OpenCritic scores come in two flavours, not one: a Top Critic Average and a Percent Recommended. They measure different things, and mixing them up is the most common way people misread a review roundup.
The two OpenCritic scores, quickly
Top Critic Average is a weighted average of scores from critic outlets OpenCritic has vetted and approved. Not every publication that reviews games counts equally — OpenCritic curates its critic list. (Source: opencritic.com/about)
Percent Recommended is simpler and more binary: what share of critics said this game is worth playing, versus not. It strips out how harsh or generous any individual reviewer’s scale runs, and just counts yes/no verdicts.
That’s why you can see a game with a solid average score sit next to a lower recommend percentage — they’re answering different questions.
Why we cite OpenCritic in our roundups
When PlayTheory builds a review roundup, we’re not trying to replace the aggregate — we’re trying to add context to it. The number gives you a fast signal. Our writing gives you the “why” behind that signal: which outlets loved it, which had reservations, and what specific issue keeps coming up across reviews.
The worked example: Black Flag Resynced
Our own Black Flag Resynced review roundup is a good stress test for this. Outlets like Rock Paper Shotgun and Eurogamer both reviewed the pirate-focused remake favourably (Sources: RPS review, Eurogamer review).
The game backed that up commercially — GameSpot reported 3 million copies sold at launch (source).
But at nearly the same time, the game was getting review-bombed on Steam specifically over single-player microtransactions and its DLC structure, per Eurogamer’s separate report (source).
None of that is a contradiction. Critic reviews are largely about the core game — combat, story, sailing, world design. Player backlash was about monetisation structure, something that often matters less to a critic playing a review copy for a week than to a player deciding whether to spend money on day one.
What a score can tell you — and what it can’t
It can tell you: how a game generally landed with people who play a lot of games and review them for a living, in the days right around launch.
It can’t tell you: how you specifically will feel about pacing, difficulty, or monetisation; how a live-service or DLC structure will play out months later; or how the wider player community will react once the game is in millions of hands instead of a few dozen critics’.
The PlayTheory take
We treat OpenCritic as a starting point, never the whole answer. A high score tells you a game is probably worth your time. It doesn’t tell you whether the specific thing you care about — say, whether there’s day-one DLC, or how grindy the endgame gets — is going to bother you. Read the number, then read the roundup.
Related: our Black Flag Resynced review roundup · how PlayTheory scores and covers reviews