From Gaming Age :

""I was hooked from the first time I saw the title screen until the credits rolled 72 hours later. Death Stranding is immensely satisfying, and everything I could have hoped for and more from Kojima Productions. In a year that brought us a new From Software title (Sekiro), a new Obsidian RPG (Outer Worlds), a new Borderlands and a new Kingdom Hearts game, the Game of the Year competition was already a bit crowded. Death Stranding definitively plants itself at the forefront of modern gaming and is a true contender for Game of the Year. One minute you can be in the middle of delivering a pizza to a doomsday prepper in his shelter, the next minute you can find yourself fighting a giant biomechanical sludge lion, hitting him with grenades full of your own blood, all while the fetus in the pod on your chest uses a form of echolocation to help keep tabs on it. All of this while the entire world melts around you into a sludgy mess. Death Stranding is the definitive Hideo Kojima experience, and a genuine, one of a kind gaming experience.""

10/10

I have watched the final veredict by Digital Foundry and yes, everything is great with only the gameplay itself being something you may or may not like. So since that is a single element of a very complex product it can't by itself give or remove 70% of the total score possible.

Poor gameplay and a bad narrative can easily give you a 3 or 4 out of 10 especially if narrative is all the game has going for it. Even some of the 7’s mention really bad gameplay. 

it’s all subjective. To me, giving a game a 7 when you say the gameplay sucks is something I’ll never understand.

Maybe they shouldn't play it then?

When i know i will dislike the core gameplay and mechanics i will not procede to play the game, not to mention do a review. If i had to review a sportsgame i'd try to be objective, but in the end i will give it a subjective score, because i don't have the experience with the sort of games, no tengible reference. So what other choice do i have but to give the score i see fitting. A rating way below average, because i dislike sportsgames.

But i must say, i don't mind the controversy. It creates the drama, keeps the buzz up. Console business how it's done. To make the games really matter.

Exactly what I think.

@DonFerrari, @Nate4Drake

Bad gameplay can certainly ruin a game's score, and as seen by these reviews, it has in many cases. If the game is boring and not worth your time, it should get a bad score. Usually reviewing a game is to help consumers decide if it's worth buying.

If I buy a game and am not happy with my purchase, it wouldn't matter how good certain parts of the game were; in most cases, the overall score is not an aggregate of it's "sub-scores" for things like sound design, graphics, difficulty, and gameplay.

But ultimately, each publication makes its own decisions on how to review games, and the good ones are more credible among consumers.

On a side note, notice how I say things like "usually", "in many cases", "in most cases", and "should". Its because there is no master template for reviewing a game, and there's a multitude of criterion that can influence the score of a game.

It's the same with movies, too. I'm not big on movies myself, but a movie isn't guaranteed a certain score just because it's CG effects go beyond anything before it, or for great acting.

Also, when did it drop to an 83? Still a good score... Hopefully I'll fall into the camp that thinks it's better than it performed by reviewers. I just hope that the 83 isn't a buffed score based on it being a Kojima game. It's possible that many reviewers went easy on this one.

This is where we are never going to agree. A game even though it is to help consumers decide isn't based mostly on how fun you though it was or if you like or not the gameplay (while sure you should describe what it consists of). I won't go in lenghts to say that the so much glory given to some games considered great gameplay is basically run and jump, or run cover and shot.

It doesn't matter that you as a customer don't like the gameplay or even the game, as no game is for everyone, but a reviewer is a professional and should do his job objectively.

Seems like it dropped on the 4 gave by giant bomb.

And sure it is fine to remove some points if you evaluated the game as having bad gameplay or not liking it. But a game that would be otherwise 10 and you didn't like the gameplay it becomes a 3.5 is totally moronic, sorry if you fill it is justified score.

Could 83 be buffed? Perhaps, we will only know for sure when playing it. Still all I have seem on the video reviews and even the written reviews (even the ones saying they were bored or is a walk simulator) would sustain over 85% meta. I do expect when I play I can say it is 90-92 in my opinion.

After seeing all of these mixed reviews, I feel that my mind is seeing it as a worse game than an 83 generally is. In other words, it's setting the expectation rather low, and this means that when we do get to play the game, we'll likely have a great time with it (as 83 is still good), and may see the game as better than we would have going in with higher expectations.

There will probably be some haters on here, but I expect some people will be claiming this as their GotY due to how much better it was than they expected.

Honest to god, while writing this post the realization hit me that the game is coming out in like 14 hours, and I could perchance be playing this game before the next time I sleep. With this epiphone, I impulsively just took the day off work tomorrow and am now extremely hyped. I've said this before, but I'm an impatient person and a videogame that is months or even weeks away from release is hard to get hyped about, as it's so far off it's not even on my radar. With less than a day before release, Death Stranding just officially hit hype mode for me.

Lower expectations and even waiting a little more to see users comments is a good way to avoid being burnt.

Nobody really knew what the core gameplay would be in the end...