How We Actually Review A Game

People sometimes ask how long we spend on a review. The honest answer is, it depends, but never less than several real hours of play. A quick arcade game gets played until we've seen the difficulty curve flatten. An RPG gets days.

We test on more than one phone. There's a current flagship and a couple of older models in the drawer, because most people aren't playing on the latest hardware. A game that only runs well on a brand new phone gets marked down for it.

Battery and heat are logged every time. We note how fast the charge drops and how warm the phone gets, because that's part of the experience and almost nobody else writes it down. Then we poke at the settings to see how much that can be improved.

The score itself is a conversation, not a formula. Usually a couple of us play the same game and argue about it. If we land on a number and still disagree, we say so in the text, because a single digit can't capture everything.

Nobody pays us for a score, and no publisher sees the review before it's published. That independence is the whole point of the site, and we'd rather stay small than lose it.