This page explains how CritFeed decides what to publish, how we score reviews, and what we do when we get something wrong. It applies to every article on the site.
Independence
No developer, publisher, tournament organiser or advertiser has any input into our coverage. Nobody outside the editorial team sees an article before it publishes, and nobody outside it can request a change to one after. Commercial conversations are handled separately from editorial, and the people writing reviews are not part of them.
How we score reviews
Reviews are scored out of 10, in half-point steps. The score reflects the game as it exists at the time of writing — not what it’s promised to become. Every review states how long we played and on what hardware, because a 40-hour RPG verdict written after four hours isn’t a verdict.
- 9–10 — Exceptional. Worth playing even if the genre isn’t yours.
- 7–8.5 — Good to great. Recommended, with caveats we’ll name.
- 5–6.5 — Mixed. Real strengths, real problems; buy it knowing both.
- 3–4.5 — Poor. Fundamental issues that outweigh what works.
- 0–2.5 — Broken, exploitative, or not worth anyone’s time.
We use the full scale. A 5 means average, not “bad” — inflating everything above 7 makes the number meaningless.
Games that change substantially after launch may be re-reviewed. When that happens we publish a new score with the date and reason, and leave the original review accessible rather than quietly rewriting history.
Review copies and access
We accept review keys, press access and event invitations. We do not accept payment for coverage, and we do not accept conditions on what a review can say. If an embargo or agreement requires approval over our wording or score, we turn it down and buy the game instead. Any material assistance from a publisher — travel, hardware, early access — is disclosed in the article it relates to.
Affiliate links
Some articles contain affiliate links, which earn us a commission if you buy through them at no extra cost to you. These are disclosed on the page where they appear. Affiliate revenue plays no part in whether we cover something or what score it gets, and we don’t add links to products we wouldn’t recommend without them.
Sourcing and verification
We link to primary sources — patch notes, official announcements, match results — wherever they exist. Rumours and leaks are labelled as such, and we say how confident we are and why. We don’t republish claims from another outlet without crediting and linking them, and we don’t launder single-source speculation into fact.
Corrections
We fix errors as soon as we find them or they’re reported. Factual corrections carry a dated note at the foot of the article explaining what changed. Typos and formatting fixes are made silently. We don’t delete articles to hide mistakes — if something was wrong enough to retract, we say so on the page.
Report an error to [email protected].
AI and authorship
Every article is written and edited by a named human, and every byline links to a real profile. We don’t publish AI-generated articles. Where AI tools assist with research or production tasks, a human verifies the output and takes responsibility for what appears on the page.
Opinion
Opinion pieces are labelled as opinion. They represent the writer’s view, not a CritFeed position, and they’re held to the same standards of accuracy as reporting — you can disagree with the argument, but the facts underneath it should hold up.