Who’s reading your review: Professional game developers. Game Developer magazine is read by over 30,000 game developers every month. The average reader is very knowledgeable about the industry, the technology, and the tools necessary to build games. Our readers include programmers, artists, animators, game designers, sound effects engineers, producers, and quality assurance personnel. While our magazine targets the whole team, don't water down a review to make every nuance of the product understandable to team members who will never use it. If it is a programming tool, write to an audience of programmers. If it's a 3D animation tool, pretend that you're writing to nobody else but animators.

After reading your review, your audience should be able to base a purchasing decision on it. For that reason it’s important not just to tell what features the product has and what it can do, but how well (or not so well) it performs at its tasks. Inject opinion into your reviews. Reviews should not read like the product’s user manual.

How to approach a review: Research the product. Unless you have used the product a great deal before, read up on it. Take the time to read any supplied reviewer’s guide and the user’s manual. If the product has any built-in tutorials, run through them. These activities require relatively little time investment and provide a base knowledge about the product. In addition, I highly recommend you seek out user forums and newsgroups that pertain to the product or the technology. By reading what other users are saying about the product, you can pinpoint strengths, weaknesses, and find out where the bugs are.

In addition to these suggestions, here are some other rules of thumb:

Run the product through a couple of trial projects that people would buy and use the product for. Talk about your experiences, what was going through your mind about the product and process.

Describe who the product would be beneficial to and the type of project it would be best used for.

Clarify the technical level that one must be at to benefit from the product. This includes any concepts or methodologies one must be acquainted with.

Give your opinion of whether the product lives up to expectations. Did it deliver on its promise (as described in a press release or on the product’s packaging), whatever that may be?

Let the reader know how it compares with its competitors.

Explain any special hardware, software, or networking requirements the product requires.

Wind your review up with a concise paragraph or two summarizing what you think about the product, who the product would be good/not good for. Answer the question every reader has: “Is it worth the investment?” and be honest with your answer.

Look at the product's price. Does the product justify the price tag? This can be especially important if you are reviewing an upgrade of a product. Should someone who has the last version of the product shell out the money to buy it, or are there not enough new features to justify the expense?

Round-Up Reviews: When looking at more than one product in a review, cover the products one at a time. Don’t switch focus between products from sentence to sentence. Cover product X entirely, then begin a new section and cover product Y. Include 2-3 paragraphs at the end of the review that sum up which product(s) you would recommend (and or not recommend) out of the lot you looked at, and why. Remember: Don’t rewrite the product’s user manual or web site—stay away from “dry” talk. Let your personality come out enough to capture and hold the reader as you talk about the product.

Include The Following With Your Review:
Product name and version number
Company name
Company address
Company URL
Product price
Software requirements (operating system/environment, etc.)
Hardware requirements (megabytes of RAM needed, the recommended hard drive space, etc.)

3 pros and 3 cons about the product (these should be short, one or two sentence summations of your main points from the body of the review)

If needed, screen shots should be in .TIF, or high-quality .JPG format, and at least 1024x768 resolution, but the bigger the better.

A 1-2 sentence bio about yourself (game credits, current position, etc.)

Autodesk Maya 2009

Blade 3D

If you have any questions or comments about product reviews, the process of reviewing a product, etc., send us mail.

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