Expecting too much
I was playing some more of Transformers: War for Cybertron last night, and it got me thinking. You see, after I’ve written a review, I like to go and check what other reviewers thought of a game – partly to see if my assessment is in line with how others feel, but mostly just out of curiosity. I don’t tend to do that before I write a review, in case it colours my opinion, but the Transformers reviews really surprised me. A lot of games run the gamut of great to average scores from different publications, but the polarised opinions of Transformers seemed especially odd. On the one hand, sites like IGN gave the game 9 out of 10 – the same as us, infact- whilst at Eurogamer and Gamespot War for Cybertron scrapes by with only a 6.
So why such diverse opinions? Personally, I think it comes down to expectations. Eurogamer’s Jon Hamblin wrote “shooting and gawping aside, there's not much more to it. We're firmly in a rinse-and-repeat cycle of corridor, room full of enemies, man turret, push button to open door - and these days, that's just not quite good enough.” isn’t it? Its good enough for me, to be honest. I don’t expect every game I play to be a revolutionary new experience- I’d rather it was good at what it set out to be than it tried something different and failed.
He goes on to complain that, “thanks to a fiction-bending reliance on ammo for Transformers weaponry, you often end up in situations that just don't feel right.” Perhaps not, but then, how fun would the game really be if your weapons had infinite ammunition? There’d be no point in switching to try out different weapons, since it would be far more effective to just opt for the most powerful one all of the time.
I’m not trying to dissect Jon’s opinion here- he’s as entitled to one as much as anyone else!- but merely using it to illustrate a point. Do we sometimes judge games rather too harshly based purely on expectations? Do we want too much from our games?
Back in the 8-bit and 16-bit era, games didn’t have to be new and progressive. The Final Fantasy games didn’t really change their formula until Final Fantasy XII, and many gamers complained about that. And yet there seems to be an expectation that modern games must offer something different. But why should they, really? Gamers are perfectly happy to play titles of similar genres and thoroughly enjoy doing so. Street Fighter IV changes little from past iterations of the Street Fighter franchise, and that's exactly what fans wanted. New Super Mario Bros. Wii deviated very little from the format of the original Super Mario Bros., and that’s exactly what fans wanted. Transformers: War for Cybertron doesn’t do anything new or previously untested in third person shooters, but it does it well.
And that is exactly what fans want.
