I've opined before about how capricious, and therefore ultimately hollow, review scores can be. They're subjective, based on perceptions of value formed in grade school, and potentially nothing more than a convenience. Most reviews seem to come in at around 1,500 words, and they come in enough flavors from "BBC businesslike" to "locker-room patter" such that everyone ought to be able to find at least a few reviews whose prose they can digest rather than rely on the numbers.
"Medal of Honor's [Metacritic] rating on the Xbox 360 is a paltry 76." From a story on IndustryGamers today. According to Metacritic, 76 is a "generally favorable" Metascore. The explicated score of 7.5 on GameSpot is "Good." Last time I checked, "generally favorable" and "good" were not synonyms for "paltry." Consensus seems to be that Medal of Honor is a good game, just not a great game…yet EA's stock price dipped by around six-percent because "good" isn't good enough.
To be fair, the "paltry" charge may be predicated on what the expectations for the game were, and perhaps that comes down to EA's stated intention to take back the #1 shooter spot. If that's the case, aren't we admitting that the scores for this game are not only subjective, but to add insult to injury, contextual, as well?
Before a single review was published, we knew that Medal of Honor was not going to be an enlightened take on the war in Afghanistan. Ian Bogost wrote, in response to EA removing the word "Taliban" from the game:
"EA's latest move in the Medal of Honor saga seems instead to reveal that its interest in Afghanistan in general and the Taliban in particular never had anything whatsoever to do with a position on foreign war — or really on anything whatsoever."
I think it's fair to suggest that if the U.S. Army was against this inclusion, and EA had any intention of respecting soldiers generally with the title as is the wont of the franchise, then perhaps there's no foul to be called here. But in any case, does the failure of Medal of Honor to make some kind of statement about the war deserve to be taken into account in a review of the game?
EA set the stage for comparisons to Call of Duty the moment they made bold claims about taking the lead in the shooter wars. Comparisons may be inevitable in any kind of a review, whether it be books, movies, music, restaurants, or video games…but Medal of Honor isn't trying to be Call of Duty. Call of Duty is a Tom Clancy novel jacked up on steroids. I adore the series as such; but if we have to make comparisons for reviewing purposes with Medal of Honor, why not make them against the whole of first person shooterdom, the aggregate model of what makes a good shooter that any seasoned reviewer ought to be in possession of?
Taken purely as a game, the Medal of Honor reviews present some equitable criticism. The presence of bugs in a highly-anticipated AAA title like this is dissapointing. The idea of suicidal enemy AI doesn't thrill me. Nor does reading that multiplayer maps are often too tight and one can spawn right into easy kill zones. I can't help but wonder if I've heard enough about the sliding-into-cover mechanic which sounds downright interesting, and working the ability to lean back into a console shooter, something I've long missed from my days as a PC gamer. I've had friends who have spent time on firing ranges tell me how amazing the sound design is in Medal of Honor. Having to read social criticisms and comparisons gives me pause to wonder if every reviewer's mental palate is as cleansed as it probably ought to be in order to notice all the details both bad and good.
There's also the question of the timing of Medal of Honor's release. I can't explain EA's decision to release the game sandwiched in-between Reach and Black Ops. I don't think that even a Medal of Honor with a perfect score could have competed adequately with these two juggernauts; but if Medal of Honor had been released in July 2011, with no competition on the market, I bet these review scores would be a good 5 points higher on average (out of 100), and reviewers would have been much kinder in their prose.
At this point, I don't think the problem comes down to specifically what the numerical score systems are, i.e. whether or not we go by the Eurogamer method of 5 being average or the American method of 7 being average. I think that all scores are subject to perceptive dissonance that dictates a certain score as having a meaning which may not actually apply. Even if Metacritic completely changed their system to something arbitrary, like a 25-point system, I don't believe it would take long before a score of 18 was established as the minimum level of acceptability, and everything else would get lumped into "paltry" or worse regardless of how Metacritic defined the scores on paper.
The inevitable result is that scores, which ought to be a mathematic derviation of value, are instead turned into psychological signposts. When we score an 80 out of 100 on a multiple choice test, it's because the student got twenty-percent of the points value in questions incorrect. Opinion doesn't enter into the calculation…so why do we think it's a good idea to keep using a system whose roots are in quantitative truth for a purpose that is subjective and contextual?
I have to ask myself whether I would balk at four stars, versus a 7.5. My copy of Medal of Honor sits unopened because I'm just as subject to this crowd psychology of review scores as everyone else, and I'm beginning to loathe it. I'm going to yank the shrink-wrap off the game purely out of contempt, I think…and then discover for myself whether it was worth my $60 or not.
Dennis Scimeca is a freelance writer from Boston, MA. He has written for The Escapist, is currently penning features for Gamasutra and @Gamer magazine, and maintains a blog at punchingsnakes.com.