Game reviewing is much like other media. They crave access. They crave dev interviews before release. They crave priority notice on what's going on. They crave early preview builds, exclusive interviews, and all that stuff.

Sure, they can just report what is out there....but that's not what media perceives as a competitive edge.

At best, gaming media tones down the criticism where a fan would call it like they see it. (And probably exaggerate a great deal.)

At worst, gaming media speaks highly of average quality and treats serious short comings as minor failures.

Fans have the luxury of being as negative, judgmental, honest, ect.... as they want. People in the business world, be they developers or gaming journalists, have to deal with reality as much as they would like to otherwise.

So I generally use gaming reviews as news announcements, because someone gets paid to spend all their time on the internet seeing what's out there, that I don't necessarily have the time or desire to spend doing. In that sense, they're helpful. They're also more condensed than player reviews by far, and are generally in the ball park of what fans are thinking about a product.

So that's what I use them for; to gauge whether or not I should even get interested. Then I go to player reviews to decide if I want to buy.

It's hard to take the 'professional' reviewers seriously these days when the average score of games seems to be an 8.  It's very rare to see anything score lower than a 6.5 or so.  It's gone on for so long like this that most people just mentally subtract 2 or 3 points from any professional review score to get the real rating.  They're obviously not allowed to rate games any lower for fear of the publisher pulling advertising in retaliation.  I generally wait a week or two on any game these days and look at the Gamefaqs user reviews to get a better idea of how good the game actually is.  As others have mentioned in the thread, user reviews are generally written by people who really wanted to play the game and will not hesitate to trash a game if it was really disappointing.  Official forums for a particular game are a good way to evaluate games as well.  If there are huge threads complaining about serious issues, it might be a good idea to wait a few months for a patch before you spend any money on it.  I was saved from buying Master of Orion 3 by doing this.

The exception here is Metacritic user reviews, which has become little more than a popularity poll due to lack of quality control.  It's to the point where anyone citing Metacritic user reviews as a valid game measurement should be shot.

What do you mean, "wouldn't be surprised?"  It's been flat out proven that these 'professional' review sites will bend over if the publisher leans on them.  Gamespot fired a reviewer after he gave a game that had been heavily advertised on the site (Kane and Lynch) a bad review.  While they claimed it was due to other reasons, they accidentally admitted the publisher had 'called them' immediately after the review went live.  It's really no secret what the conversation was about.  Around the same time, Gamespy posted a review from a freelance writer for some 1st party Nintendo game that gave it a 1.5/5 or such.  Within a couple hours, the review had been pulled, rewritten, and reposted with a new score of 4/5.  It was so blatant Penny-Arcade did a comic mocking them.

I've pretty much stopped reading written reviews in favor of Gametrailers' video reviews. They tend to lean more towards console games, and they don't do as many reviews total because they're exclusively video, but they do get the "big name" PC games in there. Their scoring system ends up with the same kinds of quirks as most others', where they might sound like they're slamming the game but it ends up getting a fairly high overall score, but overall they aren't afraid to point out game faults and actually show them to you in the video. As Tridus pointed out, in the case of Civ5 nobody really got "great" at the game to start seeing scaling issues and AI flaws, but it wasn't a willful act of deception on the part of the reviewers, it's just how the system is set up.

The important thing for me is not the overall point score. I look at how much I like the genre and what it's supposed to be, and how well the game implements it. As an example, let's take Alpha Protocol. It was always supposed to be a stat-based shooter, like Deus Ex of Old. You can aim, but your accuracy is greatly determined by how many points you invest into that particular weapon skill. This was never a secret during the game's development, yet it got slammed for it in reviews because games aren't made like this anymore and everyone wants the ME2 treatment (not that there's anything wrong with how ME2 did it). That part of the reviews I basically ignored - I knew what I was getting into and I like that system, so it didn't bother me. In fact, I feel that Alpha Protocol captured the feel of the original Deus Ex quite well, but for a lot of people nostalgia is always deceptively more positive and even though lots of people loved Deus Ex, they hated Alphas Protocol using the same system.

Eh. In Elemental's case, the popular opinion preceded the reviewers opinion. And Elemental was one game I immediately sunk 8 hours into because of things like needing to see the tech and adventure trees maxed out to appreciate everything....So while I know this will be an unpopular opinion, the reviews on Elemental were (generally) on point...even if some reviews went a little farther than just reviewing in the course of being negative.

This is stupid. Assassin's Creed 2 is almost masterpiece in gaming's world. But these kids with unknown stupid principles rate this game very low. That's why I don't trust any reviews.

It's stupid to claim its just kids. Besides, after Spore, I support any reviewers who want to ding a game because of it's DRM so long as they are clear about it.

AC2 is a great game, almost a masterpiece. But the DRM Ubi foisted on legitimate users totally deserved to bring down the game's overall score. You can't separate the game from the DRM when the DRM prevents legitimate users from playing. Ubi earned every lost point AC2 suffered for that decision.

I've played ACII a lot and this DRM hasn't been preventing from playing the game. I've had more problems with SecuROM in GTA IV.

Eh, Elemental pretty much deserved to get slammed by early reviews.  Yes, the game will be patched into shape one day.  But the fact remains that anyone who bought it day 1 got an early beta clearly rushed out in response to Civ5.  All they accomplished was making Civ5 look better while damaging Stardock's reputation.  There are many great games out there that started out rough, but why should they get a free pass if you're spending $60 to beta test?  Everything I've heard about FF14 screams 'PC gamers are paying to beta test for the PS3 release'.  This is wrong, and the more really bad reviews it gets hopefully the more people avoid the game like the plague.

As for DRM and user reviews I agree giving the game a 0/10 or something is childish.  However dinging the review a point or two because of terrible DRM (which as Nenjin said is part of game package, like it or not) is completely within reason.  Half-Life 2 may have been considered one of, if not THE best, FPS' of all time but I will never forgive the outrageous hoops you had to jump through just to install and play the game.  A friend of mine with dial-up at the time took 4 hours to install it!  4!  Hours!  Valve lost a customer for life because of that, and reviews should be allowed to reflect this regardless of how good the actual gameplay is.

I think it only makes sense for DRM to influence a game's point value if it affects the actual playing of said game. For example, Ubi's always-on connection requirement for Assassin's Creed 2, where if you lose connection you get dropped from the game and have to resume from a previous checkpoint is obviously an issue where I can see the game's score being dinged because the DRM is integrated into the actual gameplay and can easily affect enjoyment/progress.

On the other hand, your example with Steam and HL2 sucks, but ultimately it doesn't impact playing the actual game (once you go through the hoops once on install, you're good to go). In this case I can't see how dinging the game points is really justified, especially for largely temporary issues like the auth servers being slow on Day-1.

I would certainly like for reviewers to mention a game's protection scheme and if they experienced any issues in getting the game installed and running, but I do believe the game review should actually be about the game, not its protection scheme. If the scheme interfered with gameplay (again, as in Assassin's Creed 2 example), then it's fair game to ding points. Otherwise, any initial installation issues should be mentioned, but not impact the ultimate review point score.

Were you there for release? People were locked out of AC2 for several hours at a time because of release and server wonkiness, and some can still be for one reason or another. Ironically, as I was typing my previous post, MY INTERNET cut out. It likes to do that about, oh, once a day. DRM schemes that require an active connection are a real annoyance for me.

It's a bizarre world we live in now, as gamers, where we have to accept the same kind of a release day insanity for a popular SP game as we do a MP game. I'm not even talking the slowdown of digital installs. Just the damn networking that now is a mandatory part of ANY game in the AAA market.

So yeah. I feel people have every right to factor the mandatory BS we have no choice about into their opinion of a game. Particularly when it stops them from even playing, or screws up their play experience. If devs and publishers can lay off their teams, push stuff out faster and less polished and use the crappy economy to justify it, we should be able to use the same rational on our side, who have to shell out $50-$60. It's the only legitimate response gamers have, unless they want to start pirating, which most don't. Ironically though, pirated versions gracefully do what most legitimate gamers want; simply remove all the BS annoyances.

Like I said, it's a bizarre world we live in.

EDIT:  After reading the original question again, I realized my answer was commenting on the overall thread without answering the original question.

1. I think professional reviewers are affected by advertising and are also trying to make an educated guess as to how well a game will be received based on graphics, sound / voice-over quality, technical issues, and a set of criteria by which they compare games.  User reviews are based purely off of how "fun" the game is to the user and how well it meets their expectations of what the game "should be".

2.  Users play the games a lot more in depth and either find them to have a magical "fun factor" despite other flaws, or they find the games "just don't work" despite being very high in quality.  These factors make them shift their reviews higher or lower than what a professional reviewer might find who may not truly know the genre.

As far as professional reviews go, I only look at them because they often have a comprehensive breakdown of features and gameplay that a user review might not have.  They are good for a quick guideline.  I don't read as much into the actual review because the bigger a website / company gets, the more they are affected by advertising dollars, especially around the big name titles.

User reviews are usually a better indicator of game quality, but the caveat is you have to actually read through some of the reviews and make sure the people writing it have the same sensibilities as you.  There are so many different types of gamers, so while many may not like a particular strategy game, the only reviews that really matter to you are the ones who like the same kind of things as you.  Spore is a good example, the game was dumbed down to have broad appeal.  A lot of casual gamers really loved the game for what it was, and a lot of hard core strategy people hated it for what it could have been.

Perception and expectations are another factor.  Advertising dollars also play a lot into this....they can build excitement in a product that can translate into good satisfied reviews, or negatively with shattered expectations.  I think Civ 5 is getting some of the latter right now, though Firaxis will probably improve the product in an expansion to get it back up to the Civ 4 level of quality. 

As far as Elemental goes, I was really disappointed, but I have tremendous faith in Stardock to improve the game, not to mention the Stardock community to make some awesome mods for it eventually.

I don't pay much heed to reviews not in print.  I read the Game Informer magazine from GameStop and 360 magazine.  I only like a few genres anyway, RPG & TBS.  I don't buy something with a low score 6 or below. 

Now when it comes to reading reviews from users about say buying Electronics(sites like newegg and amazon).  I do take their advice.

Regarding user reviews objectivity, was reading one site recently and saw some 0/10 reviews for E:WoM based on accusations that Brad and his team have right wing political views. Now THATS a way to judge the game