All things being equal, video game fans come in the flavors of “intense” and “intense with a heat matching the surface of the Sun.” We are a group that gets mad fast and then stays mad forever. I still hear people bring up horse armor in Oblivion like we don’t all now live in a horse armor world. If anything, the video game industry now largely propped up by selling as much horse armor as possible. Everything is horse armor. But the very fact a company dared sell DLC for horses is still something we’re mad about.

And where that anger very much extends is in reviews. Which, look, I get. This is heavily-covered territory. When you’re excited about a game, a good review tells you that you were right all along! You’re a good fan! And when that game gets a bad review, it tells you that the video game site was wrong all along! They are bad fans! Because whether we want to admit it to ourselves or not, we kinda like having permission to enjoy a game. We may hate the messenger, but we love the message.

Related: In a Post-Alien: Isolation World, Aliens: Fireteam Elite Feels Like a Disappointing Step Back

We collectively seem to believe there’s an exact, but unreachable middle point from which games are either good or bad. There’s never a middle ground. A game is a triumph or a disappointment. The best ever or useless. A 9.0 is victory. A 7.9 might be worth a download on Game Pass, but nothing more.

And it’s stupid. Because decent games are, well, decent!

Aliens Fireteam Elite

There’s something freeing about playing a game like Aliens: Fireteam Elite because it’s so averagely fine. There’s no pressure on it. I don’t need to “play it right” or explore every corner to be sure I get all of the thirty endings. I’m not missing something if I don’t spend two hundred hours perfecting a skill set for something that feels like a job I’m paying to do. I also know I just wrote an article about paying to do jobs in job video games but at the end of the day, we’re all a nation of contrasts.

There’s just more going on at the seams with video games that are totally acceptable. There’s less polish. More mistakes. Weaker art. Worse acting. Weirder gameplay choices. Remember PlayStation All-Stars Battle Royale? It was an okay Smash Bros. rip off featuring PlayStation characters hitting each other. And it was fine. But also, it was weird. It wanted to have the IP-crossover-chaos that Smash Bros. had, but also a battle system that was just different enough to… basically say it was just different enough. Also Fat Princess which, in retrospect, probably problematic. I don’t know. I just work here.

Decent games put me at ease, as if they’re lucky to have me. I know Aliens: Fireteam Elite or WarioWare: Get It Together (although I wish it were also Fireteam Elite) are made or owned by major corporations with hundreds of millions of dollars. That doesn’t change the fact that when a game gets a middling score or fans seem disappointed, I’m able to twist my low-self esteem into a pretzel of making myself feel morally superior for buying and playing it.

via: justpushstart.com

Does it help that decent games are on sale more often? Of course it does! It still costs $40-$60 to play Red Dead Redemption 2 or Cyberpunk 2077, and one of them is a very good game and one of them is a very bad game. But Marvel’s Avengers was one of the most middle-of-the-road adequate experiences to hit the scene in years and I was immediately able to get it for almost nothing. Did I enjoy it? Yeah, it was alright enough. Should I have felt as self-righteous about playing it as I did? Probably not in the slightest!

The problem isn’t that reviews arbitrarily give games a set value - although it is a problem - it’s that we often give those reviews personal weight. Even when we’re angry with a review we completely dismiss, it’s often because we think it’ll unjustly influence what others think about something we love. Other times, fans review bomb games on Steam after the dev team makes a mistake or lets them down. It’s not just a personal way to judge a game, it’s a tool to say yes or no, positive or negative, good or evil. And sometimes, a game is evil. Or at the very least, uses too many pre-made stock assets, which I suppose exists on the same moral level as evil according to a lot of people.

WarioWare Get It Together

But there is a middle. Games with flaws aren’t disappointments. They’re just games with flaws. They’re like leaving on Law & Order: SVU rather than watching a prestige drama. Or, even better, like leaving on a Law & Order: SVU that needs you. Of course just-fine games should be criticized for mistakes. They don’t deserve amazing reviews and fan dedication just because they exist. And giving rich publishers the benefit of the doubt is what gets us into a lot of these problems. But I can’t help but feel more relaxed with games that don’t matter. When nobody cares, I’m not playing the game wrong. I’m not moving too slow to keep up with the discourse. I’m just enjoying a game.

Aliens: Fireteam Elite is fine.

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