huh this thread is interesting, it would literally never occur to me to look at user reviews before buying a game
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I’m just looking at who made it, what they say about it if easy to find, then gameplay video, then if still unsure Ill dig deeper but by this time a critical opinion or butt thread has probably floated up in front of me.
Ill read user reviews on steam if Im concerned about technical issues.
i don’t read reviews either. when i wasnt reading selectbutton id just play things that interested me and stuff by my friends. now im playing things that interest me, stuff by my friends and stuff people here talk about
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my brain is too shattered to suss out a systemic approach
I ignore most things until I trip over some minor incidental detail that sounds interesting to me
I’ll look for videos that give broad takes and show large chunks of Game Doings
I’ll prod people in chats? Sometimes? Can they tell me its deal?
I might search for Forum Takes if I recall fuzzing one out in passing, in the past?
sometimes the incidental details touch on Special Interests and maybe the way they’re implemented has the potential to make me mad and I ask myself
will this make me mad enough to keep playing so I see the whole thing and can be confident in the fullness of my irritation?
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the last time i felt the need to acquire another game it was coz i’d already played one that i wanted more of but less obnoxiously, and Busted was there for me
otherwise my backlog will probably be enough to keep me for like… a good chunk of the foreseeable future
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places like selectbutton have kind of ingrained in me a sense of stuff i love and made me more knowledgable of who makes what that i generally can tell what i’d be interested in from afar. it has made a weird thing in my brain w/r/t some genre that i can usually tell exactly what playing them will feel like after few screenshots
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Yeah this.
I read user reviews on steam all the time and they almost unilaterally convince me not to buy a game, negative or positive. I don’t like most games, and positive reviews can shed light on why I would not like a game
But then I’ll instantly drop money on something like Devil Daggers and not read any reviews.
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I let the games come to me. If I was meant to play a videogame, fate will place it in my hands without me looking at advertising, reviews, or indeed any sort of branding at all.
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Like with movies, I mostly refer to reviews after I’ve played/begun playing a game, to have something to bounce my ideas off of. That said, I bounce off of the reviews themselves more often than not (most video game reviews are not worth reading).
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i definitely don’t read or watch reviews unless they’re made by friends or something and i just want to know what they specifically think. otherwise, i mostly can tell what i would like or not like, or what i want to play, rather.
if i’m not sure about a game, then i read what people are saying here.
edit: actually i watch Digital Foundry stuff because i’ve become the kind of nerd that cares about framerates and resolutions
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Never watched Digital Foundry but Ive been playing Trails In the Sky (rpg by Falcom) a lot since I got the CRT tuned up and UH… I really like that I can crank the refresh to 85hz and set the frame rate to automatic.
I’m about to really start caring about frame rate I think.
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i do lots of background research and i’m broadly interested in criticism as a practice but i also hardly know any videogame critics past or present worth taking seriously both in terms of critical perspective and as writers (let me know if i’m missing any!)
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i like faqs they kinda count as reviews. no one thats written a gamefaq has been able to keep their opinions out of it and its really special
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i dont think ive read a professional review seriously in over a decade except to make fun of the dumbass who wrote it
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I like reviews because sometimes people are easily frustrated by the same stuff as me and that helps me avoid stuff that would be a bad match for me.
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I mainly lurk on here for recommendations and it’s served me pretty well, other than purchasing a bunch of aspirational schmups I will never play past the first few minutes, because I am bad. (Except for the raiden collection for iOS which I spent a million hours with)
The idea of reading steam reviews horrifies me because I paint “gamers” with a broad and bad brush. Whenever I do read them they’re usually fine and useful.
One thing I do, not as a strategy per se but just as it happens, is start watching a longplay and sometimes stop it and get the game if it looks interesting enough. That’s never ever my intention when I start watching a longplay but it happens frequently.
I read reviews for fun which is weird because they usually aren’t fun.
Anyhow that’s how I roll 
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Me, I’m great and my opinions are all stellar, unfortunately my writing is constrained to shitposting on selectbutton dot net
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i never consider reviews, only my friends views.
When new fighting games come out I will obsessively read message boards and Steam reviews and Discord chats for information on the netcode, even though very few FGs actually use rollback netcode and 99% of the people discussing FG netcode are totally ignorant so the answer is almost always “shit sucks”.
I don’t remember the last time I read a professional review for anything.
At this point in my life I know what I like and that’s like…3 games. That ain’t gonna change. I ain’t gonna find more room in my heart for more games, and I think that is good.
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only to see if a port is good or bad (like how all the resident evil ports on switch have some sort of problem where they run like shit)
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