When considering whether or not to start reviewing individual games on this blog, I was conflicted about the nature of assigning a score to a creative work and about what scale to even use. For a long time game reviews focused on the workmanship involved, a sort of aggregate of all the component parts – how good are the graphics? Is the sound design immersive? How well does it control and feel to play? Is it objectively fun?
It’s this sort of “Consumer Reports” type of approach that has frequently rubbed me the wrong way. Sure, it was fine during the industry’s formative years when games were more seen as distractions for kids and/or consumer products, but the past few decades have seen an explosion of games that can legitimately be evaluated as works of art just as any book, movie, or TV show can. Further complicating this, however, is the fact that interactive works of art can be inherently even more subjective, given the array of different types of skills you might need to play and fully engage with any given game (and that’s not even addressing a game’s narrative hits or misses). Something I personally enjoyed a lot might not (or perhaps definitely won’t) be most other peoples’ cup of tea.
So, ironically, I settled on using not just one but two rating scales. The first is a 0 to 100 rating scale but purely based on my own subjective enjoyment of the work. The second is a 0 to 3 star rating based on how readily I’d recommend it to others. Here’s the full breakdown:
Rating #1 – My personal rating
90 – 100 : An all-time favorite. I find games that land in this tier are exemplary in their genre, or are so novel and compelling that I believe they will inspire other developers to imitate or iterate on them. A score of 95 or higher puts this into the pantheon of the best games I’ve ever played.
80 – 89 : An excellent game. Any flaws that are present are minor enough to be looked past, and I find games in this range to be well-designed, enthralling, and quite possibly have something interesting to say through its narrative or express through mechanics.
70 – 79 : Solid and fun. I find that some of the more interesting works land here; games that have a novel concept or take a big swing but are rough around the edges or don’t quite meet their full potential. Very much still worth consideration.
60 – 69 : Fairly good. Enjoyable but with some notable flaws or elements that didn’t quite work for me. Games here are ones I likely still finished even if I had issues with them. This is probably the zone for games I respect but don’t quite grok (can we still use that word? Is it ruined?).
50 – 59 : Just OK. The game has obvious flaws or technical issues or otherwise didn’t quite work for me in other ways. Games in this range may be DNFs (did not finish).
0 - 49 : Yikes. Serious technical issues, poor game design, or baffling narrative choices seriously hampered my enjoyment of this game and I probably didn’t finish it for one of those reasons. I tend to be picky about what I spend my time playing (and I don’t particularly enjoy being negative about creative works), so seeing something in this range should be rare.
Rating #2 – How much do I recommend it to others?
: Recommended. I’d recommend it to fans of the genre, or with a few caveats.
: Highly recommended. I think most players would enjoy this. If I met you at a party and knew you were a gamer, I’d tell you about it.
: A must-play. I’m disheveled and sleep-deprived on a street corner, with a cardboard sign and megaphone begging people to play it.