Take a good look in magazines and the bigger websites.....
Games rarely rank below a 6.5 and if they do it's because of one of two things. It comes from a small developer/publisher that isn't going to hurt the reviewer by blacklisting them. Or two, half the critics have already called it a crappy game. Need an example Assassins creed. The game was gorgeous but it was repetitive and running back and forth through mostly empty middle space was boring. Not to mention it's B movie plot line. Yet it got great numbers from almost everyone. Why? The developer and publisher.
As for breaking things down and giving an accumulative score of 100. This is the best way to cater to all readers. For instance how a game ranks in content (stuff to do) is far more important to me than graphics. In fact graphics rank pretty low on my list of what I look for in a game. Some people don't care about AI they don't want an uber hard enemy they want to enjoy the progress and story of the game.
Not breaking a game down by category makes a review almost useless. Because your left to decide if the games good enough in by rooting through the careful ,advertiser pleasing, wording.
This is the very reason I started www.HornyMelon.com. Oddly enough I haven't done one review in the month my blog has been up. Mainly due to the fact that since it's not full time I'm not going to waste what little free time I have on games I don't care about.
View