How We Decide On A Rating

People ask what a 4.2 actually means versus a 4.5, so here's the honest answer: the number is a summary of how we felt after real play, not a formula. But there's method behind it.

We weigh how the controls feel, how it runs across our test phones, battery and heat behaviour, and whether we wanted to keep playing. A great game that cooks your phone loses points, because that's part of the experience on mobile.

We don't hand out fives easily, and we don't go below the high threes for anything we'd bother covering — if a game is genuinely bad, we usually just don't review it rather than pad the catalogue.

Scores are subjective, and we say so. Two of us can disagree by half a point and both be right. Read the words, not just the number; the review body is where the real information lives.