@kristiambrose: Steam does effectively have verified reviews. You can see how long the person reviewing has played, immediately telling you whether they've played it or not.
You should have owned a game to review it (not 'own' it, because that would disqualify you from reviewing a game you've refunded).
To be honest I don't think a score being inaccurate is a problem. Scores are, by their nature (and doubly so when taken as an aggregate), broad indicators at best. You have to read the reviews to see what's what.
I've avoided many a 'mixed' game because it was clear from only a minute of scrolling that the issues were related to terrible performance irrespective of hardware. But conversely I've bought many 'mixed' because it was clear the game was divisive or an acquired taste.
@7tizz: If games were books open world games would be a short story collection where you could read the stories in any order. A linear game is more like a novel.
Sometimes you want to read a novel. You want the depth and detail a novel offers, the narrative pay off it delivers, the characterisation (which actually applies to gameplay as well, as linear games can have a steady difficulty curve, whereas open world games struggle with this by either i. having the difficulty fall of quite early on ii. having enemies scale essentially eliminating the curve or iii. gating areas by difficulty, essentially removing the open world agency they strive for).
@Dark_Matters: Open world games tend to have poor stories and poor gameplay. Yes, you can name exceptions, but they are just that: exceptions. Poor quality and game scale correlate to one another because as a game world gets bigger and bigger the resources required to populate it with quality content blow up to astronomic proportions.
@Dark_Matters: Nope, simply not seeing that happening anywhere here. What's happening are people are seeing problems with FFXV that are typical of open world games which FFXV is suffering from because it aspired to be a typical open world game.
@RSM-HQ: TBH I think the way they repurpose and surprise with the way those old levels are retooled is a source of enjoyment (that's the impression I've gotten from many reviewers).
@snk0610: The Sonic games are from the 90s, not the 80s. And there is a heck of a lot of scrolling layers, large sprites and colour variation in here than anything possible on the Mega Drive. If anything this is like the Sega Saturn Sonic game we never got.
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