Dice
Pokémon Parentage Conspiracy Theorist
I think it's a bad idea to let a metacritic score prevent you from getting an indie game. It is my observation that there is a "people are watching" scale where anything under 7 has experience-crippling problems, and a "I can be honest" score where a 5 means mediocre/shallow but still passable for what it is.
For example, with graphics you get something like this:
Mega Man 9 "Well, it's going for a retro thing, so it's okay" rates 7
Indie FPS: "Well, compared to Skyrim it's pretty shit, and Skyrim already wasn't a technical peak" rates 5
With gameplay you get:
Nintendo game: "They have crafted another masterfully accessible and focused experience" rates 9-10.
Indie game: "It doesn't have good multiplayer features, and there aren't really any unlockables or many modes, so you're basically just looking at a simplistic single player experience that lasts 8-12 hours" rates 5-6
A lot of the time it has nothing to do with actually being bad or having major problems. It's just a really confused state of weighing expectations vs fairness in a numerical value. And it's not even completely about whether "the weight of the masses" is felt by the reviewer. If you made a genre game rather than come up with a really original idea that is well executed so as to surprise the reviewer, you're going to be judged in a different way. So you get something like a racing game or an isometric shooter will get blasted compared to something like Cogs.
For example, with graphics you get something like this:
Mega Man 9 "Well, it's going for a retro thing, so it's okay" rates 7
Indie FPS: "Well, compared to Skyrim it's pretty shit, and Skyrim already wasn't a technical peak" rates 5
With gameplay you get:
Nintendo game: "They have crafted another masterfully accessible and focused experience" rates 9-10.
Indie game: "It doesn't have good multiplayer features, and there aren't really any unlockables or many modes, so you're basically just looking at a simplistic single player experience that lasts 8-12 hours" rates 5-6
A lot of the time it has nothing to do with actually being bad or having major problems. It's just a really confused state of weighing expectations vs fairness in a numerical value. And it's not even completely about whether "the weight of the masses" is felt by the reviewer. If you made a genre game rather than come up with a really original idea that is well executed so as to surprise the reviewer, you're going to be judged in a different way. So you get something like a racing game or an isometric shooter will get blasted compared to something like Cogs.
