8.0 on Gamespot

[Mick]

Not too shabby. Hope this gives you guys a bump.

I noticed a lot of mouse aiming in the video review, heh. 

[madcow]

Not bad. I've not really noticed much in the way of reviews unfortunately. Though I've not been looking a whole lot.

Kind of surprised there hasn't been a "wtf is" of it either.

[LaughingThesaurus]

Either he's been busy, hasn't recorded a good video of it, or it just didn't pan out.
The odd thing is that this review does talk about a lack of enemy variety-- not something I'd really complain about myself. You do encounter quite a few repeats, but the number of unique enemies in this game does actually approach Symphony of the Night levels. SotN is, of course, the game that features enemies that only ever show up in one room.

[madcow]

I can see the enemy variety comment if somebody didn't know enemies were tied to biomes.

If you kept going to the more common biomes, you could easily miss out on a large chunk of enemies on some of the more exotic terrains. Depending on the RNG of the map layout.

[LaughingThesaurus]

I guess.
Like, we KNOW how many enemy types there are, but they don't.

[mrhanman]

That's two very positive reviews from major sites!  I really hope this leads to a huge jump in sales. 

I am a little confused as to why he thought there was a lack of environments or enemies, though.  There are more than enough of both, I thought.

[Teal_Blue]

I think that reviewers don't take enough time with the game. Perhaps 30 minutes, or sometimes only ten or fifteen minutes, and then do a write up. A lot can be missed when that happens. Even good reviews miss alot if they only spend a short time with the game.


-T

[LaughingThesaurus]

Well, they at least got to leveling up but I don't think they really got high tier mage classes.

[keith.lamothe]

That's two very positive reviews from major sites!  I really hope this leads to a huge jump in sales. 

One thing to note is that reviews, even glowingly-positive reviews from the most prominent gaming news sites, have never had a major impact on our sales since before AIW's steam debut in October '09.  There was one front-page Kotaku article shortly after AVWW1's release that was really positive and roughly doubled the next hour's sales (the game was still on promotional discount on steam) and maybe impacted the next hour or two after that a bit.  Sometimes coverage from RPS or TotalBiscuit has given us a nice termporary boost like that too.  There may be a few other relatively minor cases I'm not remembering right now.  This one from Gamespot did not have a measurable impact.  That said, sales aren't too bad right now, given that none of the games are on promotion, etc.

I am a little confused as to why he thought there was a lack of environments or enemies, though.  There are more than enough of both, I thought.

Yea, I was frankly baffled at that.  But I think the general "reviewers don't spend much time on a game" explanation is likely the most probable.  It doesn't look like he gutted our score over that one point, so it's not a very big deal.

[KingIsaacLinksr]

Then it's more like a first impressions, not a review. But whatever...

[keith.lamothe]

Then it's more like a first impressions, not a review. But whatever...

Yea, there are relatively few sources for truly reliable reviews.  Even then you have to weigh them with a heavy "what are the reviewer's tastes?" bias in mind.

[LaughingThesaurus]

Reviews aren't really a good place to go for a legitimate opinion I guess. It gets your game more out there but like... how often have I ever read a comprehensive and truthful review? Probably only once. That's the big reason why I demand demos or why I look for first impressions content.