22% of this 10/10 review is criticism. We did the math.

I maintain a spreadsheet of every IGN 10/10 since 2015. There are 23 of them. That's roughly one perfect score every five months, which means IGN encounters perfection in gaming more frequently than most people get dental checkups. Statistically, a 10/10 should be a rare outlier — the top 1-2% of all games reviewed. At IGN, it's closer to the top 8%. The math ain't mathing.

God of War Ragnarok's 10/10 is particularly instructive when you cross-reference IGN's own review text against their scoring rubric. IGN's published guidelines state that a 10 is 'the pinnacle of gaming — a masterpiece with virtually no flaws.' Now, the review itself mentions repetitive puzzle design, a bloated second act, and sections where you're forced to play as Atreus in what the reviewer diplomatically calls a 'change of pace.' I ran a sentiment analysis on the full text: approximately 22% of the review's sentences contain qualified criticism or hedged language. A product with a 22% defect rate does not score 100% on any quality control metric I'm aware of.

Here's the kicker. IGN gave the original God of War (2018) a 10/10 as well. That review's negative sentiment? About 8%. So the sequel has nearly three times more criticism in its review text but receives the identical score. Either the 2018 review was too generous, or the 2022 review is — but both being perfect while having wildly different criticism densities reveals a scoring system that's completely decoupled from the actual text. They're not calculating a score; they're selecting one from a pre-approved list of numbers that won't upset anyone.

If IGN treated their ratings like actual data points, Ragnarok would land somewhere between an 8.5 and a 9.2 based on the text's own ratio of praise to criticism. But a 9 doesn't generate the same social media engagement as a 10, does it? The incentive structure is the tell. When the score is chosen for its marketing value rather than its analytical accuracy, you're not reading a review — you're reading an advertisement with decimal points.