One of the best reviews ever

http://gameological.com/2012/11/review-assassins-creed-iii/ as pointed out by the wonderful Chris Schilling.

I'd agree, there is so much great insight, and it's so well written. My favourite parts:

Its disregard for the audience’s time is obscene. Here’s pretty much all you need to know about the first day you might spend playing Creed III: The 17th mission you undertake is called “Training Begins.” Prior to that, hours are pissed away, mostly on a series of go-here-kill-this errands in which you play as a rather bland fellow who has a connection to the eventual protagonist.

It’s a reductio ad absurdum of a worrisome attitude in modern game design: the belief that a task becomes entertaining simply by virtue of making it a goal. You see this attitude playing out in the corporate sphere with the execrable “gamification” movement, which attempts to increase productivity among rank-and-file employees by applying game mechanics to their jobs—like, say, giving Joe Punchclock 100 points for filling out his TPS reports on time. Instead of making work rewarding, gamification strives only to make work seem rewarding. In Creed III we come full circle: the gamification of a game.

I love it when a reviewer is able to analyse exactly what goes wrong with a game, and write about that entertainingly.

Sorry sporky, but I disagree. "Here's pretty much all you need to know":

fronkhead wrote:

Its disregard for the audience’s time is obscene. Here’s pretty much all you need to know about the first day you might spend playing Creed III: The 17th mission you undertake is called “Training Begins.” Prior to that, hours are pissed away...

The rest reinforces the reason why I read very few reviews in their entirety these days. I think Chris Schilling is one of the better games journos in the UK at the moment, but reading that, I couldn't help but think 'get to the bloody point". Yet he already had. That second paragraph is an overindulgence.

While I wouldn't call the extra words a waste, I actually agree with your point.

I find that the move to online has caused reviews to end up incredibly long, whereas back on print you'd have some games take up only a few paragraphs for review, or maybe a page (think Kittsy's Chicken Shoot review). I really miss that. Heck, NGamer/EDGE would manage to do justice to some games in just a column of text, let alone a page or half a page.

The best bits of magazines were the little drubbings for shit games. Like Doki Doki Majo Shiban getting a score of "NO".

Fun fact; the character that review calls "play as a rather bland fellow who has a connection to the eventual protagonist" is very popular with the ladies, and in my opinion much more interesting than Connor.