Great Expectations: How Genre Affects Critical Reception

Filed in archive Features on May 5, 2008

Image from Metacritic.com


image from Metacritic.com

Something struck me as funny when playing the recently released dungeon crawler for the Nintendo DS, Shiren the Wanderer (excellent game, a review is forthcoming). Genre expectations matter as much, or more, than game quality when it comes to critical reception.

Shiren clocks in at metacritic with a decent, but not impressive, 70. While Rockstar's monolithic 100 million dollar beast Grand Theft Auto IV has a staggering 99. It may set the all-time record for most well-received ever.

Reading the reviews for both games, which of course are totally different in every way, a pattern emerged. The features of Shiren's genre, the roguelike RPG, were often flagged as "weaknesses" in the game design itself. Whereas the inherent quirks of the sandbox genre were largely ignored in the reviews for GTA IV. Rather, they were accepted completely.

This made me wonder: when do critics decide if a genre's features are just that, features, or actual flaws? Is there a great cabal of gaming critics that decide these things?

In Shiren, dying in the game restarts you all the way back to the first town, with your experience reset to zero and all of your items gone (unless you stored things in warehouses or jars, which is part of the strategy of the game). That sounds dreadful, but this is balanced by the fact that roguelike games usually feature randomized dungeons, so the game you play again is different than the last one. Shiren, in addition, does have some things that happen through the course of playing that make repeated attempts easier.

This "insta-death" feature, which is the bread and butter of the roguelike game, was flagged again and again as "problematic." I almost didn't pick up the game based on this advice, until some stalwart roguelike fans at school advised otherwise. I'm glad I took their advice. It isn't all that frustrating to restart in these types of games. I really like Shiren. If I believed in "grading" games like I used to, I'd probably give it an A.

Grand Theft Auto IV is a sandbox game. It is no doubt a pinnacle of achievement in that genre. Yet that genre has features that some love and others hate- yet hardly any reviewer talks about these issues as flaws. They are accepted as the price you pay for playing the game. Features such as not knowing where to go, lack of direction, and the coup de grace of any game like this, doing lots of things OK and few thing well.

What's my point in this? To dissuade you from playing GTA IV? No. I'm sure that's an amazing game. What I'm saying is that sometimes particular game genres fall out of fashion, not necessarily with people that actually play games, but with the people paid to review them. It's important to think outside of the box and not get trapped into gaming groupthink. So when reviewers say Shiren the Wanderer is frustrating, ask yourself if these reviewers understand the genre the game is in. Look for reviewers that are sympathetic to the genre and see what they have to say.

Read a review of Shiren the Wanderer.