Employed Gamer Reviews exists for people with limited gaming windows. Those 60 minutes after a 9-5 workday, the hour between university lectures, or the 45 minutes after high school homework is wrapped up. We evaluate whether games respect these constraints.

Every review delivers two scores. First, the Gamer Score (0-10) measures traditional quality through genre-specific criteria like mechanics, balance, and depth. Second, our custom Employment Ratio (0.0-1.0) applies variables tailored to multiplayer or single-player games. Multiplayer games are evaluated on queue times, match commitments, rank decay risk, and FOMO pressure. Single-player titles get judged on session completeness, story memory decay after breaks, checkpoint generosity, and controller familiarity retention. The math is simple: Gamer Score × Employment Ratio = final Employment Rating.

A masterpiece scoring 10/10 quality but only 0.7 employment fit becomes a 7/10 recommendation. One rare exception: the "Pull a Sicky" override. Games hitting 9.5+ Gamer Score despite poor employment metrics may earn a call to take a personal day. This is also referred to as the GTA flu. Additionally, where games provide novelty and uniqueness to their genre, bonus points are on offer. Think Among Us turning social deduction into a core multiplayer loop, or the procedurally generated galaxies of No Man's Sky that made infinite exploration actually possible.

These seismic innovations reshape what entire genres can achieve, earning extra weight beyond standard scoring.