ABOUT OUR GAME REVIEWING METHODOLOGY
Writing quality video game reviews isn’t an easy going task. There are certain things that must be accounted for. Just like literature, art, movies, music, or any cultural product, video games are hard to judge. There are no empirical methods that would easily help us determine which game is better or worse than the other one. Reviewing games is mostly a matter of subjective opinion. However, that doesn’t mean that we can arbitrarily judge video games according to our own taste.
The way that we review games is mostly inspired by the way that literary critics evaluate literary works. When writing our reviews, we try to be as objective as possible. Our reviewing methodology is primarily based on evaluating six aspects of video games (see table below). These aspects are story, gameplay, longevity, graphics, sound and functionality.
| Aspect | Description |
|---|---|
| Story | Refers to the complexity of the story, characters, narration, dialogues, used motives, degrees of intertextuality and ideological richness |
| Gameplay | Responsiveness of controls, difficulty of interaction with the game’s world, feeling of satisfaction and enjoyment, functional aspects of game’s mechanics |
| Longevity | Amount of content that is packed into the game, level of replayability, existence of quality of life features, price to playtime ratio |
| Graphics | Quality of visual effects, textures and animations, color palette spectrum, design and aesthetical richness |
| Sound | Quality of sound effects, memorability of musical soundtrack, impact of soundtrack on game’s immersiveness level |
| Functionality | Performance, bugs, online connection stability, functionality of physics and rendering engines |
When we analyze each of the above listed aspects, we try to consider all the pros and cons that are related to them. After that we rate each aspect with grades from 1 to 10, by which 1 indicates horrible, 5 mediocre, and 10 excellent. In cases where things aren’t so clear, we might use 0.5 increments in order to assign a proper grade to the certain aspect. After that we sum up all of the grades and divide that value with the total number of aspects (which is six) in order to get an average score. This value represents our final review score of the game. According to the score, we finally attribute the game with a corresponding description whose meanings you can find in this table here:
| Score | Description |
|---|---|
| ≥9.5 | Legendary – title that surpasses many expectations and sets a new standard that many future games will follow afterwards; title of the decade |
| ≥9.0 | Fantastic – masterfully made title that represents all of the aspects of the genre, it’s smooth and polished gameplay makes it a must play experience |
| ≥8.0 | Great – title that is thoughtfully made and offers some very memorable moments, but which isn’t appealing to everyone |
| ≥7.0 | Enjoyable – title that is from beginning to an end coherent, but which suffers from lack of content, imagination or some technical issues |
| ≥6.0 | Okayish – title that doesn’t feel rewarding, but is sufficient for its fans |
| ≥5.0 | Passable – unremarkable title that offers bare minimum of enjoyment |
| ≥4.0 | Bad – title that offers dull and flawed experience that isn’t worth investing time into |
| ≥3.0 | Awful – title whose features are broken and incomplete |
| ≥2.0 | Horrible – complete insult to the player’s and developer’s self-esteem |
| <2.0 | Absolute disaster – why does this even exist? |
Finally, it is necessary to say that we usually avoid giving recommendations to buy games according to our reviews. Purpose of our reviews is to give our readers a broad picture, a certain context and summary of game’s features that we tried to analyze. It is up to you, as a reader, to decide whether our reviews are credible or not, and whether video game you are interested in is worth of your time. In any case, we welcome any kind of constructive criticism and would like to receive as much feedback as possible so we could produce more quality content.
