Game guides

Reading an age rating properly

An age rating describes what is on the screen. For most of the games below, that is not where the risk is.

Voice chat with strangers and in-game spending appear in every guide here, and neither is something a rating measures. Use the rating to decide whether the content suits your child. Then use the guide to switch off the parts the rating was never describing.

The age on the account does more work than any setting inside the game. It is what decides which chat features exist at all, and it follows your child to every device they sign in on. A birthday entered wrongly at sign-up quietly outranks an evening of careful configuration, so check it first.

Spending is designed to be hard to feel. Games here sell a currency, then price things in that currency, so a child choosing between 1,000 and 2,800 of something is not thinking in money and is not meant to be. Requiring a password for every purchase does more than any limit you set, because it puts a person back in the loop at the moment of the decision.