In any group, there's always the individual who has this strange desire to buck the trend in order to show some kind of superiority over the masses. It's especially common in reviewers, IMO (Those that can't do... review?).

I see similar things amongst critics in just about every medium you can think of. If everyone in their social group is raving about something, that person gets a chip on their shoulder and sharpens the claws in order to show everyone else how shallow their analysis was.

Anyway, I haven't heard of the site either. Not that it's a bad thing, but given with how many things are misrepresented, misstated, or just plain wrong I think I'll just move on from the review.

You could care because these reviews get rolled up into the metacritic and gamerankings numbers, and because one bad mark requires tons of very good ones to offset it.

For instance, if the game deserves an average of 90 then it takes six scores of 95 to offset that one outlier of 60, and get the average back up to 90.

Oh the irony... If you're going to say things like 'get your facts right', then you should at least make the effort to do the same yourself...

The very first thing I noticed about Sins was that the combat reminded me of Warcraft. It's the twin necessities of creating a balanced fleet (army) and then making sure that army is kept together whilst moving about the map, which are the two core principles of Warcraft III. It doesn't have the micro rquirements of Warcraft (thank God), but the general principles are very similar. It's based upon the idea of individual units being too weak to make any real impact, and therefore making it pointless to send scattered units around to make attacks. Hell, Sins even has hero units!

It's also very, very different to DoW. Yes, you need to capture strategic resources around the map, but you need to do that in every RTS in history (grab that gold/stone/wood/food pile before the enemy!). And Sins has no requirement to keep 'at least one unit alive so that you can reinforce'. I have absolutely no idea where on earth you got that concept from. DoW does, since it make economic sense in that game to save squads and reinforce rather than build new ones from scratch, but since Sins doesn't operate in a squad system, it really has no relation to DoW at all.

And your last point really displays your ignorance. Saying that one of the best, most popular and well-balanced RTS games of all time is 'about spamming crap as fast as possible', as 'that is basically the only way to win in Warcraft, unlike Sins', is about as completely wrong as anyone has ever been about anything, ever. If there's one thing Warcraft's not about, it's spamming units! Go and watch some tournament matches where players have won using heroes only, or go online to Battle.net and see how far your spamming strat gets you in 1 v 1 matches. You will get eaten alive. Warcraft is all about uber micro, unit countering, and judiscious use of hero abilities. Play Sins online, and you'll see plenty of frigate spamming and rushing. Why would we have all the complaints about underpowered capital ships otherwise?

The silly thing is, the reviewer is obviously talking crap. That 60% score for a game as brilliant as Sins is absurd and it's almost certainly written to generate hits on the site (which you've provided them with, btw) rather than offer a genuine review. But the irony of it all is that you've managed to pick out exactly the bits where the reviewer is actually right, and leave out most of the parts where he was talking cr@p!

Please, if you're going to stick up for our favourite space-empire game, do it by using facts and challenging falsehoods, not by demonstrating your clear lack of knowledge about other games.

It's not a bad review because it didn't serve our purpose, it's a bad review because the mans facts aren't straight.

This is exactly why I don't trust player reviews anymore; because most people make reviews out of impulse, some do it either because they hate the company, or because they hate the series.

I'm surprised that metacritic does include them, since, looking at the site, it's basically "Bjorn's gaming blog". Looking at their about section, they're basically just a clan that decided to be a news site.

Yeah, it's a "reminds me of these other games" type review. Oh well, not everyone likes it or gets it, which is to be expected.

The review seemed largely accurate to me but it makes the mistake of overlooking the fact that Sins is largely uncharted territory (RT4X) and therefore, taking creative liberties and cutting off features is to be expected. It actually did bring down the total metacritic score, unfortunately, from an 89 to an 88.

HOLY CRAP FRICKIN AWESOME! I still have my original copy of Ascendancy and that just made my day, where'd you hear this?

I feel that the most lacking part in all this is the Diplomacy factor...

Personally? I liked the diplomacy from Imperium Galactica II, would have loved to see the things in that here.

It's been in development for more than a decade, and even if they ever actually finished it it's going to be an MMO and thus of no value.

I'm amused metacritic actually heard of them.

Neither can I. There's a lot of vindication of the game in MP, and it's definitely fun to play, but he raises some valid points.