Xboxic:Scoring

From Xboxic

When Xboxic does a review, in the end we give a Final Score verdict. This page will explain how we come to that score.

All Xboxic reviews are tracked by Metacritic.com.

Reviewing

The most important thing you need to remember when reading a review is that you are not reading a text which prescribes how you should think about the given product: a review is an article describing how the reviewer thinks about the product. He tries to do this as objectively as possible, but in the end it is still the opinion of one person, corrected and egalized during the editorial process by a limited number of other people. What this means in the end is that a review can be a very good guideline for deciding about whether a product is good, but it should never replace your own opinion, just augment it.

About Scoring

Following on the fact that a review can never completely encompass your opinion, the Final Score will not always be your Final Score. However, the score can be a general guideline to how we consider the game to be in relation to comparable games on comparable platforms.

Xboxic rates on a scale of 1 to 10, and unlike many other game sites and magazines, we actually use that scale. Over the last few years we have seen the tendency that games are considered crap if they rate under 80% or even 90%. On a scale of 1 to 10, 6 is average, not 8.

We also explicitly do not want to be more granular than this scale. If we put a 7.6 on a game, some people will be bitching that we gave their fav game only a 7.5 two months ago. Bitching aside, they'd be right in considering we find it to be a better game than the old one. Should we be that precise and thus make up your mind? No, read the number, it's a good general indication of whether the game is worth your time. Then read the review and decide whether you should buy it.

Scoring Table

1. Total and Utter Crap: Don't buy this. If you get it for free, refuse it, or burn it. Sacrifice it to Satan, just to irritate him with a product this bad.
2. Waste of Time: Okay they did have some rare things right. Everything else was terribly wrong though.
3. Extremely Poor: Still a waste of the space it occupies, but at least something speaks for it.
4. Poor: Good for some limited fun on a rainy afternoon, but apart from that a no-no.
5. Below Average: If you really like the genre of the game or really need something in the niche of the product, it could suffice. Will not permanently entertain you or help you out.
6. Average: Well it does what it promises to do, nothing more nothing less. If you are in the market for a product of this type, you could be getting much worse things than this. But also better.
7. Above Average: The product is better than other offerings in the same area. It has obvious flaws, but hey it will entertain you and you probably won't regret spending money on this.
8. Good: You're going to like this if you're in the market for a product or game of this type. It's not perfect, absolutely not, but you'll most certainly be pleased by this purchase.
9. Very Good: Nearing perfection, but falls short in a few areas. However, you will most definitely need to consider this purchase even if it's not really your thing or you don't need it. You may be surprised.
10. Excellent: As close to perfection as can currently be. It may be surpassed by later products, but at the time of writing it was king of the hill. Spend your dough now.

Note that we do not reserve the highest mark for 'perfection'. Perfection doesn't exist, and especially in fast-moving technology a perfect product may already be surpassed next week. We can rate 10, and it would mean there's no better product on the market in its niche at that very moment. We could very well give another 10 the month after to another product that is just slightly better again.