Why we test every game on an old phone

Most reviews you read were done on a shiny top-tier phone. That's fine, but it hides a huge part of the picture. Plenty of people play on hardware that's two or three years old, and those games can behave very differently.

So we keep a deliberately older test phone around. If a game stutters, crashes, or overheats on it, we want to know, because a chunk of players will hit exactly that.

Sometimes the gap is dramatic. A game that feels silky on the new phone turns into a slideshow on the old one. Other times a well-optimized game runs beautifully on both, and that earns real respect from us.

We also watch loading times and download size. A five-gigabyte game is a big ask on a phone with limited storage, and that's worth mentioning up front.

The goal is simple: tell you how a game will run on the phone you actually have, not the one a marketing team wishes you owned.