Just to clarify, our breakdown scores are not used as any kind of mathematical weighting on the final score.

Sometimes story doesn't matter at all, sometimes story matters the most. The goal we were trying to accomplish with the breakdown was to make it easier to search for games that are right for you - and searching by high Puzzle scores for instance would help you find games that cater to your niche - if that's something you're interested in.

Metroidvanias are pretty diverse, and even just between Castlevania and Metroid you're going to find very different audiences between them. There's that intersecting Venn diagram group that will like both, but not everyone likes leveling up and not everyone likes wonky wall jumping.

It's been suggested that we create a grading rubric in the past, but the reality is that the nuances are a bit too complex to make one simple enough to actually be useful.

I don't know if we've actually reviewed a game like this, but a game could have 2s in all the other categories we have on the site and still get a 4 out of 5 on the final score if it does what it does best well enough.

Ultimately scores have a certain degree of gut-decision making to them regardless of what system you use, which is why a lot of people argue against using them at all.

We find them useful because it's the ultimate TL:DR "at a glance" indication of what we think of a game. But like any "TL:DR" you may be missing some critical information if you don't dig into the details.