This is a question which will make more than one jump but which deserves to be asked.
A set review is good, it allows you to see more closely a model, minifigs, a box ... but more and more, these reviews are botched, spoiled by those who offer them with blurry photos , the carpet in their living room or the checkered tablecloth in the kitchen. In addition, the high-definition visuals offered by LEGO, retouched or not, circulate regularly well before the sets are actually marketed and are of much better quality than those offered by fans.
What the fans think? Personally, I skip this part more and more often: these hasty reviews are mostly decorated with two lines of text, which, when they are not full of spelling mistakes, do not have no interest other than describing what you see in the photos. I would not come back here to the rating at the limit of the debility granted to sets by certain sites or forums .... These ratings have no interest and for good reason: they are not indexed to anything, correspond to nothing and are used just conclusion to reviews that have no such as the name.
On one side we find the Awesome Reviews, those where everything is brilliant, incredible, top-notch, grandiose, with notes to make a college student green with envy and a conclusion that recommends buying the set in question immediately on pain of being a looser for life.
On the other, we find the pathological reviews, with dozens of pictures of the box, instructions, stickers, the box, the inventory of wisely aligned parts, the box and more of the box .... All served with an over-analysis of the content, even if it means falling into obsession.
Don't get me wrong, I'm not against discovering pictures of a set I'm looking forward to, quite the contrary. But I am a big boy and I make my own opinion without having to go through the usual logorrhea of superlatives. And above all, I want to keep certain sensations for my own unpacking with the discovery of the contents, the bags, the parts ... The ridiculous ritual but essential for any self-respecting AFOL.
More and more excellent video reviews are being posted on YouTube by passionate AFOLs (Adult Fans of LEGO) or on sites like The Brick Show , which have made these mini-shows their trademark. And that's a good thing. They have the advantage of showing the set and minifigures from every angle in under 3 minutes, with minimal unnecessary commentary (you can always mute the sound), and sometimes even detailing the model's various features. I couldn't ask for more.
I recently posted some video reviews produced by Artifex on Brick Heroes . They're a great example of clean and efficient work that lets you get a complete overview of a set in just a few minutes. It's hard to do better; the technical level of production is high. I also spend some time browsing YouTube to watch videos from the young French-speaking scene that present sets in the form of short clips. The production is amateurish, the commentary hesitant, the opening credits annoying, but you generally learn more than from a review of 15 photos and three lines of conclusion.
I don't wait for a review to decide whether or not to give me a particular set. In the worst case, we get so many images of the new stuff coming out that my idea on the matter is settled long before anyone decides to post some pictures.
And you, what is your opinion on this subject? Do not hesitate to post your comments....
