Everyone knows Metacritic. It’s the review aggregator for all sorts of entertainment, from movies and TV to video games. However, Metacritic has faced criticism (get it?) for its lack of transparency. In response, OpenCritic was launched a few years ago as a more transparent review aggregator that has a specific focus on video games. It has since grown into a legitimate competitor. If you want to rely on a more open review aggregator than Metacritic, give OpenCritic a try.
A Transparent Review Aggregator
OpenCritic is an open review aggregator that is extremely transparent about all of the reviews that go into each individual game’s score. This way, you can see what a game’s average review score is, what percentage of reviewers recommend the game, and you can click through to see all of the reviews that make up each score. For example, as you can see below, the Gears 5 review tells you that it has an average score of 84% (which is considered “mighty”, more on that below) and that it is recommended by 91% of reviewers. The bottom part of the picture shows what happens when you click “show all”.
OpenCritic Rankings
The OpenCritic designations of Mighty, Strong, Fair, and Weak are defined as follows:
- Mighty: 84 and higher (90th percentile of scores and above)
- Strong: 75-83 (60th to 90th percentile of scores)
- Fair: 66-74 (30th to 60th percentile of scores)
- Weak: 65 and below (30th percentile of scores and below).
This means that Gears 5 just made the cut for “mighty”, the highest designation.
OpenCritic All-Time Lists
Another nice part of OpenCritic is the all-time games list. For example, you can see the top 10 PC games of all time (according to OpenCritic) below:
Unweighted Scores
One of the ways that Metacritic can be opaque lies in the fact that scores by certain publications are weighed more heavily than scores by other publications. OpenCritic Instead gives a simple mean of all review scores. In addition, smaller outlets can apply for their reviews to be counted in OpenCritic, making it an overall more open review aggregator than Metacritic.
Next time you want to see the average reviews a certain game is getting, or the next time you’re just looking for recent games that have reviewed well, think about going to OpenCritic instead of Metacritic. The information is more transparent, meaning that you can better make your own decision. Also, you can support OpenCritic by buying games from the affiliate links right on the site!
