Code Reviews: Good or Waste of Time?

I’ve been working with a team in Pakistan for the last couple weeks on a project which is starting to reveal itself to me.  It is an iOS game that’s nearing completion and should be ready to submit next week.

Perhaps it’s just that as a professional software developer it’s hard to accept sub-par quality code and ship it as my own product. In this case I’m doing a code review and finding so many things that were done that wouldn’t take more than a minute to fix but were not done.

My question is: is it worth the effort to try and push best practices on the team I’m working with?  Should I take the time to re-factor and debug their code so that it lives up to my standards? Should I integrate myself into a team leader position to coach my developers to get better?

Just for some idea of the quality of code. Some of this code makes me a bit stomach sick… like not using #define for numbered constants. resulting in code thats like:

if (tag == 2){ 
  check=999;
}

Other bits of code obviously taken from other projects hasn’t been refactored to change variable names. Code styles are all over the place. Best practices are thrown out the window.

My biggest takeaway from this is to absolutely enforce access to a git repository during development. As soon as I started looking at the code I had to fix it, and now it’s in a state where it’s difficult to merge in fixes that the team does. Start working on the code early on to fix and refactor things.