GOG, there's a few problems with the review system.

• There's no index, categorization, or even a way to find your own, much less other reviews. Contrast, Steam.

• What could only described as arbitrary limits plague the entire experience. No formatting, limited characters, no images, not even a way to update an extant review without a support ticket, nor any means to range-find reviews by date. Contrast literally any game review made since the days of the BBS.

• No summaries, breakdowns, half points, or clarity on final scores. For example: Contrast any review article that has a quote section somewhere.

• There's no way to tell if there was suspect activity towards a game in light of recent events; be it sugarbombing or salting the earth. Of the latter, I admit to participating in.

• A quick summary of what users are saying on the overall pros/cons are nonexistent. Identifying a game with a systemic issue is very useful, as is finding out what the greatest positive is.

• Hitting "report" on a review requires to first say that it wasn't helpful, but moreover is an empty button. It literally does nothing. There's no form, nor any way to give feedback on reviews; such as those left by those too incompetent to operate a blanket. (Ex: Someone who can't figure out, "Click the icon to start.")

Overall, I find the GOG.com review system entirely lacking and even having been bereft of benefit over other systems that were existent at the time of the site's founding. Some of the things I have mentioned are absolutely superfluous, but feel would benefit things nicely here.

My Grade: Needs Improvement. This will be mentioned with concern at the next PTA meeting.

So. Why don't you review the GOG.com review system? I think it would be a fine creative writing exercise.

Let's just call it bad and be done with it.

The fact that you can't manually alter your score if the game has seen improvements and instead has to go through support does that no sane person is willing to go through with it or just decide to don't review at all and this by itself makes the system useless. It's far easier to just look up the games reviews at steam which is sad.

Ah, thanks for reminding me of something else that was missing. I'll be adding this to the main body.

That's going down a real slippery slope, wanting GOG to delete reviews that the reader doesn't like.

Such a thing could very easily be abused. For example, fanboys/fangirls would request the deletion of all reviews that are critical of games that they like.

To prevent stuff like that from ever happening, GOG shouldn't allow it's interface to feature any possible way to "report" reviews at all. GOG should remove that 'feature' entirely, rather than to double-down on it and make it even more onerous and prone to abuse, which is what would happen if the bad suggestion in that quoted post were to be implemented.

I once unfavorably compared the review system to the gogmix system: The review system here is beyond awful. Another thing that really sucks is the way the useful/not useful system works, as it seems to be based around who garners the most amount of total helpful votes, disregarding the percentage of helpful votes. A review with 100 helpful and 100 unhelpful votes (ie. a 50% approval rate) will rank higher than a review with 98 helpful votes and 1 unhelpful vote. It may be somewhat more complicated than that, but that's the impression I got, which ultimately does nothing but encourage you to pen whatever moronic jabber that comes to your mind as soon as possible to secure a permanent top spot in the review section.

A particularly egregious example is Call of Cthulhu: Dark Corners of the Earth, which is pages upon pages of fanbois drooling over themselves that the game is now "fixed" until you eventually get to a review that clarifies, no, in fact there is still a game-breaking bug present that will prevent you from finishing the game unless you use a speed trainer.

PS: Don't even get me started about the character limit...

I understand the concern, but the focus was on reviews that are one star due to technical incompetence. You've seen em, "Game won't run on OS/2 Warp/1 star." See the attached image for an example. These are just reviews that are clogging up the system while adding nothing and dragging the score down.

Implement:
- Index reviews
- Add reporting features
- Increased character limit from 2000 to 5000
- Allow people to edit reviews
- It should be up to the reviewer to explain their scoring and if they don't, it's a bad review. If you impose minimum character limits, someone's just going to spam "lolololol" until character limit is reached before posting.
- Everyone who has taken part in reviewbombing or sugarbombing a game's review score needs to have their rating privileges revoked. Though that's hard to catch without leaving a review revealing one's idiocy;
- Review scores should also be implemented in the store's filters by entering numbers. It's a valuable parameter just sitting there going underused.

If they're not going to do that, sounds like they should bring back user curated lists like GOGMixes that fronzelneekburm suggests. And let reviews like this (2nd comment) stay up for months until someone actually goes out of their way to report it to staff? Posted Sept 15, 2019, 231 people took the time to rate it and who knows how many others have seen it in total, but wasn't removed until Mar-Apr 2021.

If you're going to prevent abuse, allow users to write a brief comment to describe what's wrong with it so it also allows mods to know what's wrong with it or if people are just crying wolf. And if you get a user who repeatedly abuses it, then remove their reviewing and report privileges.

I was anticipating the review system, but after having had some time with it now I feel slightly disaponted. Yes, it does deliver what it promises in a rudametary fasion. The text boxes are clear, the colours are easy to distinguish and the fonts are easy to read. The use of spot colour for the stars draws attention to them nicely. I do like the interaction on offer (wheter you found the specific review helpful or not) though the placement and overall style of the "read more" links are difficult to see. Having said that, lets move on from the formar to the content. I found some glaring problems here. First, and most importanly, you are not allowed to edit your reviews. This is a glaring ommision, and something other review systems in the same genre have offered for a long time, and I think this is a missed opportunity and a step back. It is also difficult for a new users to see how and where they can create their own reviews, perpahs something that can be modded? but still it should really be part main software. It could be patched in, off course, but it looks like the developers have stopped updating the review system some years ago.

So overall i would say that the review system is functional, but basic, a bit outdated with other review systems doing the same but better. Some updates could improve it, but it looks like it has been abandoned by the developers. If the system allowed me to use half a star I would have given it 2.5 stars, but since it does not it it has to be:

★★☆☆☆

Steams review system sucks too it buries good reviews and still has joke reviews on a games main page.
If you want to see reviews in order of date you have to scroll to the very bottom and clock on the link.

It reminds me of amazons ask questions section where it's been subtley messed up.

Will save you some time:
User - “ GOG, there's a few problems…”
GOG - *silence*

Agreed. Glancing at Steam's seems quite noteworthy in comparison.

Asking GOG to remove reviews is very problematic, especially for certain games -- To The Moon and Tonight We Riot - just as examples.


The biggest flaw of GOG's review system is not being able to edit your review. If the developer goes back and fixes whatever issues existed, where it be leaving out features found in the Steam version or fixing game breaking issues - people should have the option to edit their reviews. Otherwise its going to make it look like these problems still exist if there's a bunch of reviews citing these problems.

Or worse, updates/news that introduces new problems, or the abandonment of an indev game.

As I have mentioned elsewhere...

The 'user rating' is an average. But GOG breaks that by defaulting everything to 5/5 before there are any reviews at all. Basically, the fewer reviews, the higher the score. That's why, when you sort by user rating, the top few on the list are usually OST or Artwork or DLC and such.

A game that everyone agrees is utter crap and few people buy, and even fewer people review, could have a high 'user rating'. It's biased and it's broken.

What, that doesn't make any sense. You mean when you bought game and didn't rate it it counts as you'd give 5 stars?

Like this one has verified owners rating 5 but overall 2.6.

But then this has only overall 5 and none for verified.