@ Chris:

I sort of gave up on trying to quantify my experience with a game down to a number. It just doesn’t work.

Let me give you and example – let’s say I pull a number out of thin air for you and say I give this game 8.5 out of 10. Two weeks later I will be going through my archives and go “oh shit, I actually gave HL2 Episode 2 a 9 out of 10 score few months back”. Does that mean Zeno Clash is almost as good?

And what if I gave Fallout 3 a 7 out of 10 because I docked some points due to my DRM issues and bugs? Now it turns out that Zeno is actually point and a half better than Fallout 3 when I enjoyed the latter much more than the former – especially since it provided me with actual months of gameplay rather than just few evenings.

I got into problems like that in the past and decided that the whole exercise is pointless. Therese number scores are absolutely arbitrary – and even professional reviewers in mainstream gaming press pull them out of their asses. Just pick up any gaming mag and you will see that:

1. All high budget titles will have scores between 8 and 10
2. Lowest score you will usually see is 5, and that’s reserved for truly atrocious game
3. There will be wild inconsistencies in the scores from an issue to an issue

For example the same reviewer will produce a glowing review and highly recommend a game giving a score of 8. Few months later he will write a very critical review, pointing out lots of problems, issues and concerns and give the game a 7. The reviews will be like night and day, but the scores are only 1 point apart suggesting that the games are very close in therms of quality.

So yeah, I don’t really do the whole number score thing. :)

So luke, out of 10, what do you give it?

I’m looking forward to playing it.