This game plays well. It doesn't do anything new, but the controls work like they should. The A button shoots, and the B button jumps. Control pad moves your character. Lots of aliens die. Average stuff. I give the gameplay a 7/10.

Ever read a review like this? I have. I've read lots of them. Most of them from ten years ago, maybe even more. Thank the gods of criticism that reviews have changed a lot since then.

It wasn't that long ago that game reviews largely consisted of blocks of data concerning particular aspects of the game being reviewed. Large headers would segment this data into a handful of groupings, usually things like gameplay, graphics, and sound. It wasn't exactly uncommon for these headers to have scores attached to them.

I love this style of reviewing. My favorite part about it is that it analyzed the individual pieces of games. The final product was a consideration meant for conclusions, but the important thing was how individual facets of the game fared in contrast to the current game market.

Right about now, I hope that my sarcasm is oozing out of your screen. The thought of taking a total product, a complete piece of art and entertainment, and trying to evaluate it through a series of analytical lenses that remove the parts from the whole baffles me. Thankfully, it seems to have baffled most gaming critics, too.

I won't bother trying to pinpoint where in time the change started to take hold, but the result is obvious. For the most part, the days of blocky analysis and goofy headers are gone. Reviewers, as a rule of thumb, now look at games as a holistic work rather than a list of attributes to give scores.

Instead of worrying only about the quality of the graphics, reviewers can now ask questions like "how does this game make me feel?" There's an expression about the sum being greater than the total of its parts; the current holistic approach to reviewing acknowledges this possibility (or its opposite). Still, reviews most commonly have scores for aspects of a game in the old compartmentalized fashion.

And, honestly, I feel like applying scores to specific elements of a game is little more than holding on to the past for fear of letting go. If we view games as a whole, then how is the score of a given part important? Would I turn down an otherwise excellent game if the sound was given a four while the rest of the elements gained straight nines? I would very much hope not, but why do we have scores for pieces of the game if not for this?

Upon considering this, I've come to think that scoring certain aspects of games is on the way out the door. There's little merit to holding on to these scores if there's any merit to it at all. If we look at a game as a game, a total unit (rather than as a combination of graphics, sound, and gameplay), then our scoring systems need to reflect that. We need to score the whole product.