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I don't know, If I spent some hours in a game only for it to break my save, I'd probably give it a 1/10 too. Something like should have been caught in the testing phase imo

I think the way he reacted to it was a little overboard though.

Meh, not a big deal. I more dislike the people who want to impose their view onto the review score, like some of the scores for Breath of the Wilds being 1/100 on metaritic, despite liking the game, for the sole reason that they felt the current score was too high.

While I will read reviews about a game, it rarely makes me change my mind on whether or not I will purchase it. The obvious exceptions are the ones that have a lot of negative reviews due to the game having numerous game-breaking bugs, the game just flat-out not working at all , or the developer abandoning the game before it is complete (a fair number of EA games, for example).

The second I opened this thread, I had an inkling about which game this was about...and I was right!;) That game looks amazing. I'm tempted to buy it full price (it's rare that I do that anymore).

If the performance issue will affect many people, I think it's alright to alert buyers who read reviews before purchasing. For example, Just Cause 3 has/had crashing/performance issue on AMD GPUs, and 8GB of RAM wasn't enough to run the game (even though minimum requirements said so).

I made a negative review, and I don't think that was a poor decision. I rounded up the good (the game itself) vs the bad (performance), and figured that the issues were too great to be ignored, and I would rather warn future buyers. Was it right to review a game like this? That's debatable - some say performance doesn't matter and shouldn't be included as part of a review or overall score. I, on the other hand, disagree. I'd rather play a mediocre game that runs well than a great game that runs like complete crap, and I appreciate reviews that let me know about possible issues I may encounter while running the game.

Don't get me wrong, though - I really dislike seeing negative reviews say just "game crashes", etc. If you have an issue that isn't common, that you haven't tried resolving, and that you aren't willing to elaborate on or justify your review in regards of the issue, then no, you should not give a game a negative review.

He himself said without that game breaking bug he would give game as high as 9.

But since fucking up save files seems like thing this game does a lot 1/10 starts to make sense.

If your review format uses a scoring system, that score should take into account everything, including performance issues and bugs.

Sterling's was a freak accident no on else seems to have experienced but still, ignoring that issue and judging the game based on the 6-7 hours he's managed to play before that would have been the wrong call. If you go ahead and use a single save file system in your game you should be 100% sure it's not going to leave players in an unwinnable situation or have contingency plans like hidden backup saves.

The 1/10 was definitely an (understandable) overreaction from a critic and I respect the fact he went back and rectified the situation with a more sensible score.

Any reasonable person would answer: "No". Does it deserve a lower score because of it? Absolutely. A 1? No, then there would have to be NUMEROUS other serious issues.

Jim always says the score is explained in the written review (he gets angry at people who only criticise his review when based solely on the number itself without reading the articles), only now he's basically doing the same thing to the game. He's scoring it based on one mistake.

Triple A games have game breaking bullshit in it all the time, and yet he rates those highly. Hypocrisy to the max. But then Hypocrisy and Jim Sterling are like brothers in arms - as much as I do enjoy some of his content.

No matter how they say that I'm "a nice guy" or "an understanding guy", it always comes down to how good of a time they're having last night. It's not like I can't perform, sometimes I'm just nervous. So I guess in the end of the day, performance does have a big influence.

Oh wait we're talking about games...

I like JIm, i always try to follow him

I love Jim.and his reviews, I always see reviews as entertainment rather than a guidebook to purchase from. Never trust someone elses judgement, told you that a billion times! :3

Jim Sterling has a giant ego and loves to define himself with a review like this. That is okay if you know him / know this fact but I would not give a lot on a review by him or by any other "big" youtuber like AngryJoe and stuff like that.
They just have to be dramatic because that's it what the people love.

What he really should've done is just wait for a while and give them a chance to fix this issue, maybe release a vid in the meantime informing potential customers about the problem but postponing the 'review' for the time being. If they don't intend to fix such a game-breaking bug and it becomes obvious they never will, a low score is definitely justified IMO. But since every reviewer is more or less biased for different reasons anyway, I wouldn't limit myself to just listening to one side of the story - to know the truth, one usually has to view it from different perspectives, though I tend to more often than not listen to negative reviews since I wanna know about anything game-breaking or if there are any quirks in the gameplay department... I don't need anyone convincing me that the game in question is interesting, if it wasn't I wouldn't watch the review in the first place ;>.

It may be ok for non professionals to vote a game "not recommended" on emotions but as he seems to realise it was wrong for him, a professional reviewer with huge audience, to act that way.

I had something similar happen in transistor. couldnt progress, couldnt go back. I am content disliking the game and think its fair if i chose to not recommend it for something they claimed on the forums was fixed months before i even started the game.
I think jim giving that game a 1/10 was fair because he couldnt complete it without restarting it and that isnt his fault, its the devs.

another game comes to mind, The Masterplan. Really fun game but the further you get the more likely a crash is to happen, to a point where I cant complete a mission without crashing. they take a while and dont have save points. I have not recommended it on steam because its unplayable, even if everything up to that point played great.

i say it was right. but that doesn't mean he can't change the review if he wants to after the problem has been solved.

i haven't played the game yet but i've seen the trailer and stuff two days ago and added it instantly to my wishlist.
however i always say a lot of games rise and fall with a close look at the details. the devil is always in the details. you can have shiny graphics and a great music score but the details always betray it when people either didn't give a fuck or didn't bother thinking about it.
aven colony is sort of an example for that and i still don't know what to think of it but the devs are on the job in a hurry. so i'll wait a little for my review.
back to this game. if you have some sort of perma death and you rely on one single autosave slot then you MUST make sure the game cannot corrupt your save and your checkpoints must be pristine at all times.
and putting a checkpoint in this kind of game right in the middle of a few instant death events with no margin of error is a major fuckup indeed. you can do it. but then you have to make damn sure it works at all times and there are a lot of ways to do so for a game dev. but they didn't.