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With the recent release of Battlefield 3, several reviewers have acknowledged a poor campaign, but awarded high scores and written glowing reviews.
So why hasn’t that poor campaign hurt Battlefield 3’s critical reception? A collection of short stories doesn’t deserve five stars if only half the stories are excellent. A comic book with a second feature much better than its first can’t be called great if half its pages are garbage. So how can reviewers forgive the flaws of such a huge part of this release?
That school of thought ignores a fundamental difference between games and those other media: games, especially multiplayer-focused games, aspire to give the player choices. Some players will prefer Conquest, some will prefer Rush, and some will prefer single player. They’ll spend the most time with what they enjoy the most, and only feel ripped off if that section of the game doesn’t justify their purchase.
Of course, I can ignore the short stories in a collection, but that only decreases the amount of time I can enjoy the book — prose isn’t as re-readable, for me, as multiplayer games are re-playable. And since different game modes re-use the same assets (maps, weapons, vehicles, and the feel of controlling any of the different characters), sticking with one mode and ignoring other options doesn’t leave gigabytes and gigabytes of content unexplored, so it’s hard to feel like you’re missing out on anything significant.
The review-score question comes down to this: do you want reviews to analyse every feature in a game individually and assign the game worth based on the sum of its parts, or do you want a representation of the reviewer’s experience with that game? I certainly prefer the latter, but I can see a problem for gamers who don't share reviewers' preferences — whether or not they should read the text of a review and decide if their own taste differs from that of the reviewer, though, is a different question.
Which type of review would you prefer? Did its campaign spoil your experience of Battlefield 3? Is it even fair to assume that that part of the game is universally unappreciated?