Earlier this year, Kotaku began running its reviews under a unified template that was designed with a trio of key components in mind.

First, there would be no alphabetical or numerical review scores. Second, reviews would be focused on delivering the most critical information in the most efficient way possible. Third, they should be fun to read and hopefully foster conversation about a game’s positives and negatives.

We decided to exclude a final score to ensure that Kotaku reviews would not contribute to the average rating at sites that collate and aggregate numerical scores, scores that do not follow a universal grading scale. Our hope was that we could avoid discussions that fruitlessly debate whether a “10″ was, indeed, perfect and if one exclusive was better than another exclusive simply based on a number. Boiling down pages of analysis to a single grade or score or number of pumpkins doesn’t help readers, it hurts them, reducing the process of critiquing what is often a living document into black and white terms, when there is often a world of grey left untouched.

Our hope is that by laying out the analytical process, by exposing what we feel was good and bad about that game without weighting either, we give you the resources to form your own educated opinion.

We hope this explains how and why we designed this system. We encourage you to add your comments, questions and suggestions in the comments after reading through the more detailed explanation on the key aspects of our reviews on the jump.