How we actually test a game before writing about it

People sometimes ask how long we spend with a game before reviewing it. The honest answer is: it depends, but always more than you'd think from how short the review looks.

A puzzle or arcade game gets several real sessions across different days — morning commute, evening on the couch, that sort of thing. An RPG or sim gets a weekend minimum, often more, because the early hours rarely tell the whole story.

We test with the connection off first. If a game stumbles without a signal, that goes in the review, because offline reliability is the whole point of this site.

Only after all that do we settle on a rating. We argue about the half-points more than we'd like to admit, which is probably a good sign that we care.