Do the Gotham Knights Review Scores Highlight a Disparity between Games Journalists and the “Everyday” Gamer?

Game reviews.  Some of the most divisive pieces of journalism in the gaming industry, reviews have been a common area of debate for many years, and this has been further exacerbated in the recent past, following the release of WB Montreal’s new title: Gotham Knights.  In today’s post, I want to take a quick look at the relevancy of game reviews in influencing the decision making of consumers when it comes to purchasing games.

Let’s start with Gotham Knights, a game that suffered some delays due to difficulties associated with the Covid-19 pandemic (I feel like I’m mentioning this every week now).  Hype for this game was relatively high. After all, it had been seven years since a AAA Batman game had been released, and an opportunity to play in Gotham is one that very few would turn down.  With hype comes pressure (as discussed in my first post), and so expectations were high when reviews came out.

To put a long story short, Gotham Knights did not review well.  Looking to Metacritic, we see that Gotham Knights has an overall review score of 69 (deemed to be an “average” review score overall, but generally seen to be poor for a game of Gotham Knight’s stature), with many reviews citing poor open world design and mundane side activities as having an overall negative effect on a game with a compelling story.  These criticisms were found on the majority of reviews, even those that are overly positive, but the effect of this differs between reviewers.

And really that’s the point of today’s post.  Everyone has their own opinion, and ultimately, what a reviewer says about a game should not undermine how you feel about a game that you’ve played.  Reviews are used by developers to convince those who are unsure about a game to buy it.  This only works if the reviews are largely positive of course, with negative reviews often leading to a reduction in sales.  With so many different outlets reviewing games, consumers will often find trends in opinions, as well as differing opinions in the finer details.

I’ll start with my outlook on reviews, before diving back to Gotham Knights as well as other examples where reviewers across the board had a very different reaction to the “everyday” gamer.  I like to think of myself as more of a hardcore enthusiast when it comes to gaming, despite the fact that I basically have no time to play many games these days.  The fact I’m spending five nights a week working on Gaming Ramble Weekly shows I have a keen interest for the industry, but also means that I have much less time to sit down and play games (I’ve been wanting to play through Cyberpunk for a blog series for weeks now, and I currently have played just two hours).  

When it comes to reviews, I tend to listen to them while working on this blog, usually on games I already know I’m going to buy.  As I type currently, I’m listening to a podcast all about God of War Ragnarok, and the first five hours.  This is maybe the fourth or fifth different preview video I’ve watched/listened to about this game, as I have firmly jumped aboard the hype train.  This is a common cycle for me -  I did the same for the Horizon: Forbidden West reviews and Elden Ring reviews.  These games that I was hyped for are always going to be a purchase, regardless of what reviewers have to say.  So in these cases, reviews have had no effect on my decision making.

But there have been instances recently, especially with the new PS Plus catalogue of games, where I’ve looked to reviews of games to help me decide whether to try a game or not (call me lazy for not trying the games myself but there are hundreds of games on there and I have just spent the last couple of minutes complaining about my lack of time).  The most recent example I can think of is for Nioh, a soulslike game I had heard of but had ever played, and wasn’t entirely sure whether to give the game a go.  So I went on YouTube (the source of all knowledge) and watched a few reviews, all of which were largely positive, and therefore, decided to give the game a go.  I also happened to enjoy the game, and so the reviews were very useful for me.

Let’s flip this, as I look back to 2021.  Around this time, I had taken a notion to get back into Assassin’s Creed, a series I had enjoyed back on the PS3.  Having just played Origins, I was considering whether to pick up Odyssey or not, and having enjoyed Origins I was probably more than likely going to pick Odyssey up.  But I watched some reviews just to be sure.  Odyssey reviewed pretty well, scoring 87 on Metacritic, with a lot of respected outlets giving the game a score in the nineties.  Convinced, I decided to get the game, and while I played the game the whole way through (after all I had paid my hard earned money on it), I really didn’t enjoy it.  I thought the world was bland and bloated, combat was spongey, and I didn’t click with Kassandra, the protagonist of the game.

My opinion of the game therefore differed massively from the majority of reviewers, with my overall negative attitude towards the game becoming a sentiment I found to be shared more with other players, who were uninspired by this title in the series.  And that shouldn’t be a reflection on me as a player, or on the reviewer on their preference.  Ultimately, our experience of games is largely opinion based, apart from elements that are fundamentally broken (looking at Cyberpunk 2077 at release and how broken it was).

Scooting on back to Gotham Knights, it is therefore understandable that there are a group of people who love the game, that feel the need to be defensive towards the title due to the largely negative social media coverage around it.  This highlights a deeper issue that has come about due to social media, where tribalism within many different spheres in the gaming industry is an all too common occurrence.  

And I just want to briefly touch on this tribalism briefly, because it is an issue that can make people feel that their opinion is invalid, or even affect their experience of a game.  It’s no secret that Twitter is one of the worst places on the Internet, as more and more people can gain a platform for saying stupid stuff while having their profile picture be of Cristiano Ronaldo.  These people have no identity online and so they can basically say what they want without anyone knowing who they are.  Gaming Twitter has a side to it that is unbelievably toxic, especially when it comes to consoles.  Xbox fanboys are already on the “Ragnarok is bad” train, mainly out of the jealousy that comes from not having a game on their platform, while PlayStation fanboys are laughing at Starfield, a sentiment that comes from the same place.

If you’re someone who struggles with confidence, Twitter is not the place to broadcast your opinion.  Your opinion is different from the majority?  Well you must be wrong then.  Oh, and because you’re wrong, here’s some hate coming your way because your opinion isn’t the same as mine and therefore, I hate you.  It’s a terrible place, and these problems are only getting worse.

With that rant over, let’s understand where the sentiment comes from regarding Gotham Knights.  Poorly reviewed, it’s interesting to see that the overall user score for this game is also very poor.  BUT, if you investigate the user reviews, you will find there are a lot of people (I counted just under 100) who are giving the game a low score because they have heard in reviews that the game runs at 30 frames per second on console (a valid criticism, but not one to discredit the game completely).  So, these people haven’t played the game, but feel the need to give an opinion that really no one asked for, because they’re “outraged” at this one specific thing.

In reality, it is those that have played the game that deserve to have their opinion heard, and playing the game definitely adds legitimacy to their opinion.  Having asked the community for their overall opinion, Alpha, a reader of the blog, told me that for him “...it’s a guilty pleasure.  It’s got its flaws, but I can still enjoy the game”.  Nothing extreme, and a realism that in itself, is refreshing to see from someone who was very open about their overall excitement and hype for the game pre-release.

It feels like a bit of a cop-out to say that ultimately, every situation is different and how we as individuals approach every situation will be different, but that is the reality of it.  I’m honestly not sure that there is a massive level of disparity between games journalists and the “everyday” gamer, with the main difference coming from what the individual is looking for.  A journalist will be looking at games with a much more critical eye than the “everyday” gamer, but ultimately I think that critics generally will share a similar sentiment to the general public.

There will always be extremes when it comes to reviews, and there will inevitably be some reviewers that will try to find something to say that’s controversial in order to get some sort of virality on social media.  But in general, reviews remain fairly similar across the board in all gaming circumstances.  I think the general conclusion I have come to is that social media is problematic, and causes division over things that just do not matter, rather than anything definitive about the impact of game reviews.

To further my investigation into this, I once again asked Twitter if they use game reviews to help make decisions on whether to purchase a game or not, with everyone polled saying that it depends on the situation, a response I expected.  Mikey, a good friend of mine and regular reader of the blog had this to say:

“Really depends on the game, for example I’ll be getting God of War regardless.  Others I’m not fully sure on I’ll look to reviews, if it’s generally positive I’ll probably get it.  But it does vary game to game.”

It was nice for me to read that and know I wasn’t alone with my approach to game reviews.

Whether or not you like game reviews, or feel they are reliable, I think it’s clear that there is very much a place for game reviews in the current climate.  Not only can they help us make informed decisions, but can help developers improve sales on a beloved title.  And while the overall conclusion of “it’s ultimately your opinion” feels lazy (trust me I feel like it comes across as me taking the easy way out), that is the crux of the matter.  Discourse and argument will sadly always exist, but hopefully more and more people will learn that it’s ok to have their own opinion.

[If you’ve read the whole way to the bottom I just want to say a massive thank you for taking the time!  I’ll be honest, this was a post I really struggled with, and so if there is a drop in quality I can only apologise.  Each week I try to push myself to write different articles that will challenge you, but this week’s post did turn into a bit of a rant, one that I hope you’ll largely agree with me on.  Anyway, just want to say thanks again for supporting me, and next week’s will hopefully be less ranty and more thought provoking.]