Reader wants to know whether a specific new game is worth buying
A single number cannot tell you whether a game suits you, but it is a reasonable starting point if you know what it's built from. The routine below turns a vague "is it good?" into a repeatable check.
Individual outlets differ in taste and in scoring scale. IGN publishes full-length reviews with a numeric score, while NPR's game coverage is written more as cultural criticism and doesn't score at all. Reading only one of these gives you one critic's taste, not a consensus.
That's the gap aggregators fill. Metacritic compiles reviews from a set of outlets into a single weighted Metascore, and OpenCritic does the same job while describing itself as drawing from "the top critics" reviewing a given release. Neither number is a poll of average opinion — both are blends of professional critic reviews, arrived at by rules specific to each site rather than a simple average.
Both aggregators let you narrow results by platform, which matters because a multiplatform release can run better or worse on Switch, PlayStation, or Xbox depending on how each version was optimized. Switch versions of cross-platform releases tend to diverge from the blended score most often, since a game built for more powerful hardware and then scaled down to Switch can lose resolution, frame rate, or load-time performance that a combined score won't flag on its own. Filtering to your own console before reading further saves you from a score built partly on a version you won't be playing.
A practical four-step routine:
- Check the aggregate score on Metacritic or OpenCritic, filtered to your platform.
- Open two or three of the individual reviews behind that score, not just the number.
- Note whether the reviewers you read share your genre interest — a strategy-game veteran and a first-time player of the genre won't weigh the same flaws the same way.
- Skim for whether the review mentions hours played or a specific chapter reached, since a review based on a few hours reads differently from one based on a full campaign.
Publishers control review code and embargo timing, so most reviews appear at launch
Reviews cluster around launch day because publishers supply early code under an embargo that lifts on a fixed date, which is why "reviews are just marketing" is a common suspicion among readers. It's a fair worry to check rather than dismiss.
One useful check is comparing the critic aggregate against the user score shown on the same Metacritic page. A wide gap between the two is informative on its own. Sometimes the gap reflects a real split between what critics value (pacing, design ambition) and what players experience day-to-day (server stability, monetization, bugs at launch). Sometimes it reflects review bombing — a flood of low user scores tied to a controversy unrelated to the game's quality, which can drag a user aggregate down without reflecting broad play experience.
When the critic and user numbers diverge sharply, the more reliable move is to wait. Post-launch coverage from outlets like Video Games Chronicle tends to follow up on server issues, day-one patches, and balance changes that a same-day review couldn't have caught, and player reports a few weeks out are a better read on whether early problems got fixed.
Reader is deciding on an older or back-catalogue title
Aggregators are built around new releases, so a "recent reviews" feed on Metacritic or OpenCritic will not surface a game from a decade or more ago unless it just got a remaster. For older titles, the right tool is a dedicated archive rather than an aggregator.
A long-running critic archive such as The Video Game Critic reviews games going back across multiple console generations, in a single consistent voice rather than pulling scores from other outlets. Sites built this way matter most for pre-aggregation-era titles — games released before comprehensive aggregator coverage existed, or niche titles that never had enough outlets reviewing them to generate a meaningful aggregate score. If a search on an aggregator turns up nothing or only a handful of reviews, that's the signal to switch to an archive site rather than concluding the game was never reviewed.
Xbox
Xbox is one of the platform filters both major aggregators support alongside PlayStation and Nintendo Switch, and it's worth using deliberately rather than skipping. A multiplatform game's Metascore or OpenCritic score can blend reviews written against several different versions, and console-specific technical issues — frame pacing, load times, resolution mode — can pull one platform's real-world experience away from that blended number.
Filtering by Xbox on Metacritic or OpenCritic narrows the review pool toward critics who tested that version, which is closer to what you'll experience than the all-platform aggregate. It's also worth checking, on any individual review you open, whether it states which console the copy was tested on — a review written against a PlayStation build won't have caught an Xbox-specific bug, and not every review makes that clear near the score.
Next time you're checking a score before buying, filter by your own console first, then open the reviews — don't stop at the number.