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Message: <blockquote data-quote="jdrakeh" data-source="post: 4882398" data-attributes="member: 13892">I prefer honest reviews, as Jeff said. Any review that is written specifically to be positive or negative isn't, as far as I'm concerned, honest. Those 'reviews' are either deliberate puff pieces or deliberate hatchet jobs. If an honest opinion happens to be positive or negative, that's a different story, but there is a trend of 'reviewers' deliberately skewing reviews toward the positive (usually for promotional purposes) or negative (often for satire or humor). When I worked with RPGNow there was no shortage of publishers who demanded that reviews be written to order (i.e., that reviews be only positive, regardless of if a product merited a positive review) and Darren MacLennan (of RPGnet) has pretty much cornered the market for humorous negative reviews. I can also think of a site where publishers involved in a co-op write horribly obvious puff pieces for each other's games and try to pass them off as legitimate reviews, for example. So, I guess, positive or negative is an afterthought for me. I would prefer only to read honest evaluations of games written without an obvious pre-determined agenda to promote or condemn the game being reviewed.[Edit: Also, as Jeff said, slanting toward the positive and negative is forgiveable if reviewer affiliations or biases are made clear in the body of the review. IME, however, they often aren't.]</blockquote>