Imagine someone flicked a bogey at the Mona Lisa. It stuck. Its there. You can see it.

Now, imagine Polygon's 7.5 as the bogey.

Because if the 30+ reviewers who gave it a perfect score are right, then polygon just made it very difficult for the game to get the score it deserves. Think about all those arguments that start with ocarina being the best rated game of all time... lots of games deserve great accolades, but the perceived sloppiness of todays journalism prevents anything ever competing on that level. Granted though, its meta is still very very respectable.

This is what is so frustrating about Polygon reviews. The reviews are mostly well written, but the score seemingly has nothing to do with the content, the same is true for the gamespot reivews (certainly by going by the good and bad parts)

The review praises so many things, but says the second half gets a little action heavy (and thus makes Joel seem like not a very nice person) and there are occasional AI glitches. That is it, this cost it 2.5.... It just doesn't make any sense

The other thing that they do is ignore great things about the game that are too obvious. They make basically no mention of the absurdly good graphics because that is kind of expected? Or something. They have done the same in the past with AC Liberation where they didn't seem to give it any credit at all for providing such a detailed city on a portable platform, which has not been done before.

I wouldn't say that they do it for hits, because these their reviews just seem to random and inconsistent. Remember Me got an 8 and this got a 7.5, it just doesn't make sense. It does not correspond with any other website, it is just really confusing

Gamespot Skyward Sword 7.5 reminds me of that.

What people?

Because it's obviously a bias, low-browed review seeking hits.

This. People talk about how useless and stupid Metacritic is, but then they cry and complain when their favorite game doesn't achieve the highest score possible because some reviewers didn't like it.

It's an ego boost to see the game you like rated high on metacritic. 

Because they gave Remember Me an 8 LOL, now that my firend is BS! 

Because the review had some BS "bad points" in it... He said stuff like its too gory? there was something else along those lines that should not have any effect on the review... that's what the game is meant to be and that should not bring down the score... Its an outlier review that's clearly way too nitpicky

I'd rather read the 7.5 review than one of the many 10's.
I'd like to say the system is broken (for years) but that would be strange because there is no system.
Somehow it seems to pay off to give away perfect scores and now everybody does it. Ridiculous!