Game reviews from popular gaming websites - yay or nay?

[Incognitus]

Damn, I posted in a thread similar to this and it ended up being in an old, dead forum. Three cheers for the search function...?

Do you guys trust gaming reviews given by popular gaming websites? Why/why not?

I haven't trusted a big website / big magazine game review in a long, long time because I believe they all have ulterior motives. Some are quite clear---business model dependent on physical product sold, advertising dollar revenue, etc. Looking past that for a second, however: no standard grading scale exists beyond what is defined by each individual outlet. Some may give scores out of 10, some out of 5. Some use decimals; some round their scores to the nearest integer. Some could give letter grades. Some may choose to use a five-star scale with fractional star possibilities. Some may adopt a hamburger scale, adding a slice of cheese to the sections they liked best. Some might give out waffles for bad games and ponies for great games! Some of these are silly, but it's tough to take seriously when there's no set standard, ya know? Beyond that, I cannot read their wordy explanations of why they scored X section of Y game without viewing it as fluff to justify an end. My personal rule of thumb: I take any review written by anyone who has been given an advanced copy of the game with a gallon of salt.

I try not to read them. That's a lot of salt to ingest at one time.

The only reviews I actively seek are reviews from gamers weeks/months after the game's release; however, even that warrants a bit of caution. You have to wade through the people who write reviews for the sake of writing them. Some people don't have the balls to give a scathing review to a game that deserves it. Some are too blinded by nostalgia. Some reviewers can't isolate a game from an impressive franchise of great games (i.e. Final Fantasy) in order to judge it on its own merits/weaknesses. On the opposite end, some reviewers get too picky with the small stuff. Some are too critical of a game overall---perhaps motivated by some unreasonable stimuli like loyalty to a rival video game company or game console. Perhaps they're intentionally trolling for a response; perhaps they wish for X game company to ultimately fail and try to add fuel to the flames any way they can. It's not an exact science.

I still think there's more honesty in a handful of reviews by gamers than a bucket full of game magazine reviews if given enough time. That 2 week-to-2 months window of patience gives the ugly truth about a game enough time to sizzle under the light of scrutiny, thrust there by the mob of gamers who aren't motivated by magazine sales, ad sales or corporate buy-offs to give a game an undeserving high score.

My most reliable litmus test for new games will always be my friends, as they have very similar tastes in games and I already know their personal biases ahead of time.

[Mystyrion]

I use to never read big name reviews ever, but my stance has taken a little changing over the years. Some of the greatest games I've played came from some of these reviews and some of the biggest disappointments have come from these reviews. Metro 2033 for example, I only saw a couple screenshots and read the review in Game Informer. Without having even seen that review, I wouldn't have jumped on the game as soon as I did. After reading it, with the addition of having not deciding what to play, I went to Walmart and bought it. Today it stands as one of my favorite games to date.
Crysis 2 would be an example of a huge disappointment. I've always heard good things about Crysis, mostly how you had to have an awesome computer to run it, but usually good things other than that. Sequel comes along, gameplay looks beautiful, reviews are about B+ across the board. Worst buy I've ever done. Multiplayer was broken beyond belief, story was bland and boring, I don't even remember if there was a musical score or not.

Sorry for the side tracking. I usually skim through popular gaming site reviews, not really listening to what they have to say, but just generalizing. They didn't like this about the game, didn't like that about it, thought this was bland. Then I check gameplay videos and see if I can sense any of that while watching it. I can usually spot if I'd like a game or not based on gameplay. I was really hyped for Dishonored until I saw its gameplay, then I knew exactly what it was going to be like. I saw amazing user and critic reviews so I bought it for $25 on black friday and it was as I had thought, good thing I didn't bite for $50. The only really hard thing to get out of gameplay videos is story lines, something I look out for when skimming through reviews.

Other than watching gameplay videos, I play demo's if available, register for beta's, etc. As those would be some of the best ways to get to know the game. I use to check user ratings a lot of metacritic, but even those as of now are overrun with mindless spamming of 10 or 0.
I don't really trust word of mouth anymore either. Out of all of the people around me, I'm really the only one that games as a hobby. Some game casually, other play specific games like Halo or WoW religiously. Online word of mouth is useless to me, so many different people, with different likes and dislikes.

[Xanatos]

I do in fact read reviews, I just tend to ignore the final score. Overall I feel they do a good job at pointing out both negative and positive aspects of a game, they just don't have balls to trim points of AAA titles for the exact same flaws they do in other games, thus we have shit like this "yea, this 2D platformer is fun, but nothing new, not to mention it barely has any story to it"... "this new 2D Mario game is revolutionary", and I'm all like "WUT?".

I do however have two reviewers I place my complete trust on as they have yet to disapoint me, one works for a PC magazine called "Bug" and the other one is Angry Joe. With that being said I still check the game out for myself, thus end up doing exact same shit as Mysterion.