By Luke Thomas, October 14, 2025
A single number can’t capture the essence of a work of art.
As the internet continues to hold dominance over the globe, critic and user review sites like Rotten Tomatoes and Letterboxd have come into mainstream popularity. These sites offer places where any person can put down their thoughts on a film, book, game or show with a few taps on a screen. And with the rise of short-form content, accounts dedicated to rating a film or game daily have further fueled the flame of review scores.
The core problem with review scores is they’re turning something qualitative, an opinion, into a quantitative number. Nuance is taken out of the work, and the discussion is put onto a number with meaning to only the person who gave it.
A 5/10 for the person giving it out could mean they think the work is mediocre, or it could mean they thought it was great until it fell apart halfway through. And for someone else, a 5/10 may mean something completely different.
A score doesn’t allow for elaboration.
“To split all games along a binary of ‘recommend’ versus ‘don’t recommend,’ dividing them into the ones I love and the ones I hate, is something I feel iffy about, which is one of the reasons I’ve never given scores on my reviews,” said Yahtzee Croshaw in a written column for The Escapist. “My feelings for most games tend to be complicated. … Sorry I feel like I can’t summarize all of this in a five-point star rating.”
On the opposite end of the spectrum, 100 and even 1,000-point scales offer needless precision. What really separates a 56 from a 57?
Despite their specificity, they still lack the detail of why the score was given. On social media, accounts such as @samthefilmcritic put out daily reviews that amount to giving a score to ten fixed aspects, but all it does is overstimulate you with unelaborated numbers.
In the critic industry, review scores persist because of market pressure. Readers like to see scores, so they continue to be pushed. I’ve certainly been guilty of skipping through a review just to see the number at the end.
A review score on its own doesn’t say enough, and paired with a review, it’s needless. Why, despite all this, do I still use them?
On one level, scoring is fun. It’s enjoyable to see how a film stacks up against another, even if they are fundamentally different. It’s fun to see how your game rating compares to your friend’s, even if the only real difference in your opinions is how you scale your rating. If you revisit the work later down the line, you have a quick way of seeing how your main impressions changed.
Review scores also serve as a good aggregate. Despite the differences in how people score and judge, they serve as an imperfect representation of consensus.
Lastly, review scores have been around before the dawn of the internet. The acclaimed critics Gene Siskel and Robert Ebert famously used a 4-point scale, a binary thumbs up or thumbs down from each of the duo. Scores have always been a part of the critic industry.
The problem, then, is the overreliance on the score. Whenever a new review from a media outlet is released, the instinctual reaction is whether or not the score is accurate, with the top comments arguing the score is too low or too high.
IGN recently released their review on “Hollow Knight: Silksong,” giving the game a 9/10. It’s a fantastic rating, but the main discussion on the Instagram post is the writer should’ve given it a 10.
This fixation isn’t entirely the fault of the viewers. The score is often what’s plastered on the review, giving it excessive emphasis, because that’s what the market for criticism wants and rewards. With this focus, it’s not surprising most people’s focus is simply on the number, when there’s far more to be said in the review.
Ebert put it best when speaking on Mick LaSalle’s 5-point “Little Man” scale.
“It is a splendid system, but Mick wisely observes a problem with the middle position: People don’t like it. Maybe Siskel was on to something: Up or down, yes or no? I think Mick LaSalle would join me in asking: Have you considered actually reading the review?”
Feature graphic courtesy of Connor Lālea Hampton