Why ‘God of War’ is 10/10 but ‘The Last of Us Part 2’ is not

Game review is a tricky business. Get too high a score and you become part of the narrative that all games are only rated 7-10 on a 10-point scale (which is more or less true). Rate something too low and you have everyone from fans to editors yelling at you in public or in private. Therefore, the answer is that many points of sale eliminate scores completely.

We haven’t done it here yet, so I thought I’d kind of pick up on the nuances of what’s going through my mind when I rate a game. The truth is that there are no hard and fast rules and all of this is totally subjective. A game is only a 10 for me or a 6 for you. So I can’t say that I’m empirically right and that you’re wrong. And yet, as someone who scores games and is on Metacritic, these are all the things I have to think about.

The Last of Us Part 2 has dozens of perfect scores on Metacritic. I gave it a 9.5. Still extremely high, but not a 10. However, I would give God of War a 10/10, what’s the difference? Why do I make that distinction?

First of all, I think we should recognize that there is literally no perfect game. That’s why you can read a review and even if the author points out one or two things that bother you, you can still end up with a 10 at the end.

The way I generally view games, I group my experiences into three main categories, although there are nuances of nuances between them.

Story: the plot and the characters, the writing and the dialogue, everything that feeds the narrative of the game.

Design – This usually means pictures, and a great looking game can be photorealistic or it can be a cool cartoon style. This may also include sound design and other aspects of building the fundamentals of the game.

Gameplay: This is where we separate game reviews from movies and TV shows. It’s how we interact with the game and what makes a game, a game.

But the problem is that you have to make exceptions, and sometimes one category can overwhelm the others depending on the context. Every game, every situation is different.

A good example of this would be The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild.

Breath of the Wild is a 10/10 game for me personally. And yet it essentially has no history. Link goes to the temples, helps some locals, goes and fights Ganon. The end. It’s essentially a plot variant of any Zelda game, and Nintendo games generally don’t care too much about the story in any capacity, be it Mario, Kirby, DK, etc. Sometimes they go into the story a little more (Fire Emblem, Metroid), but not often.

And yet all of these are great high-scoring games. How great Zelda’s design and gameplay is overwhelms any history gap there may be. So this is how you can get to a 10/10 game with a disappointing or practically absent story.

For me, God of War and The Last of Us 2 share two pillars. Both have amazing stories and are superbly designed games, some of the best of the generation. Kratos’ story of redemption for his past sins and learning to become a father elevated the God of War story to something beyond the revenge plots of other games. Similarly, The Last of Us Part 2 is primarily focused on revenge, yet it plays with our expectations in an interesting way. I’d even say that in the end, The Last of Us could be telling a more interesting story than GoW, even if it constantly makes us “feel bad”.

The difference I found was with the game. God of War has one of the best combat systems I’ve played with for this style of play in many years. Kratos’ “Hammer of Thor” ax flying back to his hand was brilliantly designed, and the return of the Sword of Chaos was suitably epic, and they’re just as fun to use as ever. Even the mechanics that could have been annoying, like his son, were incredibly well done. The encounters were a blast, as were the boss fights.

The Last of Us Part 2 fight more here. Sight-based stealth-infected encounters and one-hit enemy kills are irritating. Human combat is better, but the game has AI issues and you never get out of these encounters saying “more of that, yes please!” Also, while exploration works for a time, debris picking becomes a critical part of the game over time in the 25-hour experience with nothing interesting happening as it happens.

So for me God of War has all three pillars working for it in its entirety, story, design, and gameplay. While The Last of Us Part 2 scores a lot of points in the story column, beating even God of War, for me it’s still not enough to make up for the issues with combat and the tedium of exploring later in the game. So I don’t have a perfect score, although it is still very high. But some games shine as much in limited areas, which overcomes the lack of history or even more minor combat issues, as the fragile weapons of Breath of the Wild, which he hated. Still, overall, that game is a 10 for me.

If this all sounds confusing and subjective, it is, which is why finding numerical scores can be so difficult for critics, and I don’t blame those who have completely abandoned them. This was just an idea of ​​my thought process and you can do whatever you want.

Follow me On twitter, Youtube and Instagram. Pick up my science fiction novels Herokiller and Herokiller 2and I read my first series The Earth Born Trilogy, which is also in audio book.