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How We Rate Games
Every guide on this site carries a rating. This page explains exactly what goes into it — the five things being judged, how the numbers turn into a letter, and why length and difficulty are measured differently from everything else.
Five pillars, equal weight
Each one is scored from 1 to 10. None counts more than another — every pillar is worth exactly 20% of the final grade.
Gameplay
The part that is simply whether the game is good to play. How it feels moment to moment, and the world and atmosphere you are playing inside — the places, the mood, the pressure. If it gripped me, this goes up. If I was bored, it goes down.
Difficulty is judged here too. A game pitched far too hard, or so easy there is nothing to hold on to, loses marks off this score. How that is measured →
20% of the gradeGame System
Everything the game asks you to manage and learn. Resources and how tight they are, puzzles, upgrade paths for characters and for weapons, buying and selling, and how you get hold of weapons and materials in the first place. A game can be beautiful and still lose marks here for a clumsy system.
20% of the gradeStory & Side Stories
The main story, and the side stories around it. A strong main plot with hollow side content does not score the same as a game where both are worth your time.
20% of the gradeDuration
How long the game runs — and this one does not work like the others. Too short and too long are both faults. Full marks go to a game whose length matches what it is actually doing. How that is measured →
20% of the gradeCharacters & Sub-characters
Whether the cast lands. Did I care about them? A game can fail here in more than one way: too few characters to carry the story, so many that none of them register, or a cast that is simply weak and forgettable. Any of those pulls this score down.
20% of the gradeTwo things that peak in the middle
Most of this rating works on "higher is better". Length and difficulty do not.
Duration
A game can be too short — it ends before it has done anything with its own ideas. A game can also be too long — padded out, repeating itself, stretching a ten-hour idea across thirty hours. Both are faults, and a single "more is better" slider cannot express that.
So duration is scored as a curve with a peak. The length of the game is placed on a scale from 1 (very short) to 3 (very long). The peak — full marks — sits at the point where the length is right for that game. Move away from the peak in either direction and the score falls at the same rate on both sides.
A little short and a little long land on the same score. Far too short and far too long both bottom out at 1.
Difficulty
Difficulty has the same shape. A game can be so punishing that it stops being enjoyable, and it can be so undemanding that nothing ever asks anything of you. Both take something away from how the game plays.
But difficulty is only ever a subtraction. It does not have its own slice of the grade — it comes off the Gameplay score, and it can take away up to 4 points. Getting the difficulty right does not earn a game anything.
That is deliberate. A dull game with perfectly judged difficulty is still a dull game, so a well balanced challenge should not lift its score. A game I loved that is pitched wrong, though, has a real problem — and that shows up.
N/R — not rated
Some games do not have all five pillars, and pretending otherwise would be unfair to them.
A pure puzzle game has no story and no cast to judge. Scoring it 1 out of 10 for characters would be punishing it for something it never set out to do. So instead that pillar is marked N/R: it is drawn pulled into the centre of the chart, greyed out, and left out of the average entirely. The grade is worked out only from the pillars that were actually rated.
All five pillars rated. The grade is the average of all five.
A puzzle game with no story and no real cast. Those two pillars sit at the centre marked N/R, and the grade comes from the other three alone — so the game is judged on what it actually is.
From numbers to a letter
The rated pillars are averaged, and that average becomes the letter in the middle of the badge.
| Grade | Average out of 10 |
|---|---|
| A+ | 9.5 – 10 |
| A | 8.5 – 9.4 |
| B+ | 7.5 – 8.4 |
| B | 6.5 – 7.4 |
| C+ | 5.5 – 6.4 |
| C | 4.5 – 5.4 |
| D+ | 3.5 – 4.4 |
| D | 1.0 – 3.4 |
| N/R | no pillar rated |