How We Score a Game

People ask what the difference between a 4.1 and a 4.5 is, and the honest answer is: it's a feel, not a formula. But there's reasoning behind it, so here's how we think.

A score starts from how much we wanted to keep playing after the review was technically done. If a game pulls us back when we're off the clock, that's the strongest signal there is. Everything else — controls, pacing, polish — feeds into that.

We weight genre expectations too. A cozy sim and a twitch arcade game are judged by what they're trying to be, not against each other. A 4.1 sim and a 4.3 racer can both be exactly as good as they set out to be.

One thing we won't do is inflate scores to please anyone. A number only means something if it can go low. If we ever hand out a 3.8, trust that we meant it.