What Makes A Review Actually Useful

A good review answers one question: will I enjoy spending time with this? Everything else is detail in service of that. So when we test a game, we're really testing our own attention span against it.

We play on real phones, not emulators, because touch controls and battery drain are part of the experience. We note where the tutorial helps and where it drowns you. We track whether we kept opening the game voluntarily or out of obligation.

We also try to be honest about taste. Our editor loves slow strategy games and gets bored by grind-heavy RPGs, so we flag that bias rather than pretend to be neutral robots. You should know who's talking.

The number at the top of a review is the least interesting part. The reasons behind it are what actually help you decide, so that's where we spend our words.