I love and hate this stuff.
Ever had someone close to you, like your mom, spouse, partner, friend, teacher, or even your dog, caution you about overusing words like “love” and “hate”? My wife, Becca, constantly checks me with, “You don’t really hate that!” or “Do you really love that?” And yeah, I get it. But as game reviews—and reviews in general—continue to degrade into dumpster fires (looking at you, Amazon), it feels like everything is either LOVED TO THE MOON or HATED WITH THE PASSION OF A THOUSAND SUNS.
Middle ground? Forget about it. It’s like no one remembers how to say, “This part was great, but that part sucked.”
Is this what’s driving the insanity in gaming publication headlines, or are they just incredibly lazy, throwing together clickbait titles? Even if, by some random stroke of curiosity, you get me to click on one of those headlines, nine times out of ten, the article has zero relation to the title. It’s so frustrating I won’t touch anything else they post. Nowadays, I rely on my RSS feeder to catch news and titles I might miss, then I Googlefu my way to the real answers and info.
(Seriously, though, when everyone is INNOVATIVE UNIQUE, AND REVOLUTIONARY I kinda feel like maybe none of them are?)
The survival genre is particularly guilty of this clickbait crap. It’s like the Wild West out there, with zero guardrails, and everyone and their grandma slapping the “survival” tag on their game just to cash in on the genre’s popularity. And don’t even get me started on the ridiculous headlines for games that don’t belong under the survival umbrella. It’s like a pizza joint offering a teriyaki chicken pizza and the local news blasting out “LOCAL PIZZA JOINT REVOLUTIONIZES CHINESE FOOD!!111”
Seriously, people, sit on it and spin. These games would do just fine in the action, adventure, and RPG categories where they belong. They don’t need to hijack the survival genre’s bandwagon.
Quick footnote: this is so amazing.
