NintendObs Thinks: Why I don't believe in reviews.
If you want to know about a game, just talk to someone you know who loves it.
Reviews are not reviews. Period. They are partnerships between a videogame publishing company and a videogame media company. Videogame publishers need to sell their games to make money, so they contact videogame media and provide them with their games in advance. Videogame media need to attract audiences to make money, so they contact videogame publishers for previews and ask for games in advance. The image you want your game to have, as a videogame publisher, given the qualities or lack thereof your game has, will influence how you will give access to your game to videogame media before launch. Videogame media, added to these circumstances, make cost-benefit analyses of the image of their review. For example, here comes the launch of Nintendo Switch. As a media, you have to give a raving review to The Legend of Zelda Breath of the Wild, even though back in the Wii U era when it was lucrative to be all-out negative about Nintendo, the occasional slowdowns of the game would have been a dealbreaker against that 10 out of 10.
The undeniable proof of that partnership are accolades trailer, which personally I avoid at all cost, where a publisher promotes their game using quotes from media reviews. This is actually beneficiary to both the publisher and the media because, on the one hand when it comes to the publisher, the accolades trailer gives their game access to the audiences of the people who trust these media. But on the other hand for the media, the trailer gives to them access to the players who love the output of the publisher and who consider that such and such media in the trailer are on the same page as they are, even though, from a cost-benefit perspective, this might be and very well is purely opportunistic.
Consequently, given all of these factors, it matters not whether you like, as a player, this or that review, this or that quote from a reviewer. As long as there is a clear financial incentive behind the review, it simply cannot be honest and reliable. You can watch or read the review for your own enjoyment if you want, that’s on you. But if that’s what defines what you will and will not play… you might find yourself with a pretty dull and strictly conventional videogame experience.