How We Actually Review a Mobile Game

People sometimes assume game reviews are written after a quick playthrough and a glance at the store page. That's not how we do it, and I want to explain the process so our scores mean something to you.

First, someone on the team has to genuinely want to play the game. We don't assign titles nobody's interested in — enthusiasm shows up in the writing, and boredom does too. Once a game is picked, we play it on at least two different phones to check performance, not just gameplay.

We track the boring stuff as we go: load times, battery drain, how often it interrupts you, whether the controls fight your thumbs. Then we play long enough to hit the point where a game either opens up or runs out of ideas. That moment usually decides the score more than anything else.

Only after all that do we sit down and write. The rating comes last, from the reviewer who put in the hours, and it's a summary of a real experience — not a number we picked first and justified afterward.