Do you read scores or do you read reviews?
This is something I've seen happening more and more in general. People discuss review scores instead of the actual reviews, because they don't seem to understand the point of a review score. I just noticed the following comment on a MyGaming article (author name withheld);
And sadly, that's missing the point of review scores. One game that scores 80% is not necessarily better or more fun than another game that scores 70%. That's not the point of a score. A score is an indication of how well an individual game accomplishes what it set out to accomplish, not how well it compares to other games. People seem to have a very big misconception of review scores are supposed to represent and this is made worse by sites such as Metacritic, which bastardizes the concept entirely.80% is my meta-critic rating I use for deciding when something if worth full price. This is not. Will wait for a sale at some point.
Without reading the contents of a review, a score is really worthless because you have no idea what thought processes led the reviewer to give the game that score. A score on its own is actually the most useless part of a review and should not be used as a baseline for anything, least of all a decision to buy a game or not (although extremely low scores might be an exception to the rule here).
Compare it to a school essay. Someone who wrote a brilliant essay, but with glaring grammatical errors might only receive 70% for it. Someone else with a lacklustre essay, but exceptionally good grammar might receive 90% for it. Without knowing the contents of either essay, would it be fair to just read the marks and assume the one is better than the other? You would have to understand why they received those marks before you can say one is better than the other. Similarly, with reviews if you don't read the review attached to the score, the score is not an accurate indication of whether a game is better than another or not.
