Critic reviews are meaningless. There’s always some objective checklist mandated by the editorial/management as guidelines for review scores.

But it’s 2021, and pretty much every game is of relatively high technical quality these days. “Is it fun to play” seems to have absolutely no bearing on critic reviews until the 8/10 threshold. A terrible, awfully designed, boring game is an 8/10 so long as it’s techically proficient.

User scores are even more meaningless. It’s 0/10 or 10/10. Not just video games, it’s like this everywhere for everything. I rated a restaurant 4/5 stars on uber eats. Thought it was a good score. The restaurant responded with “we will try real hard to get that score up to 5!” Ya know, a passive aggressive way of saying “don’t give us bullshit 4 star ratings”.

4 stars is good! They are not a 5 star restaurant. But that’s just what people do. It’s 0 or 10 with no middle ground.

Reviews are meaningless.