How the score works
One number, assembled transparently from several review sources. No black box — here is exactly what goes in and how it's weighted.
The blend
Every source is normalized to a 0–100 scale, then combined into a weighted average. Critic aggregators carry the most weight because they already pool dozens of professional reviews; player scores are included to temper the critics with the audience's verdict, at a lower weight. If a source has no score for a game, it simply drops out and the remaining weights renormalize.
What each score means
The blended number maps to a plain-language verdict:
On every game's score tile, the thin strip along the bottom breaks the number back apart: one segment per contributing source, sized by its weight and colored by that source's own verdict. It's the aggregation made visible.
Getting the right game
Scores are only useful if they belong to the correct title. Before any source's number is attached, its match must clear a similarity threshold on the game's name, and same-titled games from different eras (for example, the 1998 and 2019 versions of a remake) are disambiguated by release year. A source that can't be confidently matched is left out rather than guessed.
Staying current
Newly released games gain and shift scores quickly, so results refresh on their own. Each source is re-checked on a rolling basis (critic and player scores every several hours), and the moment any game's blend is computed it's saved so the browse and home grids upgrade from a single critic number to the full blend. The site gets more complete as people use it.
Sources & independence
Numbers are compiled from publicly reported figures on Metacritic (via RAWG), OpenCritic, Steam and IMDb (via OMDb), plus the GameRankings archive frozen at that site's December 2019 shutdown for deep pre-2020 coverage. GameReviewRank is independent and not affiliated with any of these services. Where a game links out to a store, that link may earn a commission at no extra cost to you; it never affects the score.