Dont trust metacritic, especially not gaf,
Difference of opinions is beautiful
I dont buy games based on anyone
Gameplay videos of any kind, i can judge a game by myself.
I don't generally need somebody else to tell me whether I'll like a game or not tbh
It's becoming glaringly obvious which games are going to be shit or not months before release most of the time
I don't know about you, but I don't think the point of user reviews is to immediately tell you whether a game is worth buying. Or at least I don't use them that way.
Isn't it more that any individual critic review is, in the end, just one person's mostly informed opinion, and that having a good chunk of user reviews can tell you for example that "hey, based on these random 50 people there's a good chance the game has bugs in this particular section, doesn't let you rebind your keys and takes up 45gb after downloading instead of the 20gb they put on the store page".
More specific stuff like that you can only get from user reviews, in my experience.
Steam reviews because it has the most advanced filtering system there is.
Unless it can be verified the users actually own the product “user” reviews are the most worthless metric imaginable.
So Steam for me.
Steam. Right there on the store page, shows both overall reviews and recent ones (very useful in the age of early accesses and patches), every user needs to own or to have played the game, has anti-review bomb system that still informs you of the review bomb, its designed in a way (recommend/not recommend) that takes into account the user is most interested in bringing the overall score up or down rather than giving a genuine grade.
Steam reviews are great, it's generally pretty easy to separate the wheat from the chaff just by reading the first few lines. I've read reviews from randos on Steam that were 100 times more informative and better written than most "professional" reviewers.
YouTube has become an excellent source as well. I've found a couple of content creators that vibe well with my tastes and found some real gaming gems because of them.
Steam has the most options and requirements, sure, but it also seems to have by far the most joke reviews of any of the others.
I think It's a good problem because it means enough people are encouraged to review that people just choose to do it on a whim, steam even asks for reviews after you've played for a while.
The issue is that joke reviews are pushed waaaay too high, and I don't know whether there's even a way to filter them out. For every game with a decent amount of reviews in the initial amount they show you, you're likely to get 30 - 50% of them being variations of 'I jumped on a dog. 10/10'. I get that it's jokes but I don't think any other site has that problem.
I mean, I agree steam is the best by sheer volume of useful options, but it also has a unique problem that can be kind of annoying.
just watch a youtuber like
Karak
Karak
and see what he has to say
Oh, is that karak from acg? Nice. Didn't know he was a member