What Game Reviews Can—and Can’t—Tell You

If you've ever looked up a game before buying it, you've probably bounced between reviews, YouTube videos, Reddit threads, and maybe a friend or two trying to figure out whether it's worth playing.

The funny thing is that having more opinions doesn't always make the decision easier. One person calls the game a masterpiece, another thinks it's overrated, and something one reviewer loves might be exactly what another can't stand.

That's because a review can answer a lot of useful questions about a game, but there's one question no reviewer can really answer for you:

Will I enjoy playing it?

What Reviews Are Actually Good At

Reviews can tell you a lot about what you're getting into.

They can explain how the combat works, how difficult the game is, what kind of story it's trying to tell, whether it's open world or more linear, and roughly how long you can expect to spend with it. Reviews are also useful for spotting technical problems, especially if you're trying to figure out how well a game runs on a particular console.

All of that can help you decide whether something sounds interesting before spending your money on it.

Where things get trickier is when a review moves from describing the game to judging it.

"The combat is turn-based" tells you what kind of combat the game has.

"The combat is boring" tells you how that particular reviewer felt about it.

Both pieces of information can be useful. You just have to know what you're getting from each one.

Sometimes a Bad Review Is a Good Recommendation

Say a reviewer complains that a game is way too slow. Maybe there are long stretches of exploration, the story takes hours to get going, and you spend more time talking to characters than fighting anything.

That sounds pretty negative.

But what if you love slow RPGs that take their time building a world?

Suddenly, everything that reviewer disliked might be exactly what you're looking for.

The same thing can happen with difficulty. One person might find a game frustratingly hard, while someone else loves having to replay a boss fight ten times before finally figuring it out. A complicated strategy game can feel exhausting to one player and give another exactly the kind of systems they want to spend a hundred hours learning.

That's why the most useful part of a review often isn't whether the reviewer liked the game. It's why they liked or disliked it.

Once you know that, you can compare their experience with your own tastes.

Find Reviewers Whose Tastes You Understand

This is also why following the same reviewers or creators over time can be helpful.

After you've watched or read enough of someone's reviews, you start to learn what they like. Maybe they love survival horror but don't have much patience for JRPGs. Maybe they're really bothered by frame rate drops that don't bother you much at all. Maybe both of you love difficult action games, but you disagree about almost every open-world game you've ever played.

You don't need to find someone who agrees with you all the time. In some ways, a reviewer you regularly disagree with can be just as useful.

What matters is understanding where they're coming from.

If you know someone hates grinding and they tell you an RPG has too much of it, you've learned something useful. If you happen to enjoy grinding while listening to a podcast, their complaint might not scare you away at all.

A review gets a lot more useful once you understand the person behind it.

Some Games Take Time to Click

There's another limitation that's harder to get around: our opinions about games don't always stay the same.

Some games grab you immediately. Others take a few hours before their systems start making sense. Sometimes you love a game at first and lose interest halfway through, and sometimes you bounce off something completely, come back a year later, and wonder why you didn't like it the first time.

The games themselves can change, too. Updates can fix technical problems, rebalance systems, or add features that weren't there at launch. Multiplayer games can feel completely different depending on who you're playing with.

None of that makes reviews useless. It just means a review captures one person's experience with a game at a particular point in time.

Your experience may end up being different.

The Best Recommendations Start With Context

If someone comes into Final Boss looking for a game recommendation, we usually need to know a little more before we start throwing titles at them.

What have you played lately that you loved? Are you looking for something you can sink fifty hours into, or something you can play for half an hour after work? Do you want a challenge, or are you looking for something you can relax with? Are you playing by yourself, with friends, or with your kids?

Even knowing what somebody didn't like can help. If you loved everything about a game except the combat, that tells us something. If you want another RPG but absolutely don't want to spend the next two months playing it, that narrows things down pretty quickly.

And sometimes the recommendation doesn't even come from us. Somebody browsing nearby overhears the conversation and says, "If you liked that, you need to play this."

That's part of what makes talking about games fun in the first place. Everybody brings their own tastes and experiences with them, and sometimes a game you would've walked right past ends up being exactly what you were looking for.

Use Reviews as a Tool, Not a Verdict

There's nothing wrong with checking reviews before buying a game. We do it, too.

Read a few. Watch some gameplay. Find reviewers whose tastes you understand. Pay attention to why somebody likes or dislikes something instead of only looking at the score they gave it.

And if you're still staring at the shelf trying to figure out what to play next, come talk games with us. Tell us what you've been playing lately and what you're in the mood for, and we'll see if we can point you toward something worth trying.