The Lab
BANGER · Shooter · 2016
Steam Deck UnsupportedThe verdict
PLAY IT.
A BANGER, and it costs nothing.
- Length
- 1h
- Price
- Free to play
- Reviews
- 95% positive
Minimum on the Steam store: 4 GB of memory. Windows only.
Welcome to The Lab, a compilation of Valve’s room-scale VR experiments set in a pocket universe within Aperture Science. Fix a robot, defend a castle, adopt a mechanical dog, and more. Still not sold? It’s free!
What drives the score
How to read this
Every input gets a grade, S to D, read from the buyer's side. The score is multiplicative, so an input only counts as raising when it sits near the top of its own scale. Anything with real room left is holding the score back, because that room is the gap to 100. ▲ marks a lift, ▼ a drag or a dock, ? an input we do not have, • a fact this genre's score does not use. The exact weights stay secret.
The value story
Value puts it in the top 3 percent of the games it competes with. It is better reviewed than 95 percent of its genre. It outscores the games it most resembles, including Anarchy Arcade (free, scores 21) and Fishing Planet (free, scores 71).
Inside the two-hour refund window, 89 percent of the 266 reviews written there were positive, against 95 percent overall, and those are 64 percent of everything written about it.
It is still busy. 18 players were in it at once at the last check, across 81 days of tracking.
Players
18 players at peak in the last day.
The chart appears once this game has been counted more than once.Player counts via SteamSpy.
No data upstream: critic score (Metacritic), achievement curve (Steam global achievements).
Cite this score
Embed the live badge, copy the line, or download the card.
The Lab scores 89/100 on the BANG Score (a BANGER). The BANG Score rates what a game is worth for the money. Via Steam BANGERS. https://steambangers.com/game/450390/the-labThe BANG Score is one number for value, 0 to 100: price against how it reviews and how long it was built to be. It answers the money question and stops there; whether the game is for you is still your call.
Reviews set the ceiling and price moves you inside it, so a cheap game that reviews badly cannot climb. Ratings from few reviewers are shrunk toward the middle, so 100 percent from nine people does not outrank 96 percent from ninety thousand. Length comes from HowLongToBeat where it can be matched, measured against a per-genre floor so a five-hour narrative game is judged against other narrative games rather than against a sixty-hour RPG. Where no verified length exists the score says so and carries a dock, because the biggest input is then a guess. The full method, including where it is weak → Steam reviews as of Aug 1.
A number here look wrong? Tell me what it got wrong and I will look at the inputs behind it.