Well, they got Far Cry 3 right.

The reality is that while this reviewer may be unprofessional. There are a number of other unprofessional reviewers who routinely soft score games. For the exact same reasons. They too are trolling for hits by overstating the quality of a game so the brands fans, or fans of the series will come to their site. It works both ways a reviewer can get hits with vinegar and with honey.

Like it or not this reviewer is probably effectively balancing the books. I think you need to take a good hard look at yourself, because this guy isn't really the problem. Most nobody will take them seriously with scores like this. The problem is actually you, or more specifically people who share your mindset. You so want high review scores. That it doesn't occur to you that a lot of reviewers are obliging your whim. By giving a lot of games higher scores then they actually merit.

This reviewer isn't even half the problem that people like you are. Who choose to reward reviewers for over stating the case for certain games, because they are hyped by the fans, major platform exclusives, or just to make people feel better about the platform they are playing on. Meta review sites aren't about winning some meta game. The average score isn't so much as important as having a one stop shop to compare opinions.

If all you are is fixated on the average. Then you have missed the point entirely. Anyone who uses the service as intended wants those outliers, because they offer up the dissenting, or unpopular points of view. Which isn't necessarily wrong. You pick the high review, you pick the low review, and you pick one in the middle. In doing that you get a far better feel for any game.

I got news for you of the games mentioned I can tell you that Halo 4 isn't a ninety plus game. There is a reason that the game isn't seeing the same amount of play that its predecessors have seen. Believe it or not there were probably a lot of reviewers who had serious reservations about the title, but rated it very highly anyway, because they were cowed by the venom that fans of the series could bring to bare on them.

I'd like to punch this guy in the face irl.
Guy's a fucking tool, he doesn't even deserve to review video games if he blabbers about random nonsense and completely misses the point of the game.
I don't even care if someone doesn't like Journey, how can you not praise it's beauty? That just shows you have little respect for art that other people have created. But wait, how can you not like Journey? How much more of a boring human being can this guy be?

I could care less if these reviews are included on metacritic. The truth is, if you wanted to start removing the overtly negative reviews, you would also need to remove the overtly positive review, which ironically are much more prevalent, and in my opinion, detrimental to the consumer.

Most reviewers don't have a clue anyway.

Some rate to low and some to high.
If you really want an impression of a game watch it on twitch.tv in a livestream for a few minutes.
Usually you know if you want that game pretty fast.

What would be interesting to know is if those companies could sue the guy for giving for example Halo such a low score cause even if it isn't that great it surely isn't a 20.
Could hurt the reputation and stuff

Who???

I was going to make a thread about gaming reviews, but then I got lazy. And drunk.

Hopefully, I'll have time on Sunday.

I don't even know what to say to this. Are you saying reviewers are playing games they don't like and giving them high scores because everybody else is going to give it a high score?

A review is an opinion, there is no way to be objective.

Agreed. Having a different opinion is one thing, but giving universally praised games 2 or 4 is just inprofessional. Them along with bigpond game arena should be blacklisted from the site. 

What I meant was that there had to be parameters that decided the score, things like: Presentation, gameplay, graphics, soundtrack etc. The way I see it a game as polished as Halo 4 shouldn't get anything below 50 for all the things that it did right, things that I don't see anyone arguing that were done right. It's just like giving a car review for example, you can't simply give a car a 2/10 because you don't like it. You need to look at things like: Safety, reliability, handling, space, interior and exterior design and so on and then score it accordingly. At least that's how I believe a professional review should be.

Whilst a review is a qualitative analysis it's a reviewers job to be as unbias as possible. Even if reviewers find an aspect of a game poor, they need to play through a game and objectively analyse that in relation to what other games in the genre have done in that respect, plus whether the game is acheiving its goal in the implementation of said aspect.

They can't simply rely on their own opinion of something but have to justify the stances they take when analysing a game. When a review is only filled with opinions (be they positive or negative), it's failing to inform the reader enough on whether to make a purchasing decision or not. The games industry really does have too many opinionated reviewers that are incapable of writing a truly analytical piece.