Darkfall's Tasos calls out Eurogamer on 2/10 review
Tasos Flambouras, Lead Developer for Darkfall, is not a happy bunny after seeing how low Eurogamer scored Aventurine SA's latest game. They gave it 2 out of 10, which according to their scoring policy, rates the game as 'less entertaining than burning a ten pound note'. Nice.
Quick to respond, Tasos posted a lengthy forum post. It's fascinating not for the ire and vitriol, of which there's quite a bit, but for the breakdown of how the process works. Basically he alleges that EG's reviewer Ed Zitron (formally a staffer on the UK edition of PC Zone magazine), played the game for a total of 2 hours spread across 13 sessions.
According to Tasos:
"Most of these 2 hours were spent in the character creator since during almost every one of the logins the reviewer spent the time creating a new character. The rest of the time was apparently spent taking the low-res screenshots that accompanied the article. At no point did this reviewer spend more than a few minutes online at a time."
As a video games journalist (who did, for the sake of full disclosure, once freelance for Eurogamer back in the distant past), I'm well aware of the time restraints placed on reviewers, especially when it comes to MMOs. However, reviews are ultimately the opinion of the writer justified by the text itself and Tasos is by no means the first dev to be unhappy with how a journalist has reviewed a game. The interesting part here is how much effort Tasos put into defending his game and calling out the reviewer. Although Eurogamer did respond to Tasos' fact-finding, they offered to re-review the game with a second reviewer.
[Edit: Eurogamer has officially responded.]
