There was a review of Dead Space back in the “Holiday 2008″ issue of PC Gamer that gave the game a very respectable 81%. The review ended with a paragraph devoted to discussing issues with mouse lag in the game:

“[Dead Space] would have been a much more compelling horror game if not for the bizarrely sluggish mouse movement, which feels strangely slow and floaty. This is not a sensitivity issue, and occurs even in the main menu. You get used to it eventually, but it makes pinpoint-accuracy abnormally and unnecessarily difficult in a game that demands it more than the average shooter.”

“Sluggish mouse controls” is also listed by the author of the review as one of the three “Lows” (complementing a group of “Highs”) of the game and was, quite clearly, a very important flaw in the PC release of Dead Space which saw its Xbox 360 and Playstation 3 releases hit store shelves a week earlier. I didn’t play the PC release of Dead Space (I have the Xbox 360 release) so I didn’t have a comment on the review one way or another. I already beat the game by the time I read this review and since it was providing more of an opinion as to the game’s worth to a consumer rather than a critical analysis of the game’s story or mechanics it wasn’t material that was anything new to me. It was more of a read-and-ignore short review of a game I already made up my mind about.

I didn’t give this any thought until, in the “Letters” segment of PC Gamer in the recently released January 2008 issue of the magazine, I saw a letter which was dedicated to pointing out a “fix” to the sluggish mouse issue that the author of the review considered a major sticking point:

“I greatly enjoyed the Dead Space review, and it seemed to be fairly balanced in its assessment. One of the things that stood out to me, however, was the mention of “bizarrely sluggish mouse movement.” Stuff like that can make or break a purchase. Fortunately, when I played, someone decided to turn off V-sync in the graphics settings (which is usually off by default, but in DS it’s on). To everyone’s surprise, the mouse control problem disappeared entirely. In light of this discovery, would you be willing to re-assess Dead Space after playing with V-Sync turned off?”

And the relevant portion of the PC Gamer response (not attributed to any particular writer as far as I can discern):

“It is our policy not to re-score games. It sucks for games like Dead Space that have easily fixed bugs on release, but the thought of having to re-review a game every time a patch comes out or someone finds a work-around makes our heads depressurize. The bottom line is that anyone who buys Dead Sapec off the shelf and installs it is going to have a hard time with the controls–and the last place they’re going to think to look to fix it is in the V-sync option.”

For anyone not “in the know,” v-sync (vertical sync) is an option that limits a game’s framerate to the refresh rate of the monitor it’s running on. The reason this would be desirable is to eliminate any screen tearing that may occur. Now, typically, that is the kind of option that most people turn off and never worry about it again. After all, who doesn’t want their game running at the highest framerate possible? A little screen tearing isn’t all that bad. That said, this is also the first option that an experienced gamer would look to if things seem to be running a bit out of sync (say, a sluggish mouse when a game is rendering at a decent framerate). Dead Space offers a setting to toggle v-sync on and off and simply attempting to tweak the graphical settings of the game probably would have rectified the review of Dead Space for PC Gamer’s problems. A sluggish mouse with vertical sync enabled or disables is almost certainly a bug, of course, but the fix is a very easy one that most people who bothered tweaking the game’s graphical settings would have stumbled on to.

Should the responsibility of doing this fall on the reviewer for the game? Probably not. It’s a fault with the game’s PC release, really. But the author seemed to consider it an large enough issue to end his review detailing the problems with the “sluggish mouse controls” without offering any information about this simple of fix which, as I understand it, didn’t require tweaking anything outside of the scope of the game. No INI files in a My Documents or the game’s install directory needed to be consulted for this fix.

My issue with this situation is that in December 2007 when PC Gamer ran their review of Crysis — awarding the game a seven-page review culminating in a 98% overall rating — the game’s overall performance issues were never seen as a problem. Performance with PC games is a very time-dependent factor, though, so deciding whether a game like Crysis (or Far Cry before it) should be docked any “points” for having hefty technical requirements is something I’m not in favor. Why, though, does PC gamer dedicate, outside of the seven pages of game review screenshots and text, two pages at the end of the magazine dedicated to telling their reader base how they can “Optimize Your System for Crysis!” The kinds of routines that PC gamers had to go through to get Crysis running well with a good balance of speed and visual fidelity could be kind of intricate; some out-of-game text files would probably have to looked at and altered to get the optimal playing experience.

So here’s my question: if it is okay to encourage users to tweak in-game and out-of-game settings for a game like Crysis without faulting the review of its retail build then why is it not okay to encourage users to look at the graphics settings for Dead Space to solve a sluggish mouse problem?