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Built for indie budgets
Campaigns scoped to the beats that move wishlists. No retainer padding, no busywork reports.
Team Critical Hit does two things for indie studios and the publishers who back them. We get your game in front of the press and creators who matter. And before it ships, we tell you exactly how they're going to score it.
Thousands of games hit Steam every year. A great indie can launch to silence because the right writers never saw it, or because the build that reached them showed its weakest hour. We fix both.
Campaigns scoped to the beats that move wishlists. No retainer padding, no busywork reports.
We've pitched, placed and followed up with the outlets indie players actually read, from the big sites to the critics who champion small games.
Our mock reviewers are working games writers. They read your build the way the press will, before the press does.
We run the whole arc of an indie campaign: the reveal, showcase moments, demos and playtests, launch, console ports, DLC and the long tail. Every beat gets a plan, a pitch list built for that game, and a follow-up that doesn't let a reply go cold.
A mock review is a full critical read of your build by working games writers, written the way real outlets write. You get the score, the reasons behind it, and a plan to move it while there's still time to change the game or the pitch.
Any stage from vertical slice to release candidate. We sign your NDA first.
Reviewers matched to your genre play it cold, the way a critic on deadline would.
Each reviewer files a scored review in the voice of the outlets you're targeting.
We turn the reviews into a report you can act on, then walk your team through it.
Every mock review report follows the same structure, so a publisher can compare titles across a slate and a solo developer gets the full picture.
Swaying the Score is the part studios come back for: which slice to show which writer, what to fix first, and which outlets are most likely to champion the game.
Most agencies do one or the other. Doing both means your PR campaign is built on what critics will actually say, not what we hope they'll say.
The mock review finds the slice that wins writers over. That's the one that goes in the preview build.
Rough edges get flagged months out, while they're still a patch and not a paragraph in a review.
Reviewer feedback shapes the code list, so keys reach the critics most likely to love the game.
/ Studios & publishers we've worked with
Team Critical Hit was founded in 2015 by Bill Murphy and Garrett Fuller. We've spent our careers on both sides of the review: writing them, and helping studios earn good ones.
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Tell us about your game, where it is in development and when you want the world to see it. We'll come back with what we'd do and what it costs.
bill@teamcriticalhit.com