Like I JUST wrote, if YOU don't need a tutorial or campain, congratulations!  I'll buy you one of those little plastic golden award cups.  Thousands DO.  Same with campains, and replays, ect.  The reviewers do, and HAVE been taking lots of points off because of what was left out; that's not an assumption, it's a FACT.

Before a reveiwer finishes their reveiws, they don't read all the forums, look for someonw that wrote "hey, I don't need that part of the game", and say "Gee, I guess if that fanboy does'nt need that part of the game, the entirre rest of the gaming world can't possibly want or need them either, I better give back all those points I took off".

Tutorial: Pick a character, kill stuff, kill other demigods, win games...anyone who puts this game into their pc, installs it, and knows how to run it should be able to figure out how to start playing this game.

Multiplayer - The lack of depth of the game(which isn't a problem) means that the multiplayer(which is the focus) needs to be superb.  So far it has been a disappointment for a lot of users.  They say it's ~5% that are having issues with MP, well those 5% are also effecting other players with mismatched games that never start and much more.

Stardock has already said they messed up, you can't be like "What? This game is awesome for me, how can ANYONE think it's not perfect?"  I personally find this game really enjoyable, except I can only play about 1/4 of the games I attempt to play.  I'm sorry, but 40$ isn't worth 1/4 functionality in a game I expect to be 100% functional.

Because it's okay for some companies to release games that don't work out of the box while it isn't okay for others.

For example let's take a game like Age of Conan. Which was broken for 6 months after release. It got mostly positive marks. Why? Because Eidos decorated almost every game site with tons of ads. Another example....GTA 4 for the PC. It's Rockstar and GTA. Of course no one is going to mark down a GTA game.  Stardock on the other hand doesn't have a multimillion dollar franchise and they don't pay crazy loads of cash to decorate an entire sites front page with the games they make.

So it's basically a double standard

With that said if a game releases broken it should be marked down. Period. Yes even Demigod (even though I love this game).

Demigod is getting hammered by the reviewers because it is sub-par.  The single player is just skirmishes vs the AI, so the game is really all about the multiplayer.  The multiplayer flat out didn't work innitially and still works poorly.  When your game is pretty much all multiplayer and the multiplayer doesn't work, that's bad.  Truth is, these reveiws are being very generous with demigod.  With a launch like this it probably doesn't deserve any higher than a 5 out of 10.  This game is flat out beta quality.

I agree with FooFoo that not enough games get hammered for being broken.

I agree with those who say not enough games get absolutely hammered by reviewers for having severe issues on release-  no matter what the issues are.

But there's two sides to it. For one there are legitimate issues that really are unpredictable - should a company suffer due to this?

And on top of that there's the fact that historically, games with really bad issues have gotten off scott free regardless. Do you see WoW expansions getting lower reviews due to those first few days after release being total lag/crashfests? Nope.

How many other games have teething problems on release only to be corrected later?

Where do you draw a line with an issue like this?

If anything perhaps yes, Stardock should cop it due to releasing a multiplayer title where the multiplayer basically didnt work....but on the same note, it should also warrant a re-review a week/2 weeks/month later once it's given a reasonable chance to correct the issues. A month is probably too long - perhaps a week maximum.

Demigod is a great game - when or if you get to actually play it. I do not remotely count the skirmish or tournament modes as any form of single player component. Imo just because you can play it offline doesn't mean it's an actual single player portion. A campaign of even the most bare bones implementation is about the limit here imo.

I'm probably wrong, but I thought it was already stated that there wouldn't be a tutorial or campaign.

That is just being narrow minded. Just because you didn't like the game IGN giving it a good review is a disgrace? The game has an 86% on metacritic. It has a couple of perfect scores and a lot of 90's. So all those sites are a disgrace? It's called an opinion. Second of all DoW II is not an RTS it's a RTT. Third...you need to play more games if you honestly believe that is the worst strategy game you have ever played.

People need to stop caring about numbers so much. Does anyone even actually read the reviews anymore? If you read the reviews you would see how the score would have been different if multiplayer was working.

I don't care what game it is. If you have a single player focused game and it's not working you get a low score. If you have a multi player focused game and that's not working you get a low score. I HATE the double standard where some games get marked down while others don't. They all should be. Think about how pissed off people would be if let's say IGN gave this game a 90. They would go out, buy it, and be extremely pissed off that they gave such high marks to a game that does not work.

Stardock and GPG are great companies. I place Stardock right up their with Valve. I know they will get these issues fixed and re-reviews later down the road would be nice.