Perfectly Functional
If you only read what critics wrote about the new Wolverine videogame, you might think it was one of the biggest flops of the year. They largely describe the combat as repetitive or “one-note.” Its story “frequently falls apart”. One critic even recalls putting his fist through someone’s “eyes, face, heart” and “feeling absolutely nothing.”
Would you believe that Wolverine has a 79/100 average review score on OpenCritic?
Now, when it comes down to the score itself, this is easy to explain. There are over 70 reviews in the aggregation, many of which rate the game positively. There are even a few perfect scores.
What’s strange to me is how often the positive scores belong to reviews that sound pretty negative. I’ve been reading so much about boredom and confusion and disappointment, but then also landing on a number that seems to describe a pretty good videogame. I don’t particularly care to litigate the numbered score of any or all reviews, but I am interested in what this exposes about what values are being privileged among the critical consensus.
Occasionally, the reviews themselves demonstrate what I am talking about. After spending paragraphs describing Wolverine’s combat as lacking weight, challenge, and eventually leaving him so disengaged that he lowered enemy health just to end fights faster, GameSpot’s Tamoor Hussain does clarify: “It may be hard to believe but all of that doesn’t mean the combat is bad. It is perfectly functional.”
Perfectly functional. As opposed to bad!
So often I find that functionality has the power to rescue something from being bad even after the critic has described the experience as bad.
Most reviewers are too scared to give a truely bad score.
Fuck Sony, and fuck PlayStation!
That’s… what? Isn’t this pretty obvious, or did I misread this? Like, yes, mediocre does not equal bad.
If there’s an epiphany here, I don’t see it.
I think the view can be described as two axes: doesn’t work <-> works well, and is not fun <-> is fun. “It’s functional” is hardly a ringing endorsement, so let’s put it just above zero on the “works” axis.
It’s still “not fun” on the “fun” axis, so you’d expect the overall review to be negative as an average of “neutral” and “bad”. Yet, for some reason, OP is finding that these reviews weigh “it works” so heavily that the score is positive, not neutral or negative.
If anything, I would expect most people to weigh “fun” more strongly than “it works” (where “fun” means engaging, not necessarily “happy”)
IDK what OP meant, but you’re making one too many baseless assumptions.
For all we know, “perfectly functional” could mean “After lowering enemies’ health, the game was actually kinda fun!” I don’t think we have any strong reason to assume “perfectly functional” was used in a literal sense here.
We don’t know how experienced the reviewer is with the genre. As someone who almost exclusively plays 3D linear action games or adjacent genres, I can tell you their description fits what I would describe as a mediocre game, which I can confidently say are the meat and potatoes of the genre and one of the main reason it does not typically sell well overall. Then again, we don’t know what their background is.
The reviewer did not explicitly describe the game as “bad” There’s a lot more to action games than weight and challenge. A game could lack both and still end up mediocre.