How we test whether a game is really offline

Plenty of games advertise offline play and then quietly break the moment you lose signal. So our test is blunt: install, open, then switch on airplane mode before doing anything else.

We look for the obvious failures first. Does it hang on a loading screen? Does it lock you out of saves? Then we play a full session offline to see if anything degrades halfway through.

We also check what happens when you come back online. A fair offline game keeps your local progress intact and syncs quietly if it needs to, without erasing anything.

It sounds simple, but this single test filters out a lot of games that would otherwise look great on paper. If it doesn't survive airplane mode, it doesn't earn the offline label from us.