How we actually decide on a score

People ask what a 4.3 means versus a 4.6, so here's the honest answer: it's a judgment call, but a considered one. We don't have a spreadsheet with weighted columns. We have people who played the thing and argued about it.

We look at four rough things: how it controls, how it feels over time, how it runs on mid-range phones, and whether we actually wanted to keep playing. That last one carries a lot of weight. A technically polished game that bored us won't score high.

Scores are relative to a game's ambitions. A tiny casual game and a sprawling RPG aren't judged on the same scale — we ask whether each does what it set out to do, and does it well.

And yes, we sometimes disagree loudly. When that happens, the review usually mentions it, because you deserve to know when a game divided us.