How we actually review a game

People sometimes ask how long we spend on a game before writing. The honest answer is: until we've hit the parts that separate a good game from a shallow one.

For a tower defence game that means reaching the harder waves, where the early tricks stop working. A game can feel great for an hour and fall apart by hour five, and we want to know which one we're dealing with.

We take notes as we play — control quirks, difficulty jumps, moments that made us grin or groan. The review is built from those notes, not from a memory of a quick session.

The rating comes last. It's our opinion, it's subjective, and we'd rather explain our reasoning than pretend a number is objective truth.