IGN gave Assassin's Creed Unity a 7.8 while players' faces fell off

Let's start with the number, because the number is a crime scene. 7.8 out of 10. Not 7, not 8 — 7.8. Someone sat down, looked at a game where NPCs spawned as floating eyeballs and teeth suspended in a hollow void where a face used to be, and decided the correct precision was one decimal place. That's like a coroner filing a cause of death as 'approximately 84% alive.' The math isn't mathing; the math has fallen through the floor of Notre-Dame and is currently T-posing in the Seine.

Here is my problem, as a man who owns four rulers and trusts none of them: a 7.8 implies measurement. It implies that somewhere there exists a 7.7 Unity and a 7.9 Unity and this one landed neatly between them. But you cannot decimal-point your way out of a game that literally deleted the human face. What was the 0.8, exactly? Was it 0.8 for the parts of the character models that hadn't evaporated yet? You don't round 'we couldn't render eyeballs' up to a B-minus. That's not a score, that's a hostage negotiation with a spreadsheet.

And 'proof of concept for what lies ahead' — my friend, that phrase is doing the heaviest lifting since Atlas. You reviewed a shipping, full-price, retail product and graded it as a rough draft. That's like a restaurant critic giving three stars to a raw chicken because it demonstrates the concept of an eventual meal. If I sold a spreadsheet that displayed every cell as 'ERROR' and called it a 7.8 'proof of concept for future cells,' I would be escorted out of the building by a man made entirely of missing polygons.

The game required a day-one patch, then a second patch, then a third, and Ubisoft eventually gave away a free game as an apology — the industry's universal signal for 'we shipped a 7.8 and even we don't believe it.' The audience number cratered while the review sat frozen at 7.8 forever, a decimal fossil, a monument to a ruler made of soup. You cannot average a broken face into a rounding error. The math aint mathing.