I've found that customer reviews of a product are invaluable,while "official" reviews are totally worthless and not really different from adverts.This goes across the board, not just computer games.

"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"

And don't forget the PC Gamer fiasco where a bad review of Elemental was sensationalized by quoting Brad out of context.

Could it just be that for the types of games we are interested in it is the strategic depth and replayablity that we value highest, which is the exact thing that it is difficult to determine after testing the game for however long they are given.  That can only be found out after a few hundred hours of play time.

  That is also probably why everything is 3d and super graphics as that is easy to see and review rather than concentrating on the gameplay.

customer reviews are worthless because randoms are morons and usually incapable of stringing coherent sentences together. i try and read all reviews that are released for a title im interested in, and im yet to experience this fictitious bribery of professionals. taken as a whole, they are more or less on the money with their praise or criticisim when i finally get to play the title myself.

On another note, some people worry far too much about the score and not the actual review.  As many have pointed out, there are a LOT of professional reviews that mostly trash the game but then give the game an 8/10 or something.  This to me is the writer desperately trying to tell the audience that they WANTED to give the game a 4 or 5 but company policy won't let them.  It happens with user reviews and fanboyism as well; reviews that admit there are far more cons than pros, yet because it's part of a beloved franchise it somehow gets a 7 or 8.  Huh?  8?  Didn't you just spend three paragraphs telling me how much it sucked?

In a way, I wish they'd remove score summaries entirely so people would actually have to read it.

Well, a lot of "final" point scores tend to be an average of scores for a few categories that a game is judged by. IGN and Gametrailers at least clearly let people see this. A reviewer might bash the "story" into the ground over 3 paragraphs because it's worth talking about, but if everything else about the game is great, he doesn't really have much to write about those things to fill 3 more paragraphs with how great they are. So even if it seems like a review is overly negative, in many cases it's just a detailed description of the one aspect that's not up to par, with no complaints about the others. So the average score might still come out high, even though a review sounds negative.

The games that are universally bad in every imaginable aspect usually reflect this in their scores.

I think a lot of it is sample size and self-selection. There aren't nearly as many reviewers as users, so the averages are statistically questionable. At the same time, users are more likely to review games that they enjoyed (or really hated, although my unresearched guess is that negative reviews are much less common than positive reviews), hence the ratings are higher.

Reviewers also have different ranges than users. Reviewers almost never give above a 9.5/10 and almost never give below a 6.5/10. Users have fewer qualms giving 10/10 or 0/10. 

Re "objectivity," reviews are all about finding someone with common subjective tastes to help you find stuff you like and avoid boring or annoying stuff. The only role "objectivity" might play is in hard-numbers stuff like speaker wattage or video card minimums, and that is always secondary to an interest in something like home sound systems or graphics-heavy software.

Re bashing Elemental because Brad's a 'right-winger,' that's just silly. Stardock has more than a few longtime games forum posters who are various sorts of non-mainstream/right-winger. We might get little or no affection from Draginol or Frogboy, but some of us have various forms of 'stature' in 'the community.' More importantly, I'm close to certain that Brad actually respects the idea of a loyal opposition, unlike too many folks currently claiming to be 'true patriots' or whatever. And I'm not just sweet-talking because I want the Elemental (and hopefully GC3) code to demote currency to a secondary resource in the basic game mechanics.

@OP

As much as people like to claim their view is the majority, there is no way to find out what the player consensus is. So you can't really compare the two.

But if im being less pedantic about the question id say a reviewer opinion is one from someone that wont play the game outside of their job. (If they do play the game outside of their job then technically their opinion is a player opinion.) and thats why there is a difference.

It will be interesting when the big *cough* professional reviewers check out Elemental's expansion (the sold separately one) because by that time the game will be so changed they won't know most of it was patched in over time.  Who knows?  Maybe we'll see an expansion of the year award like GC2 TotA.

From one quick look at f.e. GameSpots reviews and its users, I cannot trust the users as their "reviews" are 5 sentences long.

A review must mention pros'n'cons and tell you what works and what doesn't.

About professional reviews....I'm looking for a gamereviewersite to become my "home" for gamereviews but it's hard to decide. PCGamer is out of the question because of their "75% from us means 50% from other magazines" <--- Yes they've said that!   They're inflating scores and affecting metacritic!

Another thing which I believe is that reviewers MUST mention what types of games they like and what they don't like. In SuperPlay many years ago the reviewers were listed with their preferred gametypes and what they didn't like.

In one number, they reviewed DOOM for Playstation (this was back in 1995.) One of the reviewers, a guy called Martin-san (san is a honorary title used in ancient Japan. He loves JRPGs like Final Fantasy and such) reviewed it and part of the review went like this: "Zzzzzz.....shoot monsters, get blue skullkey, enter blue door, fight more monsters, collect weapons and ammo, get in trap and fight Barons of Hell and Cacodemons very close to you. Die 3 times until you survive. I really hate games like DOOM."

He gave it 42%(!)

The other guy who reviewed DOOM likes shooters and gave it a high score. Don't recall the score but it was what a FPS fan at the time would have given DOOM. Like atleast 85%.

I wished there were more reviews like that since it shows a a review from two different perspectives. One that loves the genre and another guy who dislikes it.

Kinda like if I had to review Baldurs Gate or IceWind Dale. Without help I wouldn't have gotten anywhere and would probably give it like 50% or something.

^^ eh? PC Gamer are hands down the best PC reviewing magazine.

Q:Why does blockbuster titles get high ratings?
A: As long as there's a single rating that has to cover gameplay, graphics, interface, sound, then a game with good graphics and sound, and at least passable design and gameplay otherwise - which the big titles nearly invariably has - is going to have a high score.

Q: Why does reviewer and user scores differ?
A1: Many users will pad stats if they like/dislike a game or something about it, often for irrelevant reasons. (All 0 and many 10 scores.).
A2: Personal preference. Not everyone likes the same game. Some reviewers try to have objective scores to rate a game by to minimize this, but that can often lead to ratings that does not reflect the game. Some reviewers are up front about their likes and dislikes; liking a genre is as dangerous to a score (Especially if it fails to live up to its hype but is still a good game) as disliking it.
A3: Longevity, updates, patches are seldom reflected in reviews, but very often so in user scores.

As some others here I've become less concerned with the actual score and more with the 'meat' of the matter... but it is still important, because if a game has a low score I might not look at it in the first place.

I've come to like GameTrailers' reviews, because they give a decent summary of the strong and weak points of the game, including game footage. Not all reviews are good, but there's been some good ones. (The review of Alpha Protocol, for instance, slammed its combat system but also made it clear WHY - and that reason was one I do not care about, so I knew I could ignore that part of the score.).  

Khardis does indirectly raise the good point that one big reason why user review scores will always be lower is because of the 0s. A reviewer who hates a game won't give it a 0. He will give it a 50 or maybe even a 30 if he thinks it's truly awful. But they will almost always give it some points. A user on the other hand will happily give it a 0 if they think it's a bad game, or sometimes just because they hate one feature. This will cause user scores to be significantly lower on average.

Now it's also true that users are more likely to give a 10 then a reviewer. But it's not as big a deal if a user gives a 10 when a reviewer gives a 92, as it is if a user gives a 0 and a reviewer gives a 50.

I don't know why all these 0's or 1 stars are such a big deal. You have a polar group doing the opposite thing at the same time, spamming perfect scores wherever they go because they like a game, love a company, or just love the idea and think that one day, some time in the horizon a poor game will become good so they give it 10s now.