Difficulty That Respects Your Time

There is a difference between a hard game and a game that wastes your time. The first makes you better. The second just makes you replay the same twenty minutes because it moved a checkpoint.

The strategy titles I like most fail you quickly and let you retry fast. A losing tower defence run should be obvious within a minute of the mistake, not thirty minutes later.

I have started scoring games partly on how they handle failure. Instant restarts, mid-mission saves, and clear feedback all matter more than raw difficulty numbers.

If a game punishes you with time rather than with a real challenge, it usually gets a lower mark from me, no matter how pretty it is.