90-100: Monolithic, groundbreaking game. An unforgettable experience.
80-89: Legendary medium and genre-defining games. One of my absolute favorites.
70-79: Excellent titles that I would recommend to anyone. Has some flaws but is overall a great deal of fun.
60-69: Good titles that I would lightly recommend. Does many things well, but has some glaring weaknesses.
50-59: Serviceable titles that I would recommend to genre fans but feels lacking or inispid in other areas.
40-49: Bad and/or risk adverse games. Usually do more things poorly than well. Avoid.
30-39: Atrocious games that have very few redeeming qualities.
20-29: Pure shovelware, you can feel the lack of inspiration from through the screen.
10-19: Lol, lmao even.

My rating scale essentially functions as a simplified way of evaluating a game in all of it's relevant fields. For some categories I added options; this is because obviously you wouldn't judge a Strategy game by it's plot or level design for instance. I attempted to capture the duality between story based video games and gameplay heavy games, rather those be arcade games or extremely in-depth strategy games. The final rating I give a game is the sum of the 10 categories added up together. If you for some reason want to view every single full 10 category rating, you can download this .txt file containing all of them.

• Art Style: Art style encompasses the art you'd find on the box art, the promotional material and sometimes in the game's menus or the game world itself. Basically, what general aesthetic does the game go for and how much do I like it?

• Atmosphere or Controls: Atmosphere encompasses how successfully the game captures the environment it seeks to build. Controls encompass how fluid, intuitive and responsive the controls feel.

• Characters or Mechanics: Characters encompass how much you like the characters and how well developed you feel the overall cast is. Mechanics encompasses the unique game design mechanics the game implements and how well it executes them. You may also give bonus points here for innovative mechanics that very few other games have tried.

• Enjoyment: Enjoyment is how much you enjoyed the game. This is a category I made to basically award bonus points to a game that you feel is worth more than the sum of it's parts.

• Gameplay: Gameplay is how much you enjoyed the gameplay systems in the game. For Visual Novels think of this as the different routes in the game.

• Plot or Replay Value: Plot is how well-written and engrossing you found the story to be. Replay value is intended for games that have no real plot; how much did it keep you coming back and could you see yourself returning to it in the future?

• Polish: Polish is how, well, polished a game feels. Are there a lot of bugs? Are there a lot of glitches or things that just feel like oversights? What's the attention to detail like?

• Sound: Sound is how good you think the OST is as well as the general sound design such as sound effects and their usage. Self explanatory.

• Visuals: Visuals refers to how much you enjoyed the in-game graphics. This is not a question of graphical fidelity; stylized games can score highly here too.

• Level Design or Roleplaying/Immersion: Level design refers to how well-designed you think the levels are. For RPGs, this can basically be viewed as "Dungeon Design" instead. Roleplaying is for games that aren't as focused on levels, how engrossing is the game and how into the world can you get?

• Total Score: