You read the review, see if his opinions are similar to yours, and then base off of that. Is that better?
No because you don't know who has bias and who doesn't.
Imagine a game has these reviews:
review 1: Graphics loving sucked, but I really liked the difficulty 7/10
review 2: graphics and difficulty were okay, about average.5/10
review 3: graphics were great but the game was WAYYY to eassy. 4/10
You have no clue who prefers difficulty over graphics or vice versa.
So you have no basis to understand how each reviewer calculated their score, which makes you unable to judge the game based on what attributes YOU like.
I think a problem with the major game review sites is that there is little to no accountability for what people write about a game or who sponsors them. There have been several instances I can think of where a major game critic site sparked controversy over their review in some way. Video game reviewing isn't a serious form of media though so such behavior often gets forgotten by many people and nothing changes.
Without actually looking at individual scores Metacritic doesn't show the polarization that often occurs in the reviews it aggregates. An example being some game with a score of 60 composed of many scores of 90 and 10. No one is saying that the game is just mediocre, people are either loving it or hating it. You need to read the individual reviews to see that and at that point what was the point of the "convenient" aggregate score in the first place? With that said scores on Metacritic have a habit of trending down so when I do see a game with like an 85+ score that is usually an indicator that a lot of people actually do like a game.
I thought this over and I was considering writing about it, but I think that badly summarizing scores is an issue too.
In a perfect review company, there's 25 reviewers who have to review a game based purely off of the individual category they enjoy most and find the most important. Additionally, they cannot read any other reviews until they complete their own and must have utterly virgin eyes to the game to avoid bias.
