Jim Sterling reviews Andromeda's Metacritic reviews - article

Metacritic  user reviews are very unreliable. It often becomes a cesspool depending on which game has the internet's ire.

Yea, its 0/10 "I hated it" or 10/10 "I love it!"

Metacritic is unreliable for another reason too.
Anything a critic ever says is biased -either because they believe it or are being paid to say such.
Never do they give the positives and negatives in equal measure -it is always one-sided... one way or another.
I don't believe anything critics say video game, music, TV or movie wise.

Perfect example:
Look at critic reviews for the games of Project Nomads and Grom.
Yep.
You won't find any.
All the more reason I like them.

This meta critic review stuff:
i.imgur.com/YPYLr9G.gif

It's fashionable to beat up Andromeda. Next year's fashionable target: Anthem. Speculating is my skill!

All reviews are unreliable. At best you can conclude if what bothered the particular user would have bothered you too. It's about tastes and sometimes not even that. If a review starts with an uunchained SJW rant, you can already say it's not worth your time. If they go into detail, such as pointing out certain narrative or technical flaws, it may be worth listening.

damn straight. 

It's hard to explain concepts that only developers understand. I'm not formally trained as a developer and I just know enough to be "dangerous" as a PC user. I wish there was an online guide or something to explain certain concepts or core terms that would help bridge that gap between hyperbole and actual critical information.

All reviews are subjective.  But at least critics are trying to give a fair score. Over time, you learn which ones match your own preferences. Yes, there are bad actors (I'm as familiar with the GameSpot Kane & Lynch fiasco as anyone), but looking at the critic reviews for MEA, there's the expected spread of reviews. One great review, a whole bunch of, "Well, it's decent, but...", and another bunch of, "Well, that didn't work".

Now, look at the user reviews.  Hundreds of 0's and 1's.  Really?  The worst game of all time?  Worse than ET: The Extra Terrestrial?  Worse than Big Rigs?  Worse than Kabuki Warriors? They're not even trying to be fair or objective. If I took an exam where the answers clearly indicate that I have a decent but mostly superficial grasp of the material (more memorization than understanding), I'll be graded fairly. The professor doesn't mark it "0/100! SJW propaganda! LOLOLOL!!!11!".   IMHO, you could shut down the entire user review section of Metacritic and not a single thing of value would be lost.  The signal to noise ratio there is just too lopsided to be worth looking at.

I wish there was a way for Metacritic to link to gaming accounts so that you had to have actually played the game to give a review for it. That, with a "Time Played" indicator, would help weed out the reviews from people who never played, or only played a few minutes/hours of the game.

"Lack of Garrus is repulsive. 4/10"

What a moronic "review". That has nothing to do with this game. It also doesn't have Link, or Solid Snake in it either. Technically, ME1 can have a lack of Garrus if you don't recruit him.

When I perused the reviews soon after launch, there were so many "0/10" scores that were basically "I swore I'd never buy another Mass Effect game after ME3's ending. Still is crap ending. 0/10."
Then there were those that complained about "Bioware SJW's adding all the gays" to the game. 0/10.
"No Shepard?? Is this Mass Effect? 0/10"

Sure there are some actual reviews of the game, but even if you really disliked the game, I don't see how anyone could give it less than a 4/10. Combat is very functional and great. Some glitches, but that's true of every AAA title. The only way you can give a game a 0/10 is if it refuses to launch on your console/PC or is literally unplayable. If the game loads and it functions as intended, 0/10 is not a realistic score. 10/10 is not really realistic for MEA either. But the number of reviews from people who never played it, were just butthurt over ME3's endings, or were butthurt that this game didn't have Shepard, unfairly skewed the results downward.

There needs to be some kind of verification of playing the game on these reviews.

100% agree on that, Especially by these kind of guys who only puts 0 and 10 in their reviews : www.metacritic.com/user/kotaryu



www.metacritic.com/user/Nareke

For them a game is either perfect or absolute shit,. Oh and of course they reviewed more than one version the same day the MEA was released, so if their rating is true, they bought TWO and even THREE version of the game and had the time to review all of them and puts 0 to all of them, less than 24 hours after the release which is of course totally enough to review a game and the multiple versions of it...

What's funny is how many of these "reviews" started popping up when the game barely came out and people were reviewing a 100 hour game less than 20 hours after it came out and on multiple platforms no less. And of course the reviews themselves were so informative "hurr dur hurr dur sjw", "hurr dur Mass Effect 3 endings", "hurr dur Sara is not hot", "hurr dur it is not witcher", and "hurr dur dem aliens is forced diversity".

Yeah, I'm saying it would be good if it FORCED verification if you are going to drop a review.

True, but Jim Sterling is pretty harsh to the reviewers themselves, particularly to those on MetaCritic.