How We Actually Review A Mobile Game

People sometimes ask how long we play before writing. The honest answer is: until we've hit the point where the game stops surprising us, or until we've clearly seen its ceiling.

For an RPG that can mean forty hours. For an arcade racer it might be a focused weekend. We never grade a game off a trailer or a first hour, because so many games are front-loaded and fall apart later.

We play on our own devices, including an older phone we keep around specifically to test performance. If a game only runs well on flagship hardware, that goes in the review.

Scores are subjective and we own that. Two of us can disagree, and when we do, we hash it out and note the split. A number is just shorthand for a longer conversation you can read in the full write-up.