I see something rather amiss with the current style of reviewing games. I don't want to single out specific instances; all I'm really looking for is discussion. I'd like to hear from members of the Edge community and engage with them on how reviews of games are perceived.

There has been a recent trend of high review scores across the board in the past few months that has on occasions has caused some controversy. So is there anything we as a community can do to make things better?

Is the system of reviewing games is stuck in some nineteen nineties time warp, pre-dating a time when the internet was commonplace, before meta-scoring and sites like Edge, IGN, Kotaku or game spot (et al.). We once relied on magazines like Edge, C&VG or whichever games magazine you preferred back then. We'd wait patiently from month to month looking for news and features and most importantly the reviews, we used to read them religiously (and still do) to help us decide what to spend our money on.

Thanks to various sites, we reached a stage as gamers where we've become more informed and information is more available than it ever was before. We can follow games closely through their development thanks to articles, interviews and various other media, we happily pre-order months in advance to secure our copies usually on the back of the information that we've been fed on the lead up to release. Are we being courted with hyperbolic claims of grandeur? Has anyone genuinely been disappointed when they've played a game a game with a high review score?

Trouble is with a market so saturated with product, it’s hard to make an informed decision so it falls to reviewers to give us a warts and all account of how they got on with a game. Though without the need to go over the top and tear a game down, we should at least be given examples of features that were liked or disliked, there still seems to be a lot of fallacy in reviews, if we are to take one persons opinion as guide, it needs to be critical and most of all independent.

One thing I have noticed over time is the disagreements being caused by the scores and you have to question the logic, with the standard of writing so high and a set of opinions as far reaching as those we find on Edge, is there any need for a score at all?

When a review gets published, there is always a person that will disagree, that’s unavoidable and far from saying that we should ignore or discredit them maybe sometimes they’ve got a point. There are a lot of factors involved but format generally plays a huge role, do we really enjoy coming here to talk trash at one another. Not particularly intelligent or constructive, if we could only forget about the consoles for the moment, they only really matter when talking about exclusives and the graphical quality between the next gens is a matter of taste. We should start considering what is actually important, the games which we all enjoy and we should be doing something more constructive to help one another.

No game should receive a perfect score! There are always going to be issues that you either like or you don’t, no game is perfect and sometimes the score and the opinion simply don’t match. You’re setting up for the fall if you mark everything high and at the moment there is a worrying trend to appease the mainstream by making sure that the score fits in with the rest. Maybe by dumping the score all together some of the reviews would make more sense after all it’s just one man’s opinion and often it’s very clear what the reviewer is putting across, so why do we feel the need to clarify it with a score. It can be misleading and you often leave yourselves wide open for fan-boyisms and troll-like responses.

Another suggestion which may help not only set the online element of Edge apart from the magazine would be to have community driven reviewing allowing those who’ve bought a particular game to re-enforce  what is being said by Edge (or not, whichever the case may be). Instead of brow beating one another over perceived impressions of scores and validity thereof we need to be more acceptant of different opinions, take them on board, try the game in question and formulate our own arguments and convey them in a sensible and relaxed manor.

We should always be mindful of the fact; we are guiding impressionable people who may be missing out on games that they may find more appealing. What suites the reviewer is not necessarily what will suite the mass audience and we can help in relaying what WE think is cool or clever or fun to play just as much as Edge.

We have our own tastes and though a good review can sometime sway you into trying new things, developer publishers and the media shouldn’t expect us to like games because they rate them highly.

Games often sell well if they are given high marks but doesn’t that discredit those that maybe haven’t hit the mark, but in many respect can be just as entertaining to play, but may lack the polish that some of the bigger studio’s can produce. There are certainly games in my own collection that have been rated poorly though I enjoy them for a number of reasons and I am sure many of you feel the same.

There is a blog section here on Edge that struggles to get more than a handful of members contributing, yet we all have some many opinions some that are often at odds with one another. We should be using the space we’re given and the time we spend here more constructively. A blog allows you to properly explain yourself far better than a short paragraph on the comments page and won’t slip so easily from people’s memory and if approached with intelligence and forethought would generate discussion not animosity. We should be adding our own reviews if you don’t agree with Edge’s version and it may be possible for us to remain independent and objective where as Edge staffers maybe cannot.