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For 1,012 reviews, this publication has graded:
  • 40% higher than the average critic
  • 5% same as the average critic
  • 55% lower than the average critic
On average, this publication grades 0.4 points higher than other critics. (0-100 point scale)
Average Game review score: 75
Highest review score: 100 The Great Ace Attorney Chronicles
Lowest review score: 20 Alfred Hitchcock: Vertigo
Score distribution:
  1. Positive: 684 out of 1012
  2. Mixed: 250 out of 1012
  3. Negative: 78 out of 1012
1021 game reviews
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    • 85 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown
    Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown isn’t a sequel or a prequel to any of the other games, it is a new journey for the series, and its first step is a confident leap. It’s not only that the most notable elements of the series’ different iterations – its setting, traps, time powers, and combat – all find a natural home in this new shape, it’s that it plays like one of the best games in its newly chosen genre, as good as a game as Metroid Dread or Hollow Knight, not an imitation of them. It’s been 13 years since the last wholly new Prince of Persia game; if this is its new direction, it is exciting to see where it will land.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    PRAGMATA
    Despite its sparkling near-future setting, Pragmata succeeds because it feels like a throwback to gaming’s recent past. It’s a beautifully made, heartfelt single player adventure with a novel combat idea, and it prioritises storytelling and atmosphere. Where attempts at heartwarming games often come across as off-puttingly saccharine, Pragmata pulls off its father-daughter relationship with surprising deftness.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Mario vs. Donkey Kong: Mini-Land Mayhem
    Those looking for a one-stop masterclass in elementary game design could do a lot worse than study this.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Halo: The Master Chief Collection
    If you like games that are so big you can immerse yourselves in them for months, The Master Chief Collection offers excellent value. It’s an absolute monolith of a package, beautifully presented for the 21st century. And with the remastered next-gen GTA V due to arrive shortly, it seems that, at least as far as video games are concerned, nostalgia is the future.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Gears Tactics
    Gears Tactics is a triumphant twist on an old favourite, capturing the fury and spectacle of its shooter-based brethren while also offering a more cerebral experience. Gears has always exhibited shades of American football, from the hypermasculine tone to its disconcertingly swole characters. Now it has the conspicuous brains to match its conspicuous braun.
    • 84 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Darksiders II
    A game of assured construction, stimulating myth, and welcome challenge, a warm celebration to the games of our childhood that, in its brightest moments, matches them.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    World of Warcraft: The War Within
    We are admittedly right at the beginning of The War Within’s two-year life cycle, but this is the best that WoW has been performing in years. While Blizzard will surely continue to grapple with Warcraft’s place in the modern gaming landscape, especially ahead of WoW’s 20th anniversary, the game feels more relevant than it has in a long time.
    • 87 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Gran Turismo 7
    It’s reassuring that despite ever-greater technical refinement, Gran Turismo’s unique, eccentric character remains intact. It’s present in the grab-bag mission mode, which handily demonstrates that a race between 17 brake horsepower Fiat 500s can be just as gripping as one between cars with 50 times that. It manifests most obviously in the utterly bemusing music rally mode, which has you hitting checkpoints to the strains of 80s pop relic Hooked on Classics. Keeping this distinctive spirit alive in the era of 4K and 60 frames a second, Gran Turismo 7 feels both fresh and comfortingly familiar.
    • 87 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Halo Infinite
    You could argue that Master Chief is the necessary foil to Halo’s inherent silliness, the gravelly undertone that ties all the pratfalls together. All the same, he and his inability to get over Cortana have long since lost their charm. The series has tried to move away from him before – in that regard, Halo 3: ODST remains its finest hour. It needs to carry on trying.
    • 89 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Resident Evil Requiem
    Requiem has had so many clever set-pieces, tense chases, and joyfully gruesome encounters by that point that it’s easy to forgive it simply running out of ideas. Capcom has been on a hot streak for a while now, so it’s no shock that Requiem delivers. But it’s a very pleasant surprise that Resident Evil still feels this vital.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    FIFA 23
    Now it feels like the physics, AI and animation have come together in a way that makes even these ridiculous moments feel naturalistic and pleasurable. The first Fifa on the Mega Drive billed itself as an authentic experience of real sport, real drama, real spectacle. It wasn’t then, but perhaps, in this final iteration … it is now.
    • 88 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Diablo III
    For single players, it's an entertaining and gorgeous-looking dungeon hack but it's a bit short, extremely linear and hardly pushing any boundaries. Playing online (and Blizzard isn't really giving us a choice) makes it a better balanced and more compelling challenge, with all the potential to be the kind of lifestyle substitute that Diablo's legion of hunter-gatherer fans should relish.
    • 60 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    GODUS
    There’s the spark of something genuinely special here, beyond a FarmVillian Nightmare, and well beyond the flood of base-building Clash of Clans clones and uninspired Candy Crush-apeing puzzlers cluttering up the app stores.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Mario Kart 7
    If MK7 is so brilliant, though, where's that fifth star? I'm withholding it because the best thing you can say about this is that while it improves on a near-perfect 64-bit game, it doesn't make any major advances. The 3D is excellently done, but totally disposable (in fact, you probably will dispose of it before you get your first cup).
    • 71 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Surgeon Simulator 2013
    This is a nicely contained couple of hours filled with fully aware daft fun. If you go into the game knowing that, you'll find dark slapstick humour that's worth persisting with.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Wipeout 2048
    Despite its visual consistency with the previous titles that share the family name WipeOut 2048 represents a concerted attempt to evolve the series in interesting ways, while making shrewd, restrained use of the new handheld's features. In this aim it finds mixed success, often sacrificing finesse in exchange for novelty, but in that creativity a new energy and revived sense of character can be found.
    • 69 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Lost Records: Bloom & Rage Tape 2
    The effect is like Stranger Things directed by Kelly Reichardt – a realist fantasy in which silence and ambiguity come to the fore. Lost Records is ultimately a game about love, grief and self-recrimination, and the different intensities of those forces as we age. By the end you miss the optimism and verve of those girls in the woods, as though you were one of them – and quite possibly, in a lot of ways, you were.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Uncharted: Golden Abyss
    It's a solidly entertaining romp.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Kinect Rush: A Disney-Pixar Adventure
    Kinect Rush may be short on length, but it's big on playability, imagination and fun.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Driveclub
    Right now, those prepared to embrace Driveclub for what it is will find a very accessible, carefully crafted, refreshing speed-over-sim driving experience that often provides fabulous fun.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Frobisher Says!
    Everything gets a laugh at least first time, followed by the satisfaction of figuring out how to do whatever you've been tasked with. The really stupid thing? This brilliant piece of idiocy is a freebie, available as a launch title for the pre-order crowd and then to everyone (for nothing) come May.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Death Stranding
    Above all, Death Stranding is a sermon on the importance of belief. The power of putting one foot in front of another when hope looks lost, in the belief that things will get better. By working together, a series of small intentional steps can make a difference, and in this often fractured, angry and confusing world; that’s as hopeful as it gets.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Zombie Army 4: Dead War
    With gruesome visuals and a shameless B-movie narrative, this Nazi-bashing survival game offers little more than mindless mayhem – but that’s what we enlisted for.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Skylanders Swap Force
    And while the previous Skylander titles no doubt drew plenty of inspiration from these legendary releases (the series has its roots in the old Spyro the Dragon adventure platformers after all), it is Swap Force that really re-captures the magic.
    • tbd Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    SILT
    This is a short game, one that can easily be finished over a couple of evenings, but the haunting underwater caverns and enduring strangeness of it all will linger long in the memory – and possibly your nightmares.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Gravity Rush
    Pleasantly distinctive and great fun to play, making decent use of the Vita's attributes without ever giving you the impression that they have been shoehorned in.
    • 87 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Uncharted: Legacy of Thieves Collection
    Given that Uncharted 4 is already available on PlayStation 5 as part of a wee free collection of PlayStation classics for all PlayStation Plus subscribers, it’s hard to argue that this is an essential purchase for anyone who’s played these games before. If they passed you by at the time, though, this is the best way to experience two different spins on the same bombastic action game – adventures that remind us why characters such as Nathan Drake (and his spiritual predecessor Lara Croft) suit video games so well.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Sunless Sea
    Indeed, one of the best things about Sunless Sea, apart from its beautifully crafted elder-horror stories, fantastically drawn artwork and generally creepy atmosphere, is the feeling that the decisions you make within the game are shaping the narrative, and that by playing, you are writing yourself into that story.
    • 88 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Dishonored 2
    Dishonored 2 is both luxurious and consistent in its set dressing. Every virtual item demonstrates its own kind of wondrous craftsmanship: the taut leather, the sunny brass. Each room is a varnished memorial to some hollowed-out forest.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Jusant
    Jusant is an eco-fable, and like other such titles you play the role of a restorer. What the game deftly tells us through its world-building, narrative, and exquisite climbing is that the role requires both ambition and imagination. This is no better summed up than by the jump your character must make from one handhold to another, an act that suspends them in midair for a perilous, heart-in-mouth moment. Lodged in this little leap of faith is the entire spirit of adventure, the quality that ultimately makes the rehabilitation of Jusant’s stricken mountain possible.
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These unscored reviews do not factor into the Metascore calculation.

In Progress & Unscored

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    • 74 Metascore
    • Critic Score
    PowerWash Simulator
    PowerWash Simulator is currently in early access (you pay a reduced premium to play a game not yet finished), but even now this is an irresistible example of so-called “playbour”, and further evidence that a shit job often makes for a sublime game. [Early Access review]
    • 90 Metascore
    • Critic Score
    Animal Crossing: New Horizons
    Animal Crossing is everything I have been craving: it is gentle, soothing, social and creative, and my group chats are already buzzing with hype about beetles and villager fashions. If there was ever a perfect time for a game such as this, that time is now.
    • 72 Metascore
    • Critic Score
    Miitomo
    If you’re old enough, if you love Nintendo enough and if you have enough friends who fall into both categories, Miitomo is an inventive and fun, first mobile app for the company. Everyone else? The wait will continue for Nintendo to make some more ambitious mobile games based on its most-loved brands.
    • 80 Metascore
    • Critic Score
    Tom Clancy's The Division
    Of more importance is how this world will evolve once enough players have completed all the current missions and find themselves in an end-game that is effectively a treasure hunt in an anarchic moral wasteland. Even at this early stage though, The Division is an experience that’s worth having if you’re at all interested in mainstream action games, or role-playing adventures, or co-operative online play. You will not be bored as you blast your way through.
    • 77 Metascore
    • Critic Score
    Hitman - Intro Pack
    There has never been a better way to confront, or indulge, your inner assassin.
    • 80 Metascore
    • Critic Score
    Dorfromantik
    Part town-planning exercise, part board game, this thoughtful debut gives plenty of scope for strategy and idealism. [Early Access Score = 80]
    • 77 Metascore
    • Critic Score
    No Man's Sky
    The ability to explore space with a party of up to three friends makes it feel much less lonely than before. And where it once was difficult to return to a previously visited planet, establishing bases allows you to make some small corner of the universe feel like home.
    • tbd Metascore
    • Critic Score
    Museum of Mechanics: Lockpicking
    The museum itself is pretty rudimentary: a dark hall, with signposted identical locks pointing the way towards Nordhagen’s recreations of lock-picking mini-games. It looks and sounds basic, but the amount of effort, knowledge and understanding of the topic (and of game design and history more generally) that has gone into this mini museum is abundantly evident, from both the exhibits and the text that accompanies them. Like listening to someone talk about the PhD research they’re doing on a niche topic, it might sound boring at the outset, but by the end of an hour, you’ll come away with something you definitely didn’t know before.
    • 77 Metascore
    • Critic Score
    Street Fighter V
    Like throwing a punch in the dark, buying Street Fighter V today is a speculative gamble.

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