Let's hear both sides

4,572.1 hours played. "Not Recommended"
Come on man do you hate yourself?
- I think i already commented on this somewhere else, but a lot of bethesda games are like that for me. The vanilla game is kind of shit, but with a lot of mods it can kind of be hammered into something I enjoy. it's still kind of bad, but sometimes you just want to eat junk food. I wouldn't recommend someone go to McDonalds, but sometimes it's just right there and it's easy.
- I read one recently that complained the devs didn't listen to them about this one extremely specific sounding request, and therefore cannot recommend it.
  The review was at like 1400 hours, and they played 1900 hours.
  Which means for another 500 hours, they continued.
- Usually happens when a game was good initially, but then publishers get greedy and push RMT/pay-to-win/freemium features to please investors.
  Maybe not a great example, but I played Eve Online for many years, and while the game is actually very playable with RMT (it feels fucking great to destroy somebody's virtual property they paid 20$ to acquire), it kinda got out of hand and diminished the thousands of hours I put into the game.
  
  Reminds me of Destiny 2. There was a period where the game was amazing, so great to play. Then it hit a downwards slope.
  
  Alternatively the game gets purchased by a new company, they don't put the same effort into it, the quality of the game played degrades, especially for multiplayer games. It's no longer worth the time now, even though it used to be before
  
  That makes sense
- I'm like this with Genshin. I've played it for almost 2k hours, love the exploration gameplay, environment graphics and music, but the monetisation system is extremely predatory, and the character designs and writing are bullshit, so overall I still wouldn't recommend it to others, or only with heavy caveats. But it really scratches my exploration itch, so I'll keep playing it myself 🤷
- I've got that in League of Legends, so yes.
  Do not recommend. 8/10 in 2016, 0/10 in 2025. Tread not upon the path.
  
  Yeah that's fair.
- Yes

This game I had on my wishlist came out recently. All 12 reviews are negative. Ouch. I'm thinking I shouldn't play it.
- The people who are first to review are those that strobgly dislike it and closed it early (or with some point to make). Everybody that strongly likes it is busy enjoying it and won't review until they take a break or are done.
  Give it time and see the reviews in a couple days.
- There's only 12 reviews, you get 2 hours within 2 weeks of buying to return the game. There's no downsides for you to try it
  
  True, but the game is a sequel and I didn't really like the first one. I was hoping the sequel would be better. It seems not.

It’s either a completely truthful breakdown about what makes the game not worth it, or a wackadoodle comment about the dumbest thing possible.
- At 4,500 hours, I would say the majority would be “it used to be great until the devs did X”
  
  The joke ones with thousand of hours are just "Eh, not that fun"
  
  Not 4500 hours but I made sure to leave one of those about the sudden block of Linux players in GTA Online.
  
  "game went woke"
- I'll admit to being someone who dislikes most Larian games (DoS, BG3). I've written reviews from the perspective of a casual gamer who finds overly complicated or mechanically overwhelming games to simply be too much. You say those things here and you get destroying by the hivemind, but it's fair for someone to say "I didn't like this game for the following reasons." Not all players are looking for the same thing.
  I like to leave compliments about the games as well, because there are some great storytellers or unique things about games that should be celebrated even if you didn't like the final product.
  
  Those are the reviews that are good! Acknowledge what you are/like, and then say why it did/didn't meet what you prefer. I prefer negative reviews because they're usually more specific and I can pick out what I will enjoy or be turned off by in a game.
  
  hah I ran into this with a tactical RPG. I even got a comment along the lines that I should change my review "because the game is great, I just can't appreciate it". I admit this was the first (and probably last) tactical RPG I've tried, but still my experiences were valid impressions as a newcomer of the genre 🤷
- I've read so many negative reviews that only say "bodytype A and B" that I'm running out of steam points to gift them clown awards.
  Edit: Thanks for letting me know I shouldn't give those awards, since it's more of a reward for them. I'll stop.
  
  sorry to say, but by awarding them, you're part of the problem by rewarding bad behaviour :|
  (I hate the award system, it made the troll reviews problem so much worse)
  
  I will say I kind of get annoyed at this. Not really on principle because I am all for inclusivity but on some games it's legitimately hard to tell which one I'm picking and I don't personally want my character to be trans (male voice, female body) in most games. In Avowed the character selection screen has your character in clothing that kind of obscures the body shape and I was like "are there boobs on this one? I can't actually tell." I'm apparently bad enough at this where I usually have to use the clothing off button if there is one to conclusively tell the difference. Helldivers 2's "Brawny" and "Lean" are pretty good but those characters are in heavy armor and either one could plausibly be either biological sex. Baldurs Gate 3 uses the terms "masc" and "femme" which is less confusing but that game also lets you do any combo of muscles, voice, titties, and genetalia you want, which kind of eliminates the whole confusion in the first place since it's all customizable. I totally get not wanting to label things but I am dumb and just want to know what I'm picking.
  
  Giving clown awards gives them Steam points. It encourages people to leave those type of shitty comments on purpose.
- You always have the hardcore players who make some obscure point the heart of every discussion. "This game is trash! They nerfed magic flummox attacks from +6 to +5! Who is the idiot who makes these decisions!? This is going to kill the game."
- 2/5 just drove past

if there's a "funny" react option there should ALSO be a 'display negative, but be positive' option because joke reviews harm the view of amazing games SO MUCH
fnaf1 has 96% positive reviews where nearly half of the negative ones are just shitposts

https://steamcommunity.com/app/319510/negativereviews/?browsefilter=toprated&snr=1_5_100010_
- Counterpoint. That game deserves a shitload more bad reviews. But people that understand what bad games are, don't play it, and thus don't review it.
  And before you start, no, I don't have to eat shit to know it tastes bad.
  
  The original fnaf isn't that bad, the community is.
  It's not an amazing game, and it's not a good horror game, but it's fun for a few hours.
  
  no, I don't have to eat shit to know it tastes bad.
  So you wouldn't bothering reading the reviews of people who ate shit either.

It's too bad steam doesn't have a "mixed" review option.
Like Fallout4. It's terrible. Bad story. bad gameplay. Buggy. But I still sometimes mod it the fuck up and play anyway, because I want a kind of stupid stealth shooter or to stomp around in power armor. So I don't really recommend it, but you could do worse.
- IMO this is a good thing. With a "mixed" option, it's hard to know where the borders are for each person. Say you rate a game on a scale of 0-100 - is "mixed" 30-70, or 25-75, or 20-80, or anything else?
  AFAIK with surveys etc. there's also a bias towards the "middle" option. By not giving one, you force people to think harder about their opinion, which in turn makes the rating more useful.
  
  Hmmm I see your point. I guess I'll just keep giving "recommend / don't recommend" reviews and writing the details with words.
- I wish it used a 5 star system instead of binary yes/no. I don't like that "yeah, it's a decent game" and "holy shit this game will change how you see games going forward" get weighed the same. A game that everyone kinda likes will have a similar rating to a game everyone loves.
  Would also be nice if they had a "shows promise but it isn't quite there yet". Or a way of using ratings to encourage devs to address issues, and maybe a mechanism where certain issues can be tied to a review and then the dev can mark the issue as "addressed" to make those reviews expire with a notice to the user that the game might be much better for them now. It sucks to see a game with a bunch of negative reviews addressing an issue that was since fixed.

Haha yea I always check out the negative reviews first - either they quickly show that I'd be wasting my time with the game, or the negatives they highlight are actually neutral or positive for me, either way I generally find them better value/time than positive reviews. (Especially when a significant portion of positive reviews are memes, award-begging copypasta, or "best game ever" with no further details.)
- If Steam would let people leave positive reviews without a comment there would be fewer low value comments.
  
  I think Valve severely escalated the problem when they introduced the award system. Now people are extra motivated to cash in a quick laugh, or provoke outrage for the Clown awards. What boggles my mind the most is that hundreds of people give awards to the same copypaste comments that appear under every major game. I sometimes try to report the reviews of the spammiest accounts, but Valve is really hands-off with their moderation. At the end of the day they profit from the points system, and as always, user experience takes a firm second seat to profits :/
- I do the same. If the negative reviews highlight a consistent issue that I have an issue with and hasn't been fixed, then I doubt I'll be buying the product. Doesn't have to be distinct to steam, either

Bloom and Rage is a perfect example of this. It’s a complete horrible garbage mess of soulless characters, terrible voice acting, horrible sound mixing, and a trash story and somehow it’s very positive. There are some negative, sane comments. I loved Life is Strange 1, but hooo boy is Bloom and Rage bad. It’s about a band and the music is not even music. It’s very funny, though.

Recently i played Xenoblade Chronicles 2 in Switch, because XC3 was very good and XC1 was even better. So i heard the community praising it, and i gave it a try. Man i hate this game so much, i really had years to play something just only to finish the story. This is the reason to always check both sides.
- This is the exact game that came to my mind. Overwhelming positive reviews for a game that seems like it was created using Grandma's description of "those funny Japanese cartoons my grandson watches" as the main creative direction. I know JRPGs are gonna have weeb elements but I didn't expect the entire game to be capturing big tiddy anime girls to beat your enemies "with friendship". Every boss you beat suddenly comes back alive and beats you in the cutscenes. Your still learning new game elements 40 hours in. One of your main teammates is a Jar Jar Binks character obsessed with building his own sex slave robot. My number one most hated game that i actually best mostly because I kept playing it thinking "at some point this has to stop being a pile of weeb dog shit and develop into a real game right?"
- I liked all of them. What did you hate about 2?
  
  Navigation was frustrating bad.
  the mechanics until the 3/4 of the game were slow and not that fun.
  dialogs felt bad and unfinished, also english VA was really bad.
  the UI in general was bad.
  the story felt shallow and the characters didn't grow. Especially Rex felt as one of the worst protagonists.
  Gatcha mechanic ...
  oversexualization of almost all female blades.
  i won all boss fights, but the cutscenes kept showing that i was losing
  i fought the last boss maybe 4 or 5 times.
  i didn't care for the world, because of the way that the game introduced it to me.
  And many more. In general felt as an unfinished game, that they released just to hit the date. I don't know how it has 83 metacritic score..