I’ve always taken games reviews with a healthy pinch of salt. I don’t rely on any individual games site to make up my mind on the merits of a title, although I do always try to find out what the critical consensus on a title is before I buy it. I’ve grown used to lazy reviews by crusty games writers who seem more interested in polygon counts than the entertainment value of a title, or punish an imperfect game for daring to be different while rewarding me-too shooters with a solid review.
Despite the hysteria that they sometimes arouse in the hearts and minds of gamers, reviews, it seems, will always be a critical part of the job of the gaming media. So too, on No Added Sugar.
When I founded the site, I was tempted to do away with a numerical scoring system altogether, and let the words do the talking. Yet, we at No Added Sugar recognise that the numerical score does serve a useful purpose- clarifying, supplementing and summarising, albeit crudely, the text of the review. While we would urge all readers to focus on the text of the review rather than the number at the bottom, we have decided not to abandon the age-old method of assigning a numerical value to a game.

The ten-point review score system is a pretty standard one, with one noteworthy difference- a half-point increment, which for all practical purposes will only be applied at the upper end of the scoring spectrum- you know, because the difference between a 3/10 and a 3.5/10 game really isn’t all that important.

A major caveat applies to all our reviews. Games writers, sadly, are human too- and succumb to all the biases, blind spots and prejudices that human beings tend to display.
We don’t claim to be objective- but we do try to be fair in our analysis.

Scoring Scale
Below is an indication of the criteria that we use to guide our review score selection. It is not exhaustive, nor is it based on any kind of average of technical criteria, like graphics, audio or gameplay.

1/10 scoring games should be a rare occurrence. Reserved for the lowest of the low, 1/10 games have no saving grace apart from the fact that they don’t break your console when you insert the disc. That’s got to be worth something, right? Yeah, one point.

Realistically speaking, any game which scores between one and four probably isn’t worth your attention. Distinguishing between a 1/10 and a 2/10 game seems like a fruitless task, except to say that the latter game is presumably slightly less awful than the former. Both are likely to be utterly inept, and you’re likely to wring more entertainment out of the disc by using it as a frisbee than playing the damn thing.

Ditto. Although, games scoring between 1 and 3 often are so bad they’re nearly good. Titles like Superman 64, which need to be seen to be believed. And then rapidly switched off.

A game scoring 4/10 is below average. You can expect dull gameplay, broken gameplay mechanics, poor graphics, or a combination of all of the above. A 4/10 game isn’t necessarily awful as a whole but typically falls down in too many areas, too often, to be recommendable.

Games websites and magazines have wrestled with the meaning of the 5/10 score since time immemorial. With many outlets, ’score inflation’ means that nothing less than an 8/10 is considered ‘good’, while others apply the ‘5= average’ rule more strictly.
At No Added Sugar, we feel that amongst the thousands upon thousands of games produced in any given year, most games simply aren’t very good. So, although as a 5/10 score implies that the game is deeply average, average isn’t really a good thing.

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