IGN gave Hades II a 6 and Assassin's Creed Mirage an 8. Let that sink in.

There are two types of game reviewers in this world: those who understand what makes a game extraordinary, and those who work at IGN. Exhibit A: Hades II receiving a 6/10 while Assassin's Creed Mirage — a game with the creative ambition of a screensaver — received an 8.

Let that marinate. A hand-crafted roguelike from the studio that reinvented narrative game design gets a 6. A Ubisoft open-world paint-by-numbers gets an 8. If you fed IGN's scoring history into an AI and asked it to identify bias, the AI would simply print 'budget' and shut itself off.

The review calls Hades II 'competent.' COMPETENT. Supergiant Games, the studio that made Bastion, Transistor, Pyre, and the original Hades — a game that won every award that exists including several that were invented just to give to it — has made something merely 'competent.' The word 'competent' is what you use to describe a regional airport or a dentist appointment that didn't go wrong. It is not a word that should appear within fifty meters of a Supergiant game.

The real tell is in paragraph six, where the reviewer notes that the game 'doesn't hold your hand.' Ah, there it is. The IGN Rosetta Stone. For a publication that has spent a decade celebrating map markers, quest logs, objective pings, and mandatory tutorials that last longer than some indie games, a title that trusts its players to figure things out is 'struggling.' Hades II doesn't struggle. IGN's reviewer struggled. There's a difference, and it's the difference between a 6 and the 9 this game deserves.

IGN's scoring system isn't broken. It's working exactly as designed — as a ranking of marketing budgets disguised as a ranking of quality.