How We Actually Review A Game

People sometimes assume reviews get written after an hour of play. For us it's slower than that. A game gets installed on a regular test phone and someone commits to playing it properly, usually over several days, before anyone writes a word.

While we play, we take messy notes: how fast it loads, whether the controls fight us, how hot the phone gets, how the battery holds up over half an hour. Those practical details end up mattering more to readers than whether the art is pretty.

We talk through the game as a team before settling on a rating. One person's annoyance is another's non-issue, and hashing that out keeps us honest. The rating is a summary of the whole experience, not a single number pulled from the air.

Nobody pays us to cover anything, and we don't accept perks tied to a positive write-up. If a studio sends a game to try, that's fine, but it gets the same scrutiny as everything else and we'll say so.

The goal is simple: write the review we wish we'd read before spending our own evening on the game.