How We Actually Score a Game

People ask us all the time what our numbers mean, so here's the honest answer. A rating on this site is one thing: how much we'd recommend spending your time on a game, given what it's trying to be. We don't judge a cosy sim against an epic RPG. That would be pointless.

We start every review by asking what the game wants to achieve. A three-minute arcade racer and a twelve-hour adventure have completely different jobs. Once we know the job, we ask how well the game does it, how it feels in the hand, and whether it respects your time.

We deliberately keep our scale narrow, roughly 3.8 to 4.9, because we only bother writing up games we found worth playing at all. Anything below that just doesn't get a page. So a 4.2 here isn't a shrug; it's a solid recommendation with a couple of caveats.

The number is always the least important part of the review. Read the words. That's where the actual opinion lives.