As somebody who works for a niche site and actually gets paid for his reviews on that site, I don't think you need to finish a game at all. I think it helps to finish a game, so you have a complete picture of the product as a whole, but the example I always go back to is a DS RPG called "Sands of Destruction."
I hated Sands of Destruction. By the fourth or fifth hour I knew I hated it. I forced myself to at least make it to the 8 hour mark and wrote a savage review on what a sloppy, awful, generic JRPG it was. Getting to that 8th hour was one of the biggest struggles I've ever had as a reviewer. I was literally counting the seconds until the in-game clock rolled over to 8:00.
Nothing after that point in the game, no matter how good, could have made up for those first eight hours. Even if I had another 20+ hours ahead of me, it just wasn't worth it. If I'd finished the game all the way, who knows how my review would've turned out. Maybe I would've been even angrier. Maybe a sort of stockholm syndrome would've set in. Neither seem very useful. I made it as far as I could, wrote my review, honestly informed my readers I couldn't and WOULDN'T finish the game, and moved on.
And there is nothing wrong with that.
Good games are a different kettle of fish. If it's a game I like, I think finishing it before writing the review should be a high priority. You're looking for any moment where the good times end and things turn sour. Whereas a bad game garners "nothing past this point would be worth the suffering I have already faced so I'm quitting early" reactions, good games really do need to be seen through to the end. I have written more than one review in my time to the effect of "this is a pretty cool game but it turns to junk near the end, so be aware of that." That's being informative, which is what reviews are designed to be.
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