How We Actually Review A Mobile Game

People sometimes ask how long we spend with a game before writing about it. The honest answer is: until we have something real to say, which varies a lot.

For a short arcade game like Big Bass Splash, a few days of regular play is enough to understand its whole shape. For an RPG or a strategy game, we push into the mid-game grind, because that's where a lot of mobile titles quietly fall apart.

We also try to play on more than one device. A game that flies on a new phone might crawl on a three-year-old one, and plenty of our readers aren't on the latest hardware. That performance check has changed a few of our scores.

Then someone writes it up and someone else argues with them. That disagreement is the point. If a review makes it to the site, at least two of us stand behind it.