We don’t give numbers. A score compresses forty hours of experience into one digit that then gets averaged with everyone else’s, and the averaging is the part we object to — it turns a set of opinions into a fact, which is not what opinions are.
Instead every review ends with one of five verdicts.
Must Play
Drop what you’re doing. We use this sparingly and we mean it — if this label stops being rare it stops being worth anything.
Recommend
Worth your time and your money now.
Wait for a Sale
Worth playing, not worth full price. We name the price we’re judging against, because a verdict that doesn’t is meaningless the moment the game is discounted.
Wait for Patches
The game underneath is good and the state it shipped in isn’t. Bugs, performance, missing features, something broken enough to spoil it. This is a verdict about timing rather than quality, and we’ll revisit it — pieces that come back to a patched game go in The Backlog.
Don’t Recommend
Not worth it at any price, in any state.
Whose verdict it is
Every verdict carries a one-line qualifier, and every verdict is attached to a person rather than to the magazine. “Recommend” from someone who plays nothing but RPGs means something different than the same word from someone who plays everything. Our writers page tells you what each of us can and can’t be trusted on, so you can weigh accordingly.
First Hours
Pieces filed in the opening hours of a game don’t get a verdict at all. They’re labelled as provisional, and if one of us files a First Hours piece we’ve committed to writing the full review later.
Disagreement
We publish it. A review can carry second opinions from other writers with different verdicts, including ones that flatly contradict the main piece. We’re not trying to arrive at a house position, because we don’t have one.
Review codes
When a publisher provides a code, the review says so in the verdict box. We buy most of what we cover. Receiving a code has never changed a verdict, and if it ever appears to, we’d rather you be able to see the disclosure and judge for yourself.
Corrections
If we get something wrong, we say so on the piece and explain what changed. Sometimes that means a writer returning months later to revise their own verdict. Those pieces go in The Backlog and they’re some of the best things we publish.