Reviews are about whole games. The timings are recorded facts that sit beside the verdict rather than replacing it, and in two cases here a slow game scores higher than a fast one because the game underneath is better.
The best-behaved game we have timed. A single load at launch, nothing afterwards, no transition between the workshop and the village, and an autosave that never once produced a visible stall. It is a small game and it embarrasses much larger ones.
A large open world with a four-second fast travel and a death loop under two seconds. The speed is not incidental; it is what makes the exploration work, because a world you can re-enter cheaply is a world you are willing to be careless in.
An excellent case delivered in three-second instalments. No single wait is worth a complaint and the total across four hundred scene changes is an hour, which is the clearest argument in this file for streaming ahead of the player rather than on demand.
Eleven seconds of elevator for every deck change is craft on day one and a tax by week three. We counted the rides across a full campaign, and the total is longer than several games in this index take to finish.
The fighting is superb and you see about a third less of it than the runtime suggests. Two hundred timed deaths, a fixed nineteen-second cycle, and a session where more than a quarter of the clock belongs to the loader rather than the game.
Tactics games now take longer to reach a first turn than open worlds take to reach a first step. A short piece on where those seconds go, and on the two-second gap between selecting a unit and seeing its movement range across a sixty-hour campaign.
