Forums > Submission Feedback > Zydrate's Sniper Elite 4 review

I feel like I should expand on the almost throwaway comment I made on the RotW topic. So I’m going to. Because it allows me to procrastinate!

I think tone is a really hard thing to nail down. It remains my biggest struggle in writing because I always want to default to grumpy unpleaseable snark mode and it doesn’t always jam with the source material. Sometimes I have to remind myself that people are reading my reviews to learn about the game rather than sip cognac and chuckle at whatever vicious barb I’ve spat out that day. I mention that not only as an excuse to talk about me, but because I get a similar vibe from this review. You’re nicer than me, so your default seems to be dropping into a conversational tone, which is great for making a review more personable and relatable, but this review tends to get a little saturated.

FOR EXAMPLE! An introduction talking about how you got this game and some other game by some method you don’t recall which was probably a thing but may not have been as well as getting a gift you wish was another gift is a bit of a jumbled start. There’s some important information in there that’s definitely worth mentioning, such as your pre-existing history with the series (which helps establish credibility) but its meaning and impact are dampened when you have to mentally dig it out. Likewise, I quite liked the Fable 2 quote, but the comment in brackets celebrating it came across as unneeded.

While we’re talking about that and I’m being a critical arse, you capitalise the starting word inside a bracket as if you are starting a new sentence, which you should only do if said word is a proper noun or adjective. So, for instance, this is correct (because this is an aside within the same sentence and not the start of a new one). Also, this is correct (Jason Venter dies a little inside every time he sees a grammar error, which is reason enough not to stop). But this is not (Because this is not a new sentence; it’s a ham-fisted example).

I genuinely like your reviews, which is why I’ve worked with them on Steam, and that’s probably because your writing has a blog-like quality to it which is not always a bad thing. For example, I really liked the wrap up to this review ending on the indifferent soldier having his organs exploded. I think sometimes you get a little carried away though and overshare, which loses some of the focus on the game you’re talking about.

Like you said, though; you can’t please everyone. Obtaining and accepting fair criticism is important but, at the end of the day, it’s all about producing an end result that you’re happy with above anything else.

For us. For them. For you.

Eyy, thanks for the feedback. So far I've only had a couple of people give me any direct feedback to some of my works. Most of them agree that my stuff 'flows' very well and I try to keep my stuff enjoyable and readable and I think I've accomplished that here. As a result, it's harder for me to mentally filter "too much" (like the whole fable quote thing) or "too familiar" (like the experience with previous Sniper games). It's all just the same to me.

Everything else is just grammatical, like my use of parenthesis, semicolons, and verb tense. Things that just were never really drilled into me in school because the American school system is still designed to put kids in factories. Topic for another day.

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