Every review on this page is a verdict, not a summary. Moe's score sits at the top of each page, big and signed. The industry's collective number, the Metacritic aggregate, sits underneath it, labeled as what it is: their number, not his. When they disagree, the review makes his case. One game on this bench broke the scale entirely, and the scale stayed broken.
Scored 15/10. One of the best games of all time. The scale broke the scale, so the score did too.
Industry score: Metacritic 95
Scored 10/10. A perfect score for a game that does not waste a single mile of its world.
Industry score: Metacritic 97 - OpenCritic 95
Scored 10/10. Breath of the Wild's Hyrule, tripled: sky above, depths below, and a toolbox that turns players into engineers.
Industry score: Metacritic 96
Scored 9.8/10. The open world every open world since has been measured against, and most of them come up short.
Industry score: Metacritic 97
Scored 9.7/10. The castle is the game. Avalanche built the Hogwarts every reader ever pictured, then let you live a school year in it.
Industry score: Metacritic 84
Scored 9.6/10. Pure joy as a design principle. Cappy turns every enemy into a new game.
Industry score: Metacritic 97
Scored 9.6/10. The best co-op game ever made. Every chapter invents a new game and throws the old one away without blinking.
Industry score: Metacritic 88
Scored 9.4/10. The remake standard. Capcom rebuilt a legend and somehow kept the camp and the terror in the same frame.
Industry score: Metacritic 93
Scored 9.3/10. The best looking and best sounding game of its generation, and it is not particularly close.
Industry score: Metacritic 81
Scored 9.3/10. A Dungeons and Dragons campaign where the dice, the writing, and your worst ideas all get a vote.
Industry score: Metacritic 96
Scored 9.3/10. The swinging is the best traversal in any open world game, and the story remembers Peter Parker is a person.
Industry score: Metacritic 87
Scored 9.1/10. FromSoftware's formula, set loose in a world built with George R. R. Martin, and the bosses are every bit as mean as the rumors.
Industry score: Metacritic 96
Scored 9/10. Kratos the father, the Leviathan Axe, and one unbroken camera shot from start to finish.
Industry score: Metacritic 94
Scored 8.9/10. FromSoftware's hardest teacher. Hesitation is defeat, and the game makes sure you learn it.
Industry score: Metacritic 90
Scored 8.8/10. Naughty Dog's bleakest swing: a revenge story that makes you carry both sides of the knife.
Industry score: Metacritic 93
Scored 8.7/10. The game that ate the culture, still eating. Battle Royale, Zero Build, LEGO Fortnite, Festival, OG: it is five games wearing one crown.
Industry score: Metacritic 78
Scored 8.6/10. The best looking samurai film you will ever play, from Sucker Punch.
Industry score: Metacritic 83
Scored 8.5/10. Journey to the West as a boss rush painting. Game Science's first swing lands hard.
Industry score: Metacritic 81
Scored 8.4/10. The roguelike where dying is how the story moves forward. Zagreus runs, the family talks, you run again.
Industry score: Metacritic 93
Scored 8.3/10. Judged as the game it became: Night City after the 2.0 rebuild and Phantom Liberty is a real place worth the trip.
Industry score: Metacritic 86
Scored 8.3/10. A deserted island, a raccoon landlord, and the calmest game loop ever built. It arrived exactly when the world needed it.
Industry score: Metacritic 90
Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas, at 15 out of 10. His words: one of the best games of all time. The full case sits in the classic review and in his piece arguing San Andreas was 100x the game GTA V ever was.
It means the ten point scale ran out of room. The scale stays honest for everything else, which is exactly why the one game that broke it means something.
Metacritic is a collective average of published critic reviews, the industry's number. Moe's score is one player's verdict, argued in the review and signed at the top. Both are printed on every review page, labeled, never blended.
Two: Red Dead Redemption 2 and The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom.
