see how the game really plays.
 
terrisus said:
I disagree, unless part of their review is pointing out they couldn't bring themselves to play to the end of it, and so can't provide a judgement on the material toward the end, how things come together toward the end, the ending, and such like that.
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It's fine to feel that way but I personally am not going to hold it against them if they don't 100% complete a 60-70 hour game let alone something that takes 100s of hours to get the full experience. I get that it's their job but I also find it crazy that they should spend what could amount to 6-7 days of straight 10 hour sessions to review a game that they can already tell won't dramatically change. Reviews are suppose to help with purchases (or at least I think that is their point) so as long as what they are giving you is an accurate representation of the game, I don't really mind whether or not they complete it.
 
Depends on the game. But if a game is still boring after the first hour or two, then maybe it doesn't deserve to show it gets good on the third hour.
 
I think it is fine to play a game for an hour and then criticise it if you aren't liking it.
If the game can't keep you entertained/hold your attention yet, then that is the game's fault not the player.
But I don't think it is fair to rate the game if you only played it for an hour. If I played Beyond for 1 hour before I got tired of it and quit, is it fair for me to give it a 5/10 on say the story?
 
tho I never willingly force myself through a shitty game; I can ascertain what the bulk of a game is all about within 10 hours of gameplay.
 
Games aren't like movies or books. With the latter two, the story has to be taken as a whole to make sense. An apparently tedious story can suddenly acquire meaning through things that happen later on or at the end, and change your opinion on what went before.

Gameplay, on the other hand, is gameplay. If it's bad, it's bad. If it improves throughout the game, that doesn't change the fact that the gameplay was bad at the beginning of the game, and unless the game shifts genres halfway through, the gameplay is almost certainly not going to radically improve.

For me, it's not a specific amount of time that you have to put into a game before you can judge it. It's when you're at a point when you've seen all the main mechanics of the game and have attempted to master them. That might take an hour, it might take five. But once you know what the gameplay is, and you think it's bad, then you're well within your rights to put the game down for good and declare it a bad game.

EDIT: I think a professional reviewer should finish all games unless there are serious extenuating circumstances.
 
Because friends in my personal group were all raving about Bioshock Infinite and it's ending, I felt like I had to play through to the very end even though I was loathing every minute of it, so I could at least talk to them having played the whole thing.

That was the first and the last time I'll do that. If I think a game is rubbish half way through, I'll just drop it now. There are too many good games to waste time on stuff you're not enjoying.
 
mrkgoo said:
By your own reckoning, Brutal Legends was a worser game overall than the beginning so you needed to play that far to give your overall opinion. If you had only played the beginning you may have been more favourable in your rating, thus misleading for the overall game!
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No, it sucked either way. I wouldn't have said anything different. Even though it got worse, I wouldn't split hairs, I would just say it sucks.
 
mp1990 said:
in my country games are very expensive,like 90-110 dollars for a game,so if i buy any game here i fell obligated to play it to completion.This happened to me with Watch Dogs,to a point that when i finished it i wanted to never more look to that game.
Click to expand...

They cost $100 and you went with Watch Dogs? Poor life decisions...

I'm pretty forgiving when it comes to games and can usually stick it out until at least the halfway point if it's "supposed to get better". But you're right, they rarely ever get that much better if you're not feeling it a few hours in.

Sorry OoT, but I guess we just weren't meant to be.
 
I played like two hours of soccer, it was bloody terrible! I got so winded and I didn't score a single goal. I can't understand why anybody plays that game, I think they must be stupid. 3/10 AVOID
 
a game should be rated in its entirety, although, like some movies, you smell its shit after the first 10 minutes. Since approximately 1991 I buy only the games I'm sure I'll like and, besides some (nice) surprises like Crackdown and some shite ones I bought because everyone seemed to be hyped about, it always went well
 
A part of something does not account for the full representation of its contents.

Maybe the game gets better or worse.

If you want to give ratings to game you've not finished you can always state how far you went and then give the rating up until that point.
 
Gotta play the whole thing imo.

I realized, say, Resident Evil 6 was complete dogshit after an hour, but what if it turned around in the last hour and became awesome? As unlikely as that is, you never know.

Same reason I don't walk out of the theatre during a bad movie, no matter how bad it is. Call it OCD, but I have to see a game to its completion, even if it's awful.
 
I mostly agree with the OP. I tend to balk at the notion that someone needs to play a game until completion to pass verdict on it.

There are a few instances, though, that I think are the exception that proves the rule.

For example, Batman: Arkham Origins. If a critic only played the first, say, five hours of the game, then they truly missed the best parts of the experience. The latter half of that game is so good that it completely changed my opinion of the game and if someone did not experience that whole half of the game and still passed judgment on it, I feel like they would have done the game a real disservice.

Then again, experiences like this are few and far between and as long as the critic is upfront with his or her audience about how much he invested into the experience, I don't see a problem with abandoning a game before its conclusion.
 
I think it's only fair to give a game 2-3 hours. Some games take that long to get going. If the game hasn't grabbed you in that time, then it's perfectly fine to say it's bad. You shouldn't need to give a game until its ending to win you over. You're supposed to have fun with these things. If the fun isn't there, then that's that. Just to avoid confusion you should always say how much time you put into the game when forming an opinion on it, in the interest of clarity and honesty.
 
Celegus said:
They cost $100 and you went with Watch Dogs? Poor life decisions...

I'm pretty forgiving when it comes to games and can usually stick it out until at least the halfway point if it's "supposed to get better". But you're right, they rarely ever get that much better if you're not feeling it a few hours in.

Sorry OoT, but I guess we just weren't meant to be.
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yeah,thath was my toughts after some hours playing it,should have got wolfenstein.
 
Sometimes it depends on my hype for the game, and how much I've invested in it. $60 titles that I've been anticipating for months, or years, I will give them a longer leash to impress me.

$5 steam sales games, that I delayed purchasing for years, I will dump them as soon as I'm no longer impressed.
 
I'm fine with someone saying they didn't like a game based on the first few hours and it turned them off from it. As long as that information is made clear in their review.

Personally I can usually tell if I'll like a game or not based just on watching footage.
 
Usually I like to give a game 2 hours before jumping to conclusions on how I feel about the game. But let's be honest some games take less than that to know what you're in for like ride to hell retribution.

With that said I do try to beat everything I start unless its just horrendously bad. Xblades I'm looking at you.
 
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