Fake game reviews

[mjs warlord]

During the covid crisis i have been using my games rig more than ever and when i needed some new games i did a lot of reading of forum disscussion posts on a client i had better not name.
Everytime i was about to get something i found myself in a dilema , loads of people were saying , stuck on main screen , wont even launch , full of bugs ....... you get the idea !
Then i started to notice certain bad comments been made by the same people , some with lower spec machines and some with better pc's than mine. In the end i decided to ignore all the comments and take the plunge. Have you ever ignored bad comments and used the game without a problem.

These games have been bad mouthed but i done them all without a problem.

The wolf amongst us...... Beyond a steel sky ..... Dragon age inquisition .... Blacksad .... Batman telltale series .. Horizon zero dawn.


This is my rig its custom built and 4 year old.

The tower COOLERMASTER HAF-X FULL TOWER GAMING CASE, the tower is massive.
The cpu is Intel® Core™i7 Six Core Processor i7-6800K (3.4GHz) 15MB Cache.
The motherboard is ASUS® ROG STRIX X99: ATX, USB 3.1, SATA 6 GB/s.
The ram is 16GB HyperX FURY DDR4 2133MHz (4 x 4GB) ....
The graphics card is 8GB NVIDIA GEFORCE GTX 1080 - DVI, HDMI, 3x DP - GTX VR Ready!
The main drive is 480GB HyperX SAVAGE 2.5" SSD, SATA 6 Gb/s (up to 560MB/sR | 530MB/sW) for windows and all the items you can’t chose where they install.
The second drive is 960GB HyperX SAVAGE 2.5" SSD, SATA 6 Gb/s (up to 560MB/sR | 530MB/sW) for games.
The dvd/blue ray is 24x DUAL LAYER DVD WRITER ±R/±RW/RAM.
The power supply is CORSAIR 650W CS SERIES™ MODULAR 80 PLUS® GOLD, ULTRA QUIET.
The cpu cooler is Noctua NH-D15S Ultra Quiet Performance CPU Cooler, this is huge!

 

[DXCHASE]

I dont think any reviews are fake, i do believe however that some reviews are partnerships, whereas they are paid to write a piece on a certain game or product, USUALLY you can see it written either before the article starts or afterwards that it was a "sponsored" review.

Game reviews tho, ARE 100% OPINION. Meaning that the ones that are writing are writing about what THEY think about the game, everyone has a different view. If you wanna get a real unbiased one, just watch livestreams of the games you are interested in, that way you can see it in action.

When it comes to PCs, everyone's pc is different in some way or another even if your specs are better or worser than the reviewers. I have ran into plenty of bugs in games i read reviews about that had 0 mention of said bug or, like you said, had absolutely no issue with (Wolcen Being the most recent, it is lauded for its bugs but ive had a pretty smooth experience for a indie PC game)

In the end i decided to ignore all the comments and take the plunge. Have you ever ignored bad comments and used the game without a problem.

Yes! Youd be inhuman not to lol, i have bought plenty of games that have bad reviews scores and i dont regret most of them

 

[Zloth]

Yeah, there certainly have been fake reviews on Steam. There's a reason they have that "got the product for free" flag, you know. There's also problems with people hearing a game offended them in some way so they would buy the game, let it run for a half hour while they ignored it, leave a negative review, then refund the game. We've now got tools to help us weed out the review bombing but only if you take the time to use them.

That said, EVERY game has people that can't run it. The trick is figuring out if "lots" of them are. It's easy to see how many posts are complaining about the game but, to figure the percentage, you have to know how many are trying - which you just don't. If the game is one that is likely to draw a lot of people who don't read (or are unwilling to believe) min specs for games, you've got to factor that in as well.

 

[DXCHASE]

Yeah, there certainly have been fake reviews on Steam. There's a reason they have that "got the product for free" flag, you know.

Part of why i disregard general steam reviews, unless its a highly rated user/curator, 99 percent of reviews on there have 0 impact on my decision.

 

[JCgames]

People never like to admit is is their issue, not the games. It is either a bad config, a software conflict, or even bad hardware. Things like ram can have bad sectors that only show up when using the max amount. Often these games that people complain about as the only game they have issues with can be tracked down to one of those things.

In all my years of PC gaming which goes back to the start of PC's, i had exactly 2 games that sound didn't work as a driver issue. I also had crash problems around the time starwars galaxies launched, which was finally tracked down as bad ram. I help people constantly with simple issues.

You would be surprised how many people are raging on the forums for days or more berating the devs when all they had to do was a simple verify, update a driver, or maybe run windows updates. Sure games at launch can have issues, but if you run a reference style system you will almost never have an issue. I honestly can't recall the last time i had a CTD or a lock up.. maybe it was battletech 9 months ago now that i think about it. The animation froze and i did a verify and it fixed one file and the problem was fixed.

as for reveiw's, honestly most are fairly dishonest IMO, at least the rage ones. A patch comes and they don't like it so despite playing a game for 1k hours they say it's the worst game ever and the devs don't care. (more often than not they can still play a previous patch as this happens with SP games all the time)


I'll scan a few bad reviews and see if it has anything worth while. For instance, a platformer.. Jumps are very hard, if your not good at them you might want to pass. Basically helpful.. the whole story sucks, the gui sucks, and so much of the typical is just drivel in my book. Now if you said the GUI was designed for a console and doesn't flow well on a comp then ok, but that is never how it's framed. (no man's sky i'm looking at you!)


At anyrate, outside of very rare instances just about everything can be tracked down to player side unless it's just after launch.

 

[mjs warlord]

Thanks for the feedback JC , 2 quick comments , some players wont accept that sadly their pc cant run a game with everything maxed out , they refuse to lower anything and take the stance of bed mouthing the game. Also , despite using steam client for many years i discovered something that i never noticed before. A guy was slagging a game off on the discussions page and somebody said , this person does not even own the game because their is no mouse icon at the side of his name , never noticed that before.

 

[Zloth]

People never like to admit is is their issue, not the games.

There's also a lot of people out there that assume it is their own problem when it isn't. Then, by some combination of being embarrassed or expecting they won't understand the answer, they never say anything about it and either live with the bug or just quit and do something else. You aren't going to hear from those people at all. Neither will the game developers unless they stick some telemetry in the game - though that sometimes brings about allegations of spying.

Every program complex enough to sell for money is going to have bugs, and plenty of them. For example, I'm playing the first Trails of Cold Steel game right now. Every time the characters walk, the speed of the animation fails to match the speed the character is actually moving, which results in their feet sliding on the ground instead of staying on one spot. When they climb stairs, its downright comical as they use the same walking animation. That's a bug and a bug the developers certainly could have fixed - especially when porting the game to PC. They didn't.

What really does get me mad, though, are people that then leap to ridiculous conclusions about developer motives. Instead of thinking that maybe the costs in fixing such a bug weren't worth doing, they immediately jump to the conclusion that the developers hate them! Could it be because that the bug came about as a side effect to a fix made to fix another, far worse bug? No no no! It was clearly done because the developers wanted to mock their customers! *facepalm*

@mjs warlord - that symbol is actually a bit dubious to use that way. All it is saying is whether the account posting has the game or not. A person that had the game but returned it won't have that symbol. A person that has the game on GOG won't have that symbol. A person playing the game via friends & family won't have that symbol, either. You can be sure a person posting with the symbol does have the game, but you can't just assume a person with the game must have the symbol.

 

[JCgames]

I hear ya zloth. I realize things can happen. For example i've seen CTD's associated with virus scanners, that is one of the more common conflicts. I recall tropico not liking guard dog, or i've seen it happen with bit defender i think its called. Basically it can happen with semi off brand virus scanners. The top few are always fine, mcfee, norton ext, but others can fall through the cracks.


My main point is, i can't even count how many times i see, (for example in the last 6 months, I have a 4.5 gzh CPU, 32 gig ram and then some vid card and this is the only game that i have issues with. (one of my main point is over all stats don't mean squat with so many of these issues.

Then they go and post a DC_diag, and you realize it is some super off brand laptop that is running a driver from a year ago post the games launch. A few weeks back i was reading posts in a forum where the guy was ragging about how horrible the devs were and after finally tracking down the issue he had a super out of date driver which most likely caused a corruption on crash, cause a simple verify and driver update fixed his issue. He then came back and was nice and said thanks. I guess people can be mad in the heat of the moment but for days, i think people should bit a bit more measured.

Another good example is when battletech launched, it has a sound driver issues. Or was it the flashpoint? I forget exactly, but a small % of players that had a particular sound driver were having issues. It got fixed eventually. But in the end i guess my point is always check your end first before you start complaining about something. I'm not even saying some complaints aren't warranted, but the vast majority of ones i see can be fixed with a little user effort. and then they can get back to gaming, which is what everone wants anyway!

 

[JCgames]

Thanks for the feedback JC , 2 quick comments , some players wont accept that sadly their pc cant run a game with everything maxed out , they refuse to lower anything and take the stance of bed mouthing the game. Also , despite using steam client for many years i discovered something that i never noticed before. A guy was slagging a game off on the discussions page and somebody said , this person does not even own the game because their is no mouse icon at the side of his name , never noticed that before.

Yea i agree here too. Fine tuning settings can often give you huge performance gains with nearly unnoticeable changes.

 

[Brian Boru]

Have you ever ignored bad comments and used the game without a problem.

Often. I check 2 kinds of reviews:
1) Those marked most helpful;
2) Recent reviews—since I almost never buy a game in its first year, a lot of early problems have been fixed by the time I'm interested.

Sometimes I'll check a playthru on YouTube, using the 'one month' filter—ie I only see videos posted in the last month, which shows the current situation.

 

[ROFbeddingfield]

someway its like reading how a person got a copy of the original alone in the dark and found it horribly craptacular because the graphics didnt do well on a 30" 4k monitor.

But there are many games with great reviews that do not deserve them. Many games got bad reviews when the games were good.

Anyone can buy a 1,000,000 car, and find a detail that makes it a piece of crap buy