What our ratings actually mean

A score with no explanation is noise, so here's how ours work. We don't grade on a curve against a genre, we grade on whether the game held up across a real playthrough.

A 4.0 means solid and worth your time with clear caveats. A 4.5 and up means we'd actively recommend it and probably kept playing after the review was done. Anything below 3.8 rarely makes the site, because we'd rather write about games worth your battery.

We also weight how a game ends, not just how it starts. Plenty of mobile games open strong and collapse at hour ten, and that fall shows up in the number.

If a score surprises you, read the last paragraph of the review. That's usually where the reasoning lives.