Not quite Reviews in Review: Left 4 Dead 2

Rageometer:  (2/5)

I finally played Left 4 Dead 2 for the first time the other night.  I know, it’s been out for a few days and I already had a preorder.  But hey, I’ve been busy, so get off it.  Anyhow, I think the game is an immense improvement over its predecessor (which is saying something because I thought L4D was pretty impressive in its own right).  It’s not without faults, of course.  The Smoker still has issues with target selection, for example, and I have some technical issues on my own PC with the game (random lock ups and crashes on minimize).  Certainly, if I used a numeric system of grading games, these issues would preclude a perfect score.  But I don’t rate games that simply, and this isn’t a review since I haven’t played the game for more than two nights.  No, I was simply curious to take a gander at some reviews to see what others had to say about it.  PC Gamer is generally my trusted source, but as it’s a print magazine, they haven’t done a review yet. 

I instead turned to Gamesradar simply  because I know they’ve done one.  For the most part I felt it was a fair review, though I was bit put off by the fact that it was studded with Xbox 360 screenshots and vids, which lack a bit of the clarity and polish of the PC version even on my slightly older rig.  This got me thinking about Squid’s discovery of IGN’s copy and paste job on MW2.  So I decided to look at Gamesradar’s Xbox review of L4D2.  Lo and behold, they’re the same article.  They don’t simply link to the same spot, however.  These are actually posted in their respective platform sections on the site with their own comment threads.  So now I was naturally interested in the author of these articles.  You can find a short bio here, though you’ll have to scroll down to Brett Elston’s section.  I find it slightly curious that a fairly serious gaming website has it’s Nintendo editor doing a 360 review and pasting it as a PC review, despite the fact that they have editors for both the categories, but that’s neither here nor there I suppose. 

So, noticing this, I decided to have another look at IGN.  True to form, they did the same thing, with the PC and Xbox 360 reviews being identical in their text and scores.  I will be a bit more lenient on them than on Gamesradar in my judgement, however, because he at least mentions what would make it a slightly lesser experience on the 360.

While I understand that many of these games, especially those from Valve, tend to be identical these days, the differences in the overall style and design of games for these different platforms really require different reviews.  The IGN review proves this when it says:

Because of that, this is an experience that feels more at home on the PC than on consoles where mouse control easily allows for rapid movements. The Xbox 360 version is still functional and satisfying, however, so no worries there.

This statement by itself shows that some games that are fine on the PC are not exactly suited to the control scheme of the console.  It also states in his numeric breakdown of the score that game occassionally chugs on the Xbox.  I’m not overly surprised by this as the Xbox is four years old now.  But shouldn’t these factors have perhaps dropped the 360 score, even if only from a 9 to an 8.5, in comparison to the PC review?  It was obviously important enough to be mentioned in the scoring, so why didn’t it materially change the score?  I had said above that I would be a bit more patient with the IGN article because they at least made mention of some differences.  But ultimately the straight copy/past job is still inexcusable in today’s age of word processors.  While the meat and potatoes of the review were still going to be the same, copying and pasting would be fine.  All that would be needed are a few added comments and perhaps a new score.  It’s become rather obvious that IGN can’t be trusted to do this.  Gamesradar may be untrustworthy too.  Why can’t we have reviews that are thoughtfully laid out for particular platforms?  Games that are terrific on one are perfectly capable of being total garbage on another, particularly if the port is done poorly (and this has certainly happened in the past.  Just do a Google search and I’m sure you’ll come up with some real winners).

The point I’m trying to make here isn’t that one platform is any better than another (although I personally feel the PC is an overall more capable and better utilized gaming platform overall), but that no matter how much you make a console into a computer, they’re still different.  They target different audiences, they use different hardware, they use different interfaces and control devices, and they lend themselves better to different types of games.  Try as you might, you’re going to have a very hard time convincing me that an RTS is ever going to be successful on a console.  Even if (and that’s a huge “if”) you actually make a decent game, you’ll never sell it to the audience, which is why you see so few try and almost universally see them fail.  FPS games are better suited to a mouse and keyboard interface because of the superior precision and reaction times.  And no MMORPG can ever really work on a console without an input device with a ridiculous number of keys for bindables (like a keyboard, maybe?).  Likewise, games like Gears of War or Resident Evil (4 or 5, though personally I thought 4 had more personality) play better on consoles.  And Smash Bros. or FIFA soccer are both more fun multiplayer on a big TV with your douchebag friends around to heckle, belittle, and high-five. 

The PC and the console are very different beasts.  It’s time for developers, publishers, and reviewers alike to stop treating them like they’re interchangable.