Game8 reviews games a little differently from other publications. Read on to learn more about our Review Scoring System, criteria, and how we handle game reviews in general.
Game8 Review Policy
Review Criteria
At Game8, we rate games based on five areas: Story, Gameplay, Visuals, Audio, and Value. A game that only excels in one of these aspects can still be a good game, but a game that exceeds in several areas deserves a score higher than one that doesn't; a game that excels only in gameplay shouldn't be scored higher than one that excels in both gameplay AND visuals. It's a much more holistic view of games and allows us to justify rating games across genres.
A perfect game to us, then, is a game that balances and achieves excellence in all of these things. A perfect game should exceed all expectations in each aspect and there is nothing that anyone could reasonably do to improve it.
This also allows you to decide what's most important to you. Maybe you want a tearjerker and don't necessarily care about visuals. Maybe you prefer to play an addictive roguelite with your own thumping soundtrack instead of the game's. By splitting a game up into its individual pieces, you can judge it according to what's more important to you.
Here is a breakdown of what specifically we look for in each criteria:
Story
The plot, characters, pacing, and overall depth all affect this score. For games that don't necessarily need a story (like puzzle games), we may rate the setting and how it adds or detracts from the immersion of the game.
Gameplay
Gameplay is scored on the enjoyability of the gameplay loop, intuitiveness of its controls, and whether it has any unique features that help it stand out from others in its genre. Gamebreaking bugs/glitches are also considered.
Visuals
Distinctive art styles, smoothness of the animations, character design, environmental detail, and UI are all considerations under visuals. Frame rate and visual glitches are also looked at.
Audio
This area looks at background music, theme music, sound effects, voice acting and even the lack thereof. Poor audio can take you out of the experience, so we rate games highly for a great auditory journey.
Value
A game that has a long runtime or a game that is completely free doesn't necessarily equal high value: the game has to respect your time, and not just pad its playtime with chorework. It balances price against addictiveness. Value is especially rated high for games with a certain 'je nais se quois' that makes you feel fully satisfied for the money you spent on it.
Review Scoring System Breakdown
Our reviews aren't scored based purely on feeling, but rather mainly on reasoning and constructive criticism. Our reviewers reflect on their experiences and point to specific areas in which the game did well or what they could have improved on.
The way we rate a game is by giving it individual scores from 1 to 10 across the five criteria we mentioned above, with 1 being awful, 5 being inoffensive, and 10 being beyond reproach. Here are the feelings of each range.
| Score Range | Description |
|---|---|
| 10 | As perfect as it's going to get. There's nothing further to improve; it achieves what it hoped with excellence and stands alongside, or even above, the greats. |
| 9-7 | The Outstanding to Good range. There are significant points where it could improve, but overall, a positive experience. |
| 6-4 | The Meh area; there are several points where it should improve, but even if it did, it might be not make you feel anything. Not actively horrible but not actively great either. 5 is the epitome of "whatever," showing that it exists. |
| 3-1 | Insulting to the senses; the level of quality makes you angry for wasting your time. There's probably worse in the world, but that doesn't make things better for this game. |
| 0 | A statement more than a score. A game that gets a 0 means not only does it feel like no thought was put into the aspect, it borders on disrespecting or even scamming players. |
These scores are then added together, then multiplied by two. This reveals the Overall Score, which ranges from 0 to 100. This combined score allows us to average things out and compare games between genres, where expectations may be different, and decide which games have executed on each of its parts.
Therefore, our scores may differ a bit from others, in a landscape where 70 would be considered a bad game. There's different reasons why a game may have the total it does, so priorities may be different per person, but here is a rough idea of what each total score means:
| Score Range | Description |
|---|---|
| 100-95 | An absolute masterpiece that will undoubtedly go into history as one of the greatest of all time. Other games should aim for this as the benchmark of excellence. |
| 94-85 | Definitely GOTY material. The developers have shown a great deal of effort in making their game an outstanding title, leaving little room for criticism. |
| 84-75 | Undoubtedly an amazing game that will meet most players' expectations. It falls short of greatness due to some noticeable shortcomings, but it wouldn't be surprising if there was a passionate player base for the game. |
| 74-65 | A good game but with some big flaws. If you can look past those flaws, you're still in for a pleasant experience. |
| 64-56 | An ok game. There are some redeeming qualities, and they may be just enough to be worth your time. But there may be some glaring deficiencies that may be difficult to ignore. |
| 55-45 | The game is mediocre in both strengths and weaknesses. Some might be able to enjoy it, but it lacks any features to stand out. It's an entirely forgettable experience. |
| 44-30 | Nothing about this game is palatable. Everything it does falls flat on its face, making it an overall failure. Even if there is something it does well, everything else is so bad that it distracts from that one thing. Objectively speaking, there was effort made into certain parts, and points are being given for that fact. |
| 30-20 | Actively unenjoyable. It broaches the area of "it's so bad, it's good," but it could also just be "it's so bad." Recommended for people who like to hurt themselves for fun. |
| 19-10 | Beyond unenjoyable, the game is just unplayable. Absolutely nothing redeeming could be found about it. |
| 0 | Reserved for games that don't deserve to be called games. The time you lost in looking this game up and starting it up hurts more than the money you potentially spent on it. |
Game8 Review Process
Scope of Game Review Coverage
At Game8, we'll review anything that we think will be interesting to gamers, across most all genres. This means we review a wide range of games, from indie to AAAA (though Skull and Bones has been the only AAAA game so far), from action RPGs to walking simulators.
While we purchase our own copies of many of the games we review, Game8 will often receive advance review keys from publishers. Outside of this, our writers are not compensated, monetarily or otherwise, by any outside companies. Any sponsored articles are clearly labeled as such.
Our scores are always solely dependent on the honest thoughts and opinions of our writers.
Updates and Revisions
Sometimes, the thoughts you have while marathoning a game and the thoughts after you've had some time to let it sit will differ. We won't always get it perfect the first time; we're only human.
As such, there may be times where scores will change. This can especially be true of live service or mobile games, in which they may update to try to improve the game over time. In cases where we change a score, we will put in a disclaimer of when we updated it and how the score changed. However, this is overall a rare occurrence.
However, this only applies to the score. Fixes to typos and small writing errors may be made without notice.
Feedback and Suggestions
If there's a game that you think we should review, or if you found a mistake, or if you would like to write about your game, you can go to our inquiries page to leave a message!
