Review Policy

Review Policy

Here at The Gaming Review we’re well aware that the gaming public are finding media-based reviews less and less helpful. Since launching in 2010 we’ve made sure every review is unbiased, fair and honest, and we refuse to fall into the trap of raising our scores just to suit the developers and publishers. But at the same time we can understand why people often question reviews published on independent websites; a lot of reviewers are giving a higher average score than before with “9 is the new 8” and “7 is an average game” common annoyances.

To redress the balance a little, we run by a sliding scale from 1 to 10. We don’t miss out any numbers, they’re all available to be used and we’ll assign whichever score suits the game. It’s worth remembering though that there are a few of us who write reviews, and as a review is an opinion of the person who writes it there’s no guarantee that everyone will agree.

The best bet? Ignore the score, and read the review. We go to great lengths to make sure the main part of the reviews are informative and cover all bases, so even if we give a game a low score there’s still a reasonable chance you might enjoy it. As for the sliding scale, it’s right here. As you can see, a game getting a score of 5/10 isn’t terrible, and a 7/10 shouldn’t put you off without further reading.

You can probably safely leave the lower games though…

  • 1/10 : Terrible
  • 2/10 : Very poor
  • 3/10 : Poor
  • 4/10 : Below average
  • 5/10 : Average
  • 6/10 : Above average
  • 7/10 : Pretty good
  • 8/10 : Very good
  • 9/10 : Excellent
  • 10/10 : Totally unmissable. Buy it. Twice

If you obsess over scores, keep an eye out for the little bubbles below. But generally, read the review before making your mind up, and if there’s ever any queries over a game just drop it in the comments and we’ll get back to you.