How we actually decide a review score

People ask why we never give a game a perfect score, so here's the honest answer: perfect doesn't exist, and pretending it does makes every other number meaningless. Our scale runs from solid to excellent, and we use the whole thing.

We weigh three rough things. How it feels to play minute to minute, how fairly it treats your time and patience, and whether it does what it's trying to do well. A tiny arcade game and a sprawling RPG get judged against their own ambitions, not each other.

A high score doesn't mean a game is for everyone. It means the game nails its goal. You might still bounce off it, and that's fine. We try to describe the feel clearly so you can decide for yourself.

Scores can change too. If a game ships broken and gets fixed, or gets worse with a bad update, we'll revisit it. A number frozen in time isn't much use to anyone.