Wired.com’s Game Review Ratings Scale

Since we’re going to be running more game reviews here on Wired.com in the future, I thought it would be instructive to share with everyone the ratings guide that we’ve been using.

This rubric is based on the ratings guide that appeared in Wired magazine’s last Test issue, with some game-specific descriptions added. Note that we use the entirety of the ten-point scale. Five is average, and a fun game can get a five.

If you were to glance through our reviews, you’d notice that most of them trend positive. This is because we’re actively seeking out solid, or at least high-profile, games to review on Wired.com and in the magazine. So there is a bias towards positive ratings, but only because we are choosing not to give our time and energy over to the bad ones.

10 — "Metaphysical product perfection." Our highest rating. We might be able to point out a couple of niggling flaws, but the experience is so entrancing overall that it just doesn’t matter. Very few games will get this rating. Reserved for games that are truly ground-breaking.

9 — "Nearly flawless — buy it now." An amazing game whose only flaw is that it isn’t a brilliant ground-breaking work of genius. We’ve played games just like 9 before, but this one is still too much fun to get anything lower. This is recommended to even people who aren’t fans of the genre.

8 — "Excellent, with room to kibitz." The game’s flaws are now dragging the score down, but not by much. It’s still a stellar game, but they’ve made one too many mistakes and the experience suffers. A little. This is the cutoff point where we might not recommend this game to someone who’s not already a fan of the genre. Genre fans might think this is a 10. Everyone else, not so much.

7 — "Very good, but not quite great." We repeat: this is a very good score. It’s two full notches above "average." At this point, genre fans who just want a game experience in this milieu will likely want to buy this, and put up with its minor issues in exchange for a relatively solid game. Maybe it’s got one huge flaw that hurts it, but it’s still good.

6 — "A solid product with some issues." A six, while displeasing to some, is still an above-average ranking. Maybe there are some good ideas that just happen to be crippled by iffy gameplay overall. Maybe it’s an overall fun game with too many issues to ignore. We could see recommending this to genre fans.

5 — "Recommended with reservations." Average. Your run-of-the-mill gaming experience. Genre devotees would give this a 6 or maybe a 7 on a good day, but even they would have to acknowledge that it’s got a lot of flaws and design issues that keep it from standing out from the crowd. Or maybe it’s just bland and uninspired. A 5 is still fun, but there’s just so many better experiences out there.

4 — "Downsides outweigh upsides." The first "below average" rating. If a game is significantly worse than what we consider the average, run-of-the-mill gaming experience, it gets a four or below. We might actually have had some fun with this game now and then, but the overall experience was distasteful.

3 – "Serious flaws, proceed with caution." Not even the craziest of crazy fanboys would argue with us on this one: This is just a bad game. At this point, it’s not even fun for a second. Just terrible through and through.

2 — "Just barely functional — don’t buy it." The game boots up, but that’s about it. Crashes. Glitches. We didn’t know what to do. If you got this game for Christmas as a child, you’d cry and cry.

1 — "A complete failure in every way." Doesn’t boot with any regularity. Gameplay is severely broken. May have wiped our hard drive.

Original photo: Ryan Rigby/Flickr