Edge has put up its Impossible Road review. It gets a 9. Having spent hours wrestling with this bastard-hard game, I think that’s a perfectly justifiable score. Impossible Road is addictive, pure and polished. It’s not perfect, but in the context of mobile games, it’s very, very, very, very good indeed.

However, how does it fare when you remove the context of mobile games? In the comments section of the Edge review, a couple of readers have complained that the game doesn’t deserve its rating, that Edge is dumbing down, or that it only deserves a 9 if you compare it to other games that you play for five minutes. So here’s my entirely reasoned and carefully considered response to that: bullshit.

I’m sick to death of people whining about mobile games somehow being inferior to ‘proper’ games on ‘proper’ consoles. If you have a ratings system, its full range should be used. If a game is really great, it should get a high score. If it’s not that great, it shouldn’t. I understand why it might break some people’s brains that the likes of Impossible Road might score similarly to a Zelda, but it’s insulting to mobile developers to suggest their games aren’t as rewarding or, for that matter, don’t reward investment.

If I think about the games I’ve spent most time on over the years, they are varied. Civilization II had tons of depth, and I spent many hours rampaging around semi-random planets, obliterating all-comers. But I also spent an insane number of hours honing my skills on Tetris. Should Tetris somehow have had a ratings ceiling, just because it was a simple game? Of course not. Just because you can understand Tetris and see pretty much all it has to offer within a minute, does that mean it lacks longevity? Absolutely not. In fact, gaming’s history is littered with titles that were absurdly simple and yet also brilliant, from the Pac-Mans of the classic era of arcade gaming through to the Super Hexagons of the modern mobile age. Moreover, they reward investment. It’s a different type of investment to finite and linear games, where the objective is often to complete a story, but it’s still a reward, more akin, perhaps, to honing a sports skill.

Given the choice, I’d obliterate all scores in every publication, essentially forcing everyone to—horrors!—read the text. At the most, I’d allow ‘recommended’ and ‘bloody essential’ badges, as per the mid-1990s Melody Maker. But if numbers must be applied, then this shouldn’t be done on the basis of any arbitrary rules dreamt up by ‘hardcore’ gamers scared witless by the prospect of mobile gaming encroaching on their turf. The thinking should be simple: is this game any good? If it is, like Impossible Road, it deserves a high score, regardless of the platform the game’s on and the mechanics it offers.