IGN Early Access reviews have been a thing for a LONG TIME now.
Epic's base-building, cartoony survival action game starts out strong but slowly grinds to a halt.
www.ign.com
At least since 2017, but the whole thing about flexible reviews probably got going in 2014 or so, line around the time of this
IGN Review Policy Letter to Readers.
I preferred the clearer marker that an Early Access review was based on an unfinished game, but then again, I agree with a lot of the responses already on here that a "finished game" is an unfortunate thing of the past; games get patched and added on to, communities turn to shit, and sometimes Early Access is the only access ever offered because the game never leaves Early status when the developer goes bankrupt or abandons its project. So that whole thing of pretending that an Early Access score wasn't a "real score" was a bit disingenuous considering, as you know from your years of working in press Manabyte, readers still just scrolled down past the text to the score to find out what it rated so they could go argue about it on the comments and on Twitter...
It's not my favorite part of today's gaming world that everything that exists has to have a score assigned to it, but then again, I don't like throwing my money at things that I won't like, and to me reviews (be they professional or amateur) can be appreciable. If it makes you feel any better, IGN does Early Access reviews for things you DON'T like as well, such as
Hyper Scape...
IGN did Review-in-Progress for games that were not available to review prior to launch / needed an online to review (MMOs or PVP games.) Those used to not have any preliminary score, just text of the thoughts as a reviewer went along, but more recently the reviews have had the etched-out "Not Final" score like on that old Fortnite review, and I'm not sure if IGN still does it that way or if the reviews are just straight reviews now?
If Grounded had a firm Release Date when it was to be reclassified from Early Access to Final, then maybe it would make sense to not put any score on an Early Access game? But this could be earmarked not-final for months or years, and they'll be charging 30 "final" dollars all that time, so it's just one of those things that is what it is these days.
Fortnite released in 2017 and just left Early Access barely a month ago in June. Considering its place as a dominant force in general populace entertainment, would it have made sense to you to be reading the first-ever Fortnite reviews four weeks ago?