Aren't quick looks in essence supposed to be them going almost blindly into the game, so we get their impressions naturally?
IMO they are there to provide insight to a game you haven't played yet or are looking forward to - if they are missing insight to the game and haven't played it yet, how can they possibly provide it?
A simple gameplay trailer would often show more mechanics than they do in a (sadly nowadays more often happening) bad Quicklook, which means, they often haven't even watched those... The Cities Skylines Gameplay trailer shows off the brush for zoning and is 2 minutes long e.g.
Yeah the Alex and Vinny quick looks have been consistently more informative lately. The one's that Dan drives are usually better too.
Yep, like I said, when they are good, they make me want to buy a game, I didn't know anything about before, like Offworld Trading Company, where a trailer couldn't possibly dive into the complex mechanisms at work, but the Quicklook delivered in explaining the basic functionality needed to understand the game and what it tries to achieve.
The problem is that Joe (any Joe I know, at least) would read the tutorial tip for the zoning tool in a city builder. Naturally they don't want to spend time in a QL doing that, but it really just takes reading that paragraph of text to figure out what your possibilities with zoning are.
Exactly - so it would make sense for them to know about the different zoning tools beforehand to show some of them off in the Quicklook, since they are basic features. It would have been great if they went about it by saying: 'This you might know from SimCity, but depending on the job you want to do, you also have a brush for smaller areas or you can zone an big area by click and drag' - the Joe now knows how the game is different from SimCity and what kind of options he has from the beginning on. Here it was like: 'So how can I zone in a smaller area? - Mhh, I don't know, let's move on' - 'Where is my installed mod? - Well... I don't know, let's do something different' - 5 minutes of googling beforehand would have cleared that up.
Saying things like 'The streets carry electricity' while it's not true and learned in the first few minutes with the game is just confusing for someone who doesn't know anything about the game.
Not knowing how curved streets work... etc. etc. is just bad from a professional point of view for someone who wants to make a living by running a site that provides information about games.