Terms of service

Acceptance of these terms

This site is operated by Cold Open Media Ltd, registered in England and Wales under company number 13284770, with its registered office at Unit 4, Whitcomb Works, 18 Blackfriars Road, Manchester M3 5AB. By using the site you agree to these terms. If you do not agree with them, please stop using the site. Nothing here affects your statutory rights as a consumer.

Using this site

You may read, print and share anything published here for your own personal, non-commercial use. In using the site you agree not to:

• attempt to gain unauthorised access to the site, its hosting, or any system connected to it;
• interfere with the operation of the site, including by placing an unreasonable load on it with automated tools;
• scrape or bulk-copy the content for republication, or use it to train a model for commercial resale, without our written permission;
• remove, obscure or alter any attribution, byline or copyright notice; or
• use the site for anything unlawful.

We may restrict access from an address that is doing any of the above, without notice.

Our content, and what you may do with it

All editorial text on this site is original work and is copyright Cold Open Media Ltd or its individual authors, all rights reserved, except where stated otherwise. The site design, the wordmark and the Cold Open mark are also ours.

You may quote up to roughly 150 words of any article for the purposes of commentary, criticism, review or news reporting, provided you credit Cold Open and link to the original page. That is a licence we grant freely and we will not chase anyone who stays inside it. Reproducing whole articles, or systematically republishing our work, requires permission; write to us and the answer is often yes.

Photographs on this site are used under open licences and are credited individually in our image credits file. Those licences are between you and the original photographer, not us, and our permission does not extend to them. No screenshot, logo, character art, box art or other trademarked material belonging to any games publisher appears on this site; where a product is named, it is named for identification only and remains the property of its owner.

What you send us

If you send us a story tip, a correction or any other message, you keep ownership of it. You grant us permission to use the information it contains in our reporting, and to quote it, subject to anything you tell us about confidentiality. If you ask not to be named, we will not name you and will not confirm to a third party that you contacted us.

Please do not send us confidential information you are not entitled to disclose. If you send us material subject to an obligation you owe someone else, that is a matter between you and them, and we may decline to use it.

Accuracy, opinion and corrections

Reviews and criticism published here are the honest opinion of the named writer, formed after playing the game to the extent stated on the review. Scores are calculated from the published rubric. Opinions are opinions, and they are presented as such.

Reporting is checked before publication, but we are a small publication and we occasionally get things wrong. When we do, we correct the article at the top of the page, date the correction, and add it to the log on our about page. We do not silently delete or rewrite published work. If you believe something is inaccurate, please tell us.

Advertising

This site carries display advertising, which is how it is paid for. Every advertising slot is labelled “Advertisement” and is visually distinct from editorial content. Advertising is sold against the site and against broad sections, never against a named game, company or article, and advertisers have no sight of or influence over editorial.

We are not responsible for the content of third-party advertisements, for the products or services they promote, or for any dealings you have with an advertiser. If you see an advert here that appears misleading or inappropriate, tell us and we will block it. Details of the cookies advertising may set, and how to refuse them, are in the privacy and cookie policy.

Links to other sites

We link out to sources, documents and other publications. Those sites are not under our control, we are not responsible for their content or their privacy practices, and a link is not an endorsement. Following an external link is at your own discretion.

Availability

We try to keep the site online and current, but we do not guarantee that it will be available uninterrupted or free of errors. We may change, suspend or withdraw any part of the site, including archived material, though our settled practice is to keep published work online at its original address indefinitely.

Disclaimers

The site and its content are provided for general information. Guides describe steps that worked on the hardware and software we tested, at the time we tested them. Settings menus change, configurations differ, and you are responsible for the changes you make to your own equipment. Nothing on this site is professional, technical, financial or legal advice, and you should not treat it as a substitute for advice specific to your situation.

Liability

Nothing in these terms excludes or limits our liability for death or personal injury caused by negligence, for fraud or fraudulent misrepresentation, or for any other liability that cannot lawfully be excluded.

Subject to that, we are not liable for any loss of profit, loss of data, business interruption, or any indirect or consequential loss arising from your use of, or inability to use, this site or anything you rely on from it. If you are using the site for business purposes, you use it entirely at your own risk.

Governing law

These terms and any dispute arising out of them are governed by the law of England and Wales, and the courts of England and Wales have exclusive jurisdiction. If you are a consumer resident elsewhere in the United Kingdom or in the EEA, you keep the benefit of any mandatory protections of the law where you live.

Changes to these terms, and how to contact us

We may update these terms from time to time. The date at the top of this page shows when they were last changed, and the version in force is the one published here when you use the site. Material changes will be flagged on the home page for a period.

For anything in these terms, write to [email protected] or use our contact page. Our privacy and cookie policy explains what happens to your data.