Bowlby’s Reviewer Manifesto

(Established on 16th May 2009.)

These are a set of standards or principles I follow when reviewing films or video games, and by which you can always be certain of when reading my work. They will likely develop further and become more refined as time goes on:

No review will exceed 1000 words(-ish)

Brevity is the name of the game here. I don’t like reading long reviews, because I want to make my own mind up as to whether something is good or not, and I’m generally not all that interested in detailed analysis when I’m looking for a recommendation. I want to know whether something is worth playing or not worth playing, worth watching or not worth watching; I don’t want a lengthy exegesis of the ins-and-outs of any film or video game. Is it good or isn’t it? That’s what I want to know, and that’s how I aim to write my reviews.

All reviews will come with a score, and it will be featured prominently at the top of each review.

All reviews will be rated out of five on a scale of recommendation, roughly as follows:

5/5: the strongest recommendation possible
4/5: well recommended
3/5: a possible recommendation but maybe not for everyone
2/5: hard to recommend
1/5: avoid at all costs

I endeavour to deliver content and reviews on time, but I may be lying — in which case, I will have whatever it is up on the site soon afterwards.

Sometimes life gets in the way; sometimes I’m just too damned lazy; and sometimes there is a more technical reason behind the delay. Either way, I’d rather take the time to deliver something good rather than have it rushed, and since I don’t get paid for any of this and am my own editor, I get to choose whether I get an extension or not.

Specific to games

All games are played through to the ¾ mark of the estimated “length” or to completion. If an exception is made to this rule, it will be noted within the review itself.

I honestly believe you cannot accurately review a game without playing through most of it. This might sound like common sense to most, but, just from my own experience, there have been many occasions where I have discounted a game as crap, only for it to surprise me halfway through or towards the end.

The five-minute rule to reviewing games (i.e. that you can judge the general quality of a game by the end of five minutes by whether it grabs you or not) can yield results, and, in the majority of times, can give a fair impression, but it doesn’t always work. As such, it’s not a fool-proof indicator and is only useful in giving one an initial impression of a game, and not of the full product.

Sometimes there maybe occasions where a game, through its own construction, cannot be completed in the ordinary sense and doesn’t naturally ‘end’ – MMORPGs being an entire genre rooted in this idea. There are also other games, like Fallout 3 or Empire: Total War, which are so expansive that to have fully seen and played through everything, one would have to spend dozens upon dozens of hours playing the game – time which I don’t have.