I don't mind this too much. Indie games tend to have a certain aesthetic and budget, if you happen to be into that. It's nice to have an exclusive space dedicated to them.
Huh? There isn't any form of indie aesthetic; they're all over the place, possibly moreso than recent AAA's. 2D, 3D, primitive ("Highly stylized"
), advanced... you could probably exchange assets between Torchlight 2 and WoW, and nobody would notice. Bastion and Transistor are
probably the two most gorgeous games ever made. Prison Architect and Dwarf Fortress are all about the underlying engine, rather than the visuals (And probably wouldn't work with "better" visuals anyway). Hotline Miami and Super Hot have distinctive visual styles as an aesthetic choice. Nethack's characters tell you everything you need to know, with a minimum of fuss. Minecraft's gameplay wouldn't work with less blocky graphics. Depression Quest is a gamebook, so... text. Cactus' games... are fucking wierd. Amplitude's 4x games are very pretty, and compare favorably to Civ; Dungeon of the Endless has a clean look to it, that's distinct from the others, but it's also a distinct genre change.
The segregating of games off into an "indie game" category demeans them; it's not giving them their full due, and it also isolates AAA games from having to compete with them. These are titles that can stand alongside the AAA market in terms of their
gameplay, which is ultimately the most important thing, and that's why they should be rated there, not dropped off under another header (And the indie games that can't match up, gameplay-wise, can get bad ratings, alongside the bad AAA titles). All are games; all should be lauded or trashed on their own merits.
I don't want opinions. I want objective facts and truth that can be proven. I don't care how boring it is to be frank about it. I just want the news and unbiased game reviews that is unbiased as humanly possible. If there is some biased I want to be told about it first before I go on to read it.
Then you are in luck my friend, as I posted the link to Objective Game Reviews.
Enjoy.However, pure objectivity fails when discussing artistic mediums. Breaking down the elements of a game; we already know that people have widely-varying tastes in the traditional artistic mediums (Music, paintings, sculptures, writing). They can't be numerically quantified. Same comes to levels, characters, moves, items... it's just a number. Is a game with 30 levels twice as good as one with 15? Maybe, depends on the levels. Is it twice as big? Well, Elite : Dangerous has 1 level, and it's the entire galaxy. So, um... yeah, that's not a useful number either. Is it better to have more characters? Torchlight 2 has four classes; Diablo 2 has five (Or seven, with the expansion). Is that good? Is Diablo 2 25% better? 25% longer? 25% more varied?
When it comes to gameplay, though... firstly, different people like different sorts of games (This isn't new information, right? I don't need to prove this empirically?). Fans of a particular genre aren't necessarily going to like other genres; and it's not enough to say "I played Metal Gear Solid 3 and it was good". If I'm reading a review, I want to know what the reviewer thinks of the genre, what their biases are, what they like and what they don't like, because the more information they give me, the better informed I am to make a decision on the game. Could be we value some features very differently! A good reviewer can write up exactly why they hate a particular feature, and sell an interested reader on it at the same time.
Frex, Polygon's review of Bayonetta 2 may have had a 7.5 at the end of it (Which, in AAA-gaming reviews, means "worst thing ever made"), but I read the fucking text too and that's why I bought my brother a copy for christmas; the author clearly enjoys action games, and clearly thought it was a very good action game. That they objected to the boobies, well, I'm an adult; I can judge information for myself and come to my own conclusion about it.