@ Lord

 Since I wont play it till I buy it, I will rely on some reviews to give me a sense of how good/bad the game is.

The first game burned me so bad.........

Well just don't let them be the whole judgement. Waiting for word of mouth can also be good, which I find is usually more reliable.

Word of mouth is the exact same as critics reviews really.

And I think HVS's previous games should be enough to sit on the fence about the Conduit 2.

They are not. Chinatown Wars got tepid word of mouth compared to reviews, and load of "casual" games get better word of mouth compared to critical bashing.

Black Ops has pretty good word of mouth despite how critics insist it's a vastly inferior game to Modern Warfare 2, and I've seen Homefront getting better word of mouth compared to the reviews.

I said it before: if they fix the major online bugs that plagued the last one, i'll be pleased as punch. That was the only thing that hurt was getting online being such a crapshoot, then having to pull the plug on the Wii if it locked up at any point in the process

Well, now that the bar for FPS on the console is way higher than when the first game launched this game may not be bad and it can actually be better than the original, but when you compare it with the current games is not that great. For comparison sakes here are other scores for FPS on the magazine:

Red Steel: 8.0

Call of Duty: World at War: 8.0

The Conduit: 8.0

Call of Duty: Modern Warfare: 9.0

Red Steel 2: 8.0

Goldeney 007: 8.5

I think we can agree that Red Steel 2 is a much better game than the original Red Steel and it got just the same score, also for me Goldeneye is way better than Modern Warfare but it got a lower score, so a 7.5 is actually not bad, the game still has a chance of being better than the original and for me that's the only thing that I want.

People, people.

Games are mostly graded on hype then anything else.

You know this.

i've heard nothing but good things about chinatown wars -- that is to say nothing but good things until someone made a thread here about chinatown wars something something core games and nintnedo.  after that i hears lots of terrible things about the game but not before.

i've heard mostly positive things about black ops and MW2 but i've heard more noise concerning MW2.

personally, i've been burning from word-of-mouth just as often as being burning by reviews and I've got to agree with boutrous -- they're basically the same thing.

OT i could see this getting ugly, either people will bitch that HVS sucks or they'll get mad at reviewers who gave it too low or score of something. either way we might be in for a treat

If you mean word of mouth to you personally, that's not what I mean. I mean in general, not anecdotally.