Metascore
Metacritic score
A Metascore is Metacritic's 0 to 100 summary of critics' reviews of a game, film, TV show or album, calculated as a weighted average of scores Metacritic assigns to reviews from critics it selects.
Metacritic builds the Metascore in two steps it describes publicly: it chooses a group of critics and assigns a score to each of their reviews, then combines those scores in a weighted average. The number is shown with a colour and a verbal label, such as Universal Acclaim, and the count of reviews it is based on.
The weighting is the part that makes the Metascore hard to check. Some outlets count for more than others, and Metacritic does not publish the weights, so the number cannot be recalculated from the reviews listed on the page.
The Metascore is separate from Metacritic’s User Score, a 0 to 10 rating from site users. On Elden Ring’s page in September 2026, for example, the Metascore was 96 from 86 critic reviews and the User Score 8.4 from 24,703 user ratings.
For how it compares with OpenCritic’s unweighted Top Critic Average, see our guide to how Metacritic and OpenCritic scores work.
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