Is a game worth it? How to decide before you buy

Most "is it worth it" advice ends at the review score. The review score tells you if a game is good. It does not tell you if it is good for the money, right now, at this price. Those are different questions. Here is a way to answer the second one that holds up.

Start with the reviews, but read the count

A 95 percent rating from four hundred people is a real signal. A 100 percent from eleven people is a rumor. Look at the percentage and the number of reviews together. Then check the recent reviews against the lifetime reviews. A game that was loved and is now sitting at "mixed" for the last month usually means a bad patch, a dead player base, or a monetization change. That gap is often the most useful line on the page.

Turn the price into hours

A price alone means nothing. A price against how long the game actually is means a lot. Take the real length, the main story from HowLongToBeat, not the store page fantasy, and divide. Twenty dollars for a tight eight-hour game is about two-fifty an hour. Sixty dollars for a forty-hour game you will finish is a dollar-fifty an hour. The cheaper sticker is not always the better deal.

One trap: long is not the same as good. A forty-hour game that bores you at hour six cost you sixty dollars for six hours. Length only counts if you will actually play it, which is why the finish rate, how many owners get to the end, is worth more than the advertised hours.

Check the price history, then wait if you can

Almost every game goes on sale. If a game is at its normal price and a sale is a month out, the question is whether you want it now or want it cheaper later. The historical low tells you how patient is worth being. A game that has never dropped below ten percent off is different from one that hits sixty percent off twice a year.

I still do this every time. I grew up running the hours-per-dollar math in my head before I spent twenty dollars, and I never stopped. The only change is that the number is written down now.

The quick version

• Reviews good and plentiful, and recent reviews not falling off a cliff.
• Price per real hour that you would pay for that kind of game.
• Not sitting just above a sale you could wait a few weeks for.
• A finish rate that says people actually play it, instead of buying it and bouncing.

If all four line up, buy it. If the reviews are strong but the price per hour is rough, wishlist it and wait for the drop. The BANG Score rolls these into one number so you can skip the arithmetic, but the reasoning is the same either way.