I care a lot more about the scores than I do the personal reviews, as I'm not interested in other people's subjective experiences or opinions. That's why I prefer when reviewers at least try to adhere to some universal system of grading. I only want to know if the game is worth playing and how badly should I want to play it. Anything else I can judge for myself.

If I ever want more info I can just watch ACG's video reviews, as he has a very good formula for breaking down games and only giving the relevant details. But I barely ever read or watch game reviews now, not counting Digital Foundary.

That's my thoughts on reviews. When it comes to actually choosing the games I play, I trust word-of-mouth and my own interests more.

Same. I've enjoyed a lot of supposedly middling games (from critics) and not rated some highly praised ones. Review scores are always subjective to ones opinions at the end of the day. While reviews are some ways an indication of games quality; some games for example like GTA Remaster/Cyberpunk on consoles get down-scored for horrible bugs and performance - and rightfully so.

As for fans of said companies who crutch onto scores from their favourite multi billion dollar corporations. I don't see much harm in them. Let them be. While I largely don't agree when certain fangroups who push the narrative that scores = better games/system nor do I care what scores what vs another in pointless debates over system wars. They can be make for interesting if not entertaining reads.

Personally I generally just look at publishers/devs previous games before making my purchasing decisions.

The vast majority of my favorites are 80s-tier games according to Metacritic. A lot of the 90s-tier stuff bores me. A lot of games I like are 70s, even a couple of 60s. I honestly stopped caring much about Metacritic after what happened to Obsidian with Fallout: New Vegas, which I absolutely loved. Most people would probably say my tastes in games suck. Oh, well.

I think part of the problem with aggregate scores is that we've been conditioned from our years in school. 70 is supposed to be a C (75 in some scales), which is "average". In reality, my mother would start chewing me out and restricting my gaming privileges if my grades dropped below a B. When I was in nursing school, you had to have a minimum 72 (C-) to pass. There was no "D." If you made a 71, you failed.  So we're conditioned to see 70s as borderline failing grades. And when letter scores are involved, Metacritic tends to weigh a B as 75, a C as 50, a D as 25, and F as zero. At least they did the last time I saw one of those. And one less than stellar grade from some hole-in-the-wall site that barely has enough recognition to be captured by MC can sink a game's aggregate. 

7.8 out of 10, too much water.

When I was young/er. My schools actually didn't have pass or fail grades.
Ended up leaving school after I finished year 9 anyway and went straight into college level education... High School wasn't for me.

But you are right, it seems around the 70's mark is seen as a bombed game... Yet something like Vietcong in the early 2000's scored in the low 70s and I had an absolute blast with it.

Reviews should just ditch scores and use a verdict system consisting of Bad/Average/Good, this would also put more focus on the review content and make clickbait harder.

See, that's great and dandy for some, but others, like myself, want the opposite. Written reviews take all the surprise out of the game for me. Just give me a score and nothing else, then aggregate the scores. Anything 70+ meta or open is worth a shot to me if it looks intriguing, anything below is most likely a pass unless it really captivates me by a trailer or marketing. Simple, easy, and is spoiler free.

I don't mind written reviews existing, but they need to have a score, out of a 100, to matter to me. None of this /5 or /10 nonsense either. An 81 is a massive difference from an 89. An 84 is a noticable difference from an 87. Websites need to stop being lazy and do all reviews out of 100 if they want to matter to a gamer like me.

Scores on reviews are an outdated metric especially as the scale is inconsistent for example in Edge 5/10 is average but for most reviews anything below 7 is bad as 7 tends to be average which is stupid because you have 3 numbers for how good something is and 6 for how bad something is when all we need to know is whether a game is just bad, average or good, a verdict system not only does this but can have a pros and cons section with the verdict which would have a small summary with it anyway if you don't want to go through the written review.

It makes the clickbait culture harder as it becomes eyebrow raising if a game is being seen as universally good in verdicts and someone randomly marks it as average as they'll need to reflect it in their review content, verdict system is just all round better and healthier in marking games.

I don't really pay too much attention to reviews, I'll check out the meta score of a game and that's probably about it. The majority of the games I buy, I buy based on recommendations from YouTubers or places like Reddit, also I'd say a significant number of my all-time favorite games are games that have scored in the 70s and 80s on Metacritic.

On a side note, many games that score 90 or higher I have found to be average games for the most part but you know, "that's just my opinion"

How do you decide, which reviews are worth your time when you want some new games?

Or do you read reviews of every of the thousands of games released each year? Or do you just ignore most of the games due to lack of time to read their reviews?

Why is simple classification which allows only three outcomes (good, average, bad) better for a preselection than a finer classification where you can see, which games barely made it into the "good" category and which ones are much better?

And it is a lot more informative, when you have 3 numbers (out of 10) for how good something is (or 30 numbers out of 100) than when you have just 1 number for how good something is.

Because the reviewer will have to present in their review how they came to that verdict, you can get away with given HZD2 a 7/10 and say it's not a bad game with out actually calling it average as the scaling is subjective but have a trickier time straight up calling it average as when people investigate the review it'll not only expose the outlet but in the long run it'll hurt the outlets future traffic.

You should already have an idea of which outlets have views or tastes that line up with your own, tell me what exactly does this finer classification really add other than a load of cluttered numbers many of which aren't even used and a scale that is subjective to the reviewer it's not more informative in fact it's a mess look at GTA4 for example it's rated as one of the best games in history alongside games like OOT under the scoring system but many people argue it's the worst of the 3D GTA games. Three outcomes tells you what you need to know about the game with out any fussing about pointless numbers and the review's content will tell you if it's the type of game you'd be into this in the long run means anyone who wants to do reviews will have to be competent in presenting their view in why the game falls into the verdict they've given.

You're arguing how will you know well it's easy you do the same thing you do now only instead of a number the will be a straight to the point verdict with pros and cons and and small summary along the verdict.