Rating System
Overview
Our ratings reflect the writer's opinion, guided by standards for fairness. Reviewers play games thoroughly before assessment. Each category is rated out of 10, then weighted for the final score. Ratings consider both release year context and genre expectations. All ratings accompany detailed written reviews explaining our decisions.
A full technical explanation is detailed below
The categories we rate are as follows:
Gameplay
Evaluates game feel (input response, feedback, fluidity), progression design (difficulty curve, skill balance), systems design (AI, economy, strategic depth), pacing, NPC sophistication, multiplayer elements where applicable, and accessibility features.
This is the the heaviest weighted category, as it is the most important aspect of a game.
Graphic Fidelity
Assesses technical visual quality including rendering resolution, lighting systems, visual effects, animation quality, and support for modern display technologies.
Visual Design
Examines artistic direction, implementation quality, character and environment design, and UI/UX effectiveness separate from technical graphics capabilities.
Audio
Considers gameplay audio elements (directional cues, physicality, voice acting) and technical implementation (clarity, mixing, compatibility).
Music
Evaluates soundtrack quality, appropriateness, and implementation within the game experience.
Narrative
Assesses storytelling quality, character development, world-building, and narrative integration with gameplay.
Optimization
Evaluates technical performance efficiency across hardware configurations. Measures how well the game utilizes system resources, maintains consistent frame rates, minimizes loading times, and scales across different specification levels. Considers performance-to-visual-quality ratio and whether the game runs smoothly on recommended hardware without requiring excessive computing power.
Stability
Assesses the game's technical reliability including crash frequency, bug prevalence, save system integrity, and patch requirements at launch. Considers severity of issues (minor visual glitches vs. game-breaking problems), consistency of performance during intensive gameplay sequences, and how quickly critical issues are addressed post-launch. This may also take into account player reports and developer responsiveness to bugs.
True to Vision
Assesses how successfully a game realizes its core concept and creative intentions. This metric rewards titles that demonstrate clear artistic and design goals, then execute them with conviction, whether through deliberate simplicity or ambitious complexity. Games receive credit for cohesiveness, originality, and faithfulness to their stated or implied vision, allowing titles with focused concepts to earn recognition even when deliberately limiting certain elements to serve their overall design philosophy.
Innovation
Evaluates the game's originality and creativity in gameplay mechanics, narrative structure, visual design, or audio-visual presentation. This category rewards games that introduce new ideas or significantly improve upon existing concepts, regardless of their commercial success. It recognizes both groundbreaking innovations and thoughtful iterations that enhance the overall gaming experience.
Longevity
Evaluates the game's lasting appeal. Factors include replayability, content variety, post-launch support, procedural/random elements, player progression systems, endgame activities, and community engagement. Also considers how the core gameplay loop maintains interest over extended periods and whether the experience feels complete at launch.
Multiplayer
Examines all aspects of multiplayer functionality including matchmaking efficiency, server stability, competitive balance, social features, cooperative mechanics, community tools, anti-cheat effectiveness, and cross-platform capabilities. Considers both technical implementation and design choices that facilitate meaningful player interaction, whether competitive or cooperative.
Scale
Assesses the game's scope and how effectively it manages its ambitions. Evaluates world size, content density, environmental diversity, and how meaningfully the game utilizes its scale. Recognizes both focused experiences that maximize limited scope and expansive games that successfully deliver cohesive experiences across vast worlds. Considers whether the game's scale enhances or dilutes the core experience.
Value
Evaluates content quantity and quality relative to price point, with special consideration for indie titles that deliver exceptional experiences at lower price points. Factors include gameplay hours, replayability potential, content variety, post-launch support, DLC pricing fairness, microtransaction implementation, and overall satisfaction compared to market cost. This category intentionally allows smaller-budget games with strong core experiences to compete favorably against higher-priced AAA titles. This category takes into account the other categories scores and should change based on the price of the game.
Technical Breakdown
Categories
Each category is given several parameters:
- Weight: A number that determines how strongly the category effects the overall score.
- Curve: A cubic bezier curve that adjusts the score. This means categories are adjusted on a curve rather than a linear scale.
- Required: Non-required scores can be discarded in certain instances.
- Penalize: True/false, enables a penalty sytem that allows the category to pose a negative impact on the overall score if it's value is low enough.
- Penalty Threshold: Scores below this threshold apply the penalty.
- Penalty Factor: The scale of the penalty.
Calculation
Each category's score is ran through it's curve to produce an adjusted value. Then it's multiplied by its weight before being added to the total score.
Of the non-required categories, the 4 lowest rated ones will be completely discared so they won't affect the review.
If a category is marked as penalize, and the score is below the penalty threshold, the penalty will be calculated and applied.