Reviews are opinions from people no different from any of us. The only difference is they get to play the games before we do. They aren't somehow professionals who are more qualified than myself or anyone else here to judge a game's quality. Half the time you listen to these guys talk on a stream, and you end up concluding that you don't want to hear their opinions on much of anything, but I'm going to let what these same individuals write dictate to me the overall quality or merits of a game? Especially when half the time these guys are either barely average at, or have zero interest in, playing the games they're expected to review.
I played Knack at a friend's house and enjoyed it quite a bit more than reviews implied I should have. Even my friend liked it, and I would have bet 10 times out of 10 times that he wouldn't like that game, but he does. I pay attention to reviews simply out of curiosity, but I never expect them to tell me with any accuracy how good or bad a game truly is, because there's just way too many important variables involved with that, and not everybody has the same taste. I play a game and beat it, or either play as much as I can stand to play, and then I draw an opinion. If the game is important enough in my eyes, I then read reviews about that game afterwards to see which agrees with me the most, whether my opinion be negative or positive. That's how I treat reviews. If I used reviews to dictate to me which games were worth my time, from which ones weren't, I would have probably quite gaming a long time ago solely on the basis of boredom. There are too many biases and questionable loyalties to trust what such a small number of people have to say on a particular subject, and this is every bit as true for positive reviews as it is for negative ones.
