The Rating I Went Back and Changed

I wrote up Heat: Pedal to the Metal at four stars and I stand by most of what I said in that review, the heat management deck really is the reason a racing theme I have zero natural interest in got its hooks into me. What I didn’t fully reckon with at the time, because I’d only played it maybe eight or nine times when I wrote the review, is how much the rubber banding problem would bother me once the group had put another fifteen sessions into it.

Here’s what actually happened, laid out honestly instead of glossed over the way a lot of “I changed my mind” posts tend to gloss over the boring middle part. The spreadsheet has Heat logged at a four the week I wrote the review. Six weeks later, after a run of Thursday nights where it kept being the fallback pick when nobody wanted to commit to something longer, I noticed I was mentioning the rubber banding complaint out loud almost every single time we played it, not as a joke, as an actual real frustration that kept resurfacing. That’s usually my tell that a rating’s gone stale. If I’m bringing up the same criticism unprompted five sessions in a row, the number attached to it in writing is probably wrong.

I went back and forth on whether to actually change the published number or just leave it, since there’s an argument that a review is a snapshot of a moment and shouldn’t get retroactively edited just because more plays happened. I get that argument. I don’t fully buy it for my own site though, because the whole point of writing these up is supposedly to be honest about what I actually think, and it started to feel dishonest to leave a four star rating standing once I genuinely didn’t believe it anymore.

So the review stays at four stars, the original text unchanged, but I wanted to say plainly here that if I were writing it today it’d be a three. The game is still good. The first half of most races still doesn’t matter as much as it should, and after twenty-plus plays that stopped reading as a minor quibble and started reading as the actual shape of the design, not an edge case I happened to hit a few times.

I don’t know how many other ratings on this site are quietly drifting the same way without me having noticed yet. Probably a few. That’s sort of the risk of publishing an opinion before you’re fully done forming it, which is every review ever written if you’re honest about it, mine included.