About Our Reviews

If you’re wondering how we review our games on Aussie-Gamer.com, you’ve come to the right place! Here you can find out all you need to know about how we come to review decisions, why our reviews are written the way they are, and what the review ratings mean.

The Reviews

We here at Aussie-Gamer know that your time is valuable. Between school, work and playing video games, it’s surprising that you have time to read reviews in the first place! That’s why since March 2011, we have devised an elegant way to convey our opinion while not taking up your hard earned free time.

We have a “two paragraph” philosophy on Aussie-Gamer.com when it comes to reviews. When you ask a friend why you should buy a game, he tells you in about 100 words or less what he thinks of the game. That’s the kind of interaction we hope to convey in our reviews. We play a lot of games and, since we report the latest news, we have certain expectations on what a game should deliver based on our industry experience. To this end, our opinions are still informed, just condensed when you compare them to other video game review websites.

There are, of course, exceptions to this rule;

• If the game is technically complicated – There are times where a game is technically complicated to voice our views in just two paragraphs. When this is the case, we will write up a more in-depth review.
• If the game is incredibly bad – On rare occasions, a game will be so very bad that it almost demands more words so we can correctly convey why we formed that particular opinion
• If we feel like it – Sometimes we just want to write a more in-depth review for whatever reason!

Please note that some reviews may appear in our free online magazine publication, GAMR. Magazine, prior to appearing on the website. This is because many of the folks writing the magazine also write for the website, meaning our opinions on the games will be generally the same. Since the magazine has a slightly different rating structure for reviews, their score may appear differently on the website.

The Ratings

We believe that video game ratings are generally flawed across the board. Ratings out of 100 (or 10, or 100%) do not convey an accurate picture of the game in context with the rest of the video games on offer. For example, this system usually means that any game scoring lower that 7, 70, 70% is poor in quality whereas a 10 or perfect rating is incredibly rare. There’s no room for “average”.

While we don’t pretend that our system is perfect, it does offer a clear and easy to follow solution to those who may be new to video gaming. As of March 2011, our reviews are rated out of 5 stars – 1 Star being very poor and 5 Stars being as near to perfect as a game can be.

This means that a game rated 3 Stars will be average – a solid game that doesn’t push any boundaries. If you were going off our scale for purchasing decisions, a game with 3 Stars will be considered a decent use of your cash. Below we have what all our ratings mean;

• 5 Stars – As near to perfect a game can be, particularly taking into consideration similar games in the genre
• 4 Stars – A great game that will appeal to fans of the genre, or exceeds our expectations for other similar games
• 3 Stars – An average game that doesn’t push any boundaries, but is still quite solid and worth your time – particularly if you’re a fan of the genre
• 2 Stars – A game scoring 2 Stars has serious flaws in it’s overall design or in one specific element. Caution should be taken before rushing out to buy this game; we recommend “try before you buy”.
• 1 Star – Incredibly poor – this game should be avoided. A game with 1 star is likely to be boring or falls far short of any other title in it’s genre.

We take care to form an opinion on games based in context of the game itself, when it is released and other games in it’s genre. However, our opinions are not always going to align with yours and we encourage you to stipulate your opinions on the game in our comments section so that other visitors may get other viewpoints on the game.

FAQ’s

Why are your reviews so short?
As mentioned above, our reviews are short by design. This is to give you an easy-to-digest version of our opinions. Our own research shows that a majority of review readers will skip to the bottom of the page to see the summary section of very long reviews. With that in mind, we’ve constructed a new way to form opinions on games, rate them, and give you the information you’re after.

Why are your ratings lower/higher than other websites?
We try our best to form an objective view on the games we review. We never collect payment for reviewing games from publishers or developers. We will also never publish a review until we’ve played the game enough to be comfortable with it’s rating.

Please also see the above rating scale for more information on our ratings

How long do you play games for before you review them?
There are many factors that affect how long we play games before we publish a review. As a general rule, we like to give each game no less than 30 hours of play before we write up a review; some games may need longer. We will never publish a review until we’re comfortable with its rating.

Are there any games you don’t review
We do not review any adult-oriented games (that is different to “violent” or “R-rated”). We also tend not to review games that are only released in languages other than English, or games that are purely educational in nature. Games designed for pre-schoolers also rarely get reviewed.

Our main viewer demographic is 15 years – 35 years.

How do you review games for new hardware?
Video game hardware changes and updates all the time, however our expectations on games in general doesn’t. We base our reviews on the simplest possible method; the more fun the game is, the higher it will be rated.

If you have any other questions about reviews, feel free to drop us a line using our Contact Page.