HonestGamers is primarily a game reviews site, with a mission to provide helpful reviews and related content that will allow consumers to make choices about the games they purchase or play, while simultaneously providing gamers from a variety of backgrounds with the opportunity to have their opinions heard (hence the site's enormous selection of quality reader reviews).
Staff reviews
When reviewing games, writers at many sites now feel a moral imperative to spend much of their time discussing themes and politics rather than mechanics. Such discussion is important and beneficial in the right venues, but it can get in the way of the sort of consumer-facing review that is this site's millieu.
Our goal is to match critics with the sort of games they would typically choose to purchase and play, not the ones that make them angry. If someone is about to buy a game and he or she heads online for a review, the review that will prove most helpful is a review written from the perspective of someone else who might also have bought that game.
If a critic finds a game's subject matter, themes, or design elements inherently offensive ahead of time, that perspective's value for potential consumers is severely limited. A low score and an angry rant might drive traffic when stunned onlookers see them shared on social media, but they're not the sort of content that best serves the HonestGamers audience.
None of the above is necessarily meant to be taken as the "one true way" to review games, or as a critique of sites that take a different approach. It is simply the policy that determines which critics will receive which assignments at this site.
It's worth noting that on occasion, one of our critics may review a game and will wind up disliking it for reasons that sound an awful lot like total garbage... to some readers. But that doesn't mean we'll delete it, should people happen to voice objections. We are not in the practice of censoring contributors, most especially those who are ready to back up their opinions with logic. We want readers to know that they can count on honest impressions from writers who went into a game expecting to have a decent time with it. What happened after that isn't up to us. It could well end up happening to a lot of other consumers if they buy the game in question. Suddenly, that "contrarian" opinion is relevant to the site's overall audience.
No review at HonestGamers is intended to cover more than one game at a time. A review should address not the game a critic might wish existed, but the game that was actually created and placed on store shelves or on a digital storefront. It should ask not what a game might have done differently to reach a larger and more diverse audience, but what it does well (or not so well) for the audience it targets. Reviews should cover fairly conventional stuff, including graphics and audio, play control, replay value, difficulty, and so forth (as applicable).
If staff writers want to tackle game reviews from other angles, they should feel welcome to explore those other angles on their site blogs. Any site staff member can also submit reviews as reader contributions.
Reviews can be rejected (at any level) if they don't adhere to reasonable grammatical standards, or if they don't spend sufficient time critiquing the individual game being reviewed. There are plenty of other sites where editorials and features are gladly accepted, and there are a number of sites that still accept reader reviews that are unsupported or horribly written. We just don't want HonestGamers to be one of them.
Sponsored posts
HonestGamers does not accept sponsored posts or advertorial written by outside sources. Our content is written entirely by our staff team, freelancers, and members of the community. We believe our readers should be able to count on independent editorial output, and we don't accept guest posts even when relevant content is promised.
Commonly, we are approached by SEO experts who hope to secure a "do-follow" link within the body of an article on the site, in order to increase the profile of content on their own site. This practice violates Google's terms and will likely be penalized at some point down the line. We are not interested in being part of that inevitable sequence of events. If a marketer wishes to sponsor content at HonestGamers, we are always interested in finding partners to sponsor our game guides. Otherwise, we regard such queries as spam and are unlikely to respond.