We love to play and have been reviewing games since 2012. From the very first reviews, the founders of gg have been focusing on whether a player should spend their money at all. Therefore, we demonstrate even the traditional "advantages and disadvantages" not like everyone else, but as reasons to buy or refuse to buy a particular game. Players usually do not care about the names of technologies, such as "collision" or similar. When it comes to games, they are interested in answers to simple questions: is the story interesting, is it fun to play, how good the graphics are, and what unusual things the game has to offer.
We never measure how hot a PC gets while playing a game or go looking for soapboxes with a magnifying glass. This usually doesn't tell the average person anything. So we try to be clear to as wide an audience as possible and use criteria that everyone understands, each of which is rated from 1 to 5 points using transparent indicators, which we report in this text. There are 8 criteria in total:
- Story: does it make you want to fall asleep or can you not wait for the next plot twist?
- Gameplay: how crooked it is or, on the contrary, how well it is implemented with interesting mechanics
- Graphics and sound: how well everything in the game sounds and looks
- Optimisation: no matter how good the game is, the desire to buy it often depends on the optimisation, so we pay maximum attention to this criterion
- Expectation-impression balance: how many times have we been promised almost the best game in the history of mankind? So here we focus on whether we were deceived at the release
- Stress level for parents/girlfriend: our own age rating system that determines whether your family will be able to watch and support what you are playing
- Atmosphere: this section allows you to understand how much the game can draw the player into its world
- Willingness to recommend: how much we liked the game and whether we can advise players to pay money for it
In addition, all reviews are built on the principle of an inverted pyramid - first, we reveal the conclusions of the review and provide information about the main advantages and disadvantages of the game. Then we list the reasons to buy or not to buy it and provide our integral score as a percentage of the maximum possible score, taking into account our 8 criteria. And then we go into the details for those who want to know more or understand how we came to our conclusions. This helps to save the reader's time and allow them to decide for themselves whether they should read further or whether this information is already enough.
Evaluation criteria: what makes up our 5-point rating system
| Category | 1 point | 2 points | 3 points | 4 points | 5 points |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Plot | I want to fall asleep all the time | the plot is forgotten the next day after completion | a story that does not stand out from the competition | a well-written story that you want to follow | you cannot look away from the events in the game |
| Gameplay | the gameplay was scored from the very beginning | inconvenient controls | there are practically no new ideas, and everything works according to the old formula | nice controls and a good set of solutions | there is a constant dynamics, and all mechanics are successfully interconnected |
| Graphics and sound | we would rather not see this | the level of a cheap mobile game | It was like this back in the days of PlayStation 4 | Everything sounds and looks good. It's up to today's standards | use of modern technologies and their successful transfer to the game |
| Optimisation | the situation is worse than in Gollum | the game needed another 3 months of polishing | there are bugs, but you can play | there are no critical problems | works flawlessly |
| Balance of expectations and impressions | promised mountains of gold, but the result was a failure | much more was expected | we did not expect much more | the developers kept their promises | impressions exceeded expectations |
| The atmosphere | absent | inexpressive | is not able to keep the player in front of the screen | immediately immerses you in the game | wants to be in this world |
| Stress level for parents/child | supportive | approve | not happy | outraged | condemn |
| Willingness to recommend | desire not to recommend | rather not recommend than recommend | can be skipped | worth playing |
should not be skipped |
We are confident that this rating system allows us to give the reviewer's ultimately subjective opinion an objective quality that can be easily verified by these criteria.
We also tried to create fair conditions not only for AAA games, but also for interesting indie games. They have almost no chance of getting 5 points everywhere. But at least there are three criteria where they can count on our highest subjective score - "atmosphere", "desire to recommend", and "optimisation" - which allows such projects to get a fairly high integral score, which is a percentage of the highest score.
In addition, games that receive a score of 4 in the "recommendability" category (not the only, but essential condition for this) can count on receiving our editorial "we recommend" award:
Games that receive 5 points in several criteria at once (and must receive 5 points in the "want to recommend" criterion) have a chance to win our highest award, the "Editor's Choice". Thus, it is used exclusively to reward games that have significant advantages over their competitors and/or some kind of innovation that affects the development of the industry as a whole. In general, these are games that we ourselves have played with pleasure (or would play several times) and would definitely recommend to others.
Our game editor has been playing games since he was 4 years old and can't imagine himself without it. He has played 100+ games on PlayStation, but still considers The Last of Us Part II to be the best in the industry. In January 2022, he joined the gg team. He studies at the Faculty of Journalism at Kyiv International University.
