The heck is Castlevania Dracula X Chronicles? xD
Let me see... I think this is kinda a mixed bag. Mind you, there's gaming "journalists" and then there's gaming journalists, just as it happens with Journalism altogether in real life. So, you have those who can actually review things out of expectation, in order to please readers (or just pull a Polygon and just lower the score for the sake of clicks), and then there's some journalist who geniunely review a game. A review of a game is nothing more than the journalist experience through it at the end of the day, so there's subjectiveness all over the place. Then there's the technical aspects, on which everyone can be objective. There's the comparisons within other games of the saga, or completely different games that resemble (or borrow) the same core gameplay mechanic, and its execution.
The thing is, it is hard to discern which one is telling the truth and which one is bullshitting. It is especially worse when a journalist gives its genuine piece of work and people bash him because it doesn't met consumer expectation: it alienates the journalist and, in most cases, doesn't end well.
Look at the guy from Giantbomb who used to work at Gamespot. The guy wrote a great piece of review with Kane & Lynch, and gave it a score of 6. Fair. A game that you can enjoy. Nothing special, but there's fun to be had. Did it met what Gamespot and consumers were expecting? Nope. Well, bad luck, guy gets fired.
Most journalist wouldn't risk their career just for the sake of one game. It needs a 9? It can be done. Just tweak some things here and there and voilá! Game is a masterpiece. You could argue that liking a game is purely a subjective matter of point, but there's things to be reviewed that can be covered with a mantle; and it doesn't have to do with reviewing out of consumer expectation. That being said, nobody cares about AA or indie games from unknown companies, so those games tend to get reviewed fairly.
The thing is, where do you set the line? Once four or five reviews are out and the meta is established, it is hard to change the overall score. Look at The Last of Us. Game gets glorified with 9's and 10's, and Tom McShea gave it an 8. Was the review genuine? We never know, but the guy even got death threats. Bu the time the DLC releases, he gives it a 9. It doesn't feel genuine anymore. Whether Tom gave TLoU an 8 because he felt it like that or not, we may never know anymore.
The thing is, difficult doesn't always lower the score. Or make it go higher. Its just if the game resonates within the reviewer. Demon's Souls, for example, came out of nowhere. But people liked it. You can say reviewers genuinely enjoyed their time on Demon's universe. I am genuinely enjoying my time with Super Meat Boy; does that mean everyone is going to enjoy it? Maybe not. But it seems reviewer did like it. Back then, indies weren't still a big thing, except for the cult hit Braid (And again, this game had no consumer expectation whatsoever, so reviewers geniunely felt like loving Braid), so SMB did resonate on reviewer's heads.
Maybe I'm going in circles here, so I'll just said that your words may contain some degree of truth. But it's just not "pleasing the consumer" the only reason a reviewer could inflate/lower the socre, or even resort to a total subjective review in order to guarantee the score he's aiming for. Scores are the worst thing that could happen in a review, and hence the incredible amount of attention they get instead of people reading through the review is what lead some of these cases. Fear, objectiveness, technical aspects, amount of money paid and journalist's gaming skills, they all get to factor in the final score, whether the review does seem to fit with it or not.
So I'll just conclude by saying that metacritic is one of the worst things that could happend to gaming journalism. That, and scores. Nothing pisses me off more than watching on the cover of a game "9/10 from Destructoid!" or things like that to appeal more to the average non-gamer consumer. Batman's Arkham City is probably the worst offender here:
