You're about to spend $70 on a game. You open a review aggregator. The critic score says 82. The user score says 5.2. What do you do?
This gap, where professional critics and actual players seem to occupy different planets, shows up constantly in gaming. Sometimes critics love games that players hate. Sometimes the reverse. Occasionally both agree, and that alignment is the closest thing to a sure bet this ecosystem offers. Most of the time, though, you're staring at two numbers that don't match, trying to figure out which one to believe.
The short answer: both matter, but for completely different reasons. Here's how each one actually works.
What Critic Reviews Are (and Aren't)
When a publication like IGN or Polygon publishes a review, a paid editor plays the game (usually on a press copy provided by the publisher before release), writes a structured evaluation, and assigns a score. That score gets fed into aggregators like Metacritic or OpenCritic, where it joins dozens of others to produce a single number meant to capture consensus.
Critic reviews offer things user reviews can't: professional context, editorial standards, and accountability. A reviewer at a major outlet has likely played hundreds of games across every genre. They can tell you whether a game's open world is genuinely innovative or just a reskin of something from 2015. They have colleagues who push back on weak takes. Their publication's reputation depends on not being obviously wrong.
That said, professional criticism has real blind spots.
Score inflation is a persistent one. As The Verge documented when overhauling their review scoring in 2022, scores trend upward over time at most outlets. A 7 that should mean "good, with real flaws" reads as a harsh score because readers only ever see 8s and 9s. The effective scale at most gaming outlets has collapsed into roughly the 8-to-10 range, where anything below an 8 signals failure even when the review text says otherwise.
There are also structural pressures readers rarely see. Outlets receive early review copies from publishers. No publication wants to burn a relationship that provides access. Not every review is shaped by this, but the incentive exists.
How Metacritic and OpenCritic Actually Work
Metacritic converts review scores into percentages and calculates a weighted average, giving certain publications more influence based on what it calls "stature." The exact weights are proprietary and never publicly disclosed, which is one reason gaming critics have long viewed the system with suspicion. Metacritic's Wikipedia page confirms the weighting methodology exists but gives no specifics. The site also added a 36-hour delay on user reviews for new game launches and requires verified playtime before a review posts, partly in response to manipulation.
OpenCritic took a different approach. Founded in 2015 by Matthew Enthoven and colleagues who came out of Riot Games, the site was built explicitly to avoid Metacritic's controversies. It uses a simple arithmetic average of all numeric reviews from top critics, normalized to a 0-to-100 scale, and shows you the percentage of critics who recommended the game outright. That recommendation percentage is often more informative than the aggregate number. In July 2024, media company Valnet acquired OpenCritic, and the site began accepting player ratings separately, keeping them walled off from the critic average so neither score contaminates the other.
Both aggregators have their uses. OpenCritic's transparency is better if you want to understand where a score comes from. Metacritic's longer history and publisher relationships sometimes mean earlier coverage for major releases.
What User Reviews Actually Catch
User scores tell a different kind of story, and that story has genuine value.
A critic might play a game for 20 hours on a press build against a release-day deadline. A player might put in 200 hours over the following month and catch things no pre-release review could have flagged: a multiplayer lobby that empties within two weeks, a progression system that falls apart past the midgame, a patch that fixed one critical bug and introduced three new ones.
User reviews tend to be strongest on long-term playability. Whether the community stays alive. Whether the developer supports the game after launch. Whether the story holds up all the way to the credits. These things simply can't be measured in a review written before the game ships to the public.
The catch is consistency. A lot of user reviews are posted in the first 48 hours, when emotions are highest. And they're vulnerable to manipulation in ways that critic scores are not.
The Review Bombing Problem
Review bombing is what happens when a large number of players flood a game's rating for reasons unrelated to the game's actual quality. The practice traces back at least to 2008, when players protested Spore's DRM system on Amazon by tanking its user score en masse. Since then, review bombing has evolved into a genuine form of consumer protest, with real consequences for developers.
A few recent examples show exactly what user scores can and can't tell you:
- In May 2024, Helldivers 2 received over 200,000 negative Steam reviews in three days after Sony announced a requirement for players to link PlayStation Network accounts. Sony reversed the decision after the backlash.
- In June 2024, Team Fortress 2 was bombed over Valve's perceived neglect of persistent bot infestations, dropping the game's recent rating to "Overwhelmingly Negative" despite no actual change to the game.
- Kerbal Space Program 2 was bombed the same month after Take-Two shut down developer Intercept Games, signaling the game would never leave early access.
Steam introduced a review histogram in 2017 that shows when a rating spike occurred, and an off-topic review detection system in 2019. Valve manually intervened in 44 separate bombing incidents that year alone. These tools help identify when something unusual happened. They don't always tell you whether the reason was legitimate.
What Gamers Actually Do
Most players have already moved away from trusting any single score. A February 2024 YouGov survey across 17 international markets found that only 6% of consumers rely more on critic reviews when deciding whether to buy a game. Twenty-four percent lean on consumer reviews instead. Another 25% use both equally. And 24% said they factor in neither, prioritizing free offerings or titles they already know.
"Only 6% of consumers say they rely more on professional critic scores when buying video games, compared to 24% who lean on consumer reviews." YouGov, February 2024
Americans are the most skeptical of professional critics: only 3% say they trust critic scores more. Men are roughly twice as likely as women to lean on professional reviews (8% vs 4%), though consumer review preferences are similar across genders.
Here's a breakdown of what each signal actually captures:
| Signal | What it captures well | Where it breaks down |
|---|---|---|
| Critic Metascore (Metacritic) | Polish, design craft, genre comparison | Score inflation, opaque weighting, pre-launch bias |
| User score | Long-term feel, community health, post-launch support | Review bombing, fake accounts, early emotional reactions |
| % Critics Recommended (OpenCritic) | Binary consensus across outlets | Misses minority views; doesn't reflect score strength |
| Review volume | Whether there's enough data to draw on | High volume can still include coordinated campaigns |
The pattern that tends to be most useful: treat critic scores as a baseline read on production quality, then look at the delta between critic and user scores. A large gap deserves closer attention. Either critics missed something the community feels strongly about, or the user score caught a coordinated campaign with nothing to do with the game itself.
How to Actually Use Both
Find critics whose taste you understand. One reviewer's 7 might be your 9, if their preferences track yours. This is older advice than the internet itself, and it still works better than any aggregate. Once you know a critic's sensibilities, you translate their reactions instead of accepting scores at face value. You're not looking for objectivity; you're looking for a calibrated lens.
Read the review, not just the score. A critic who gives a game 7/10 because the pacing collapses in act three is still giving you something useful, even if you ignore the number. The text is the actual review. The score is a compressed summary that loses most of the meaning.
Wait a few weeks on user scores. The most honest user data comes after the launch wave settles. Review bombing campaigns lose steam. Long-term players start posting. A month after release is usually when user scores reflect genuine sentiment rather than first-day emotion or organized protest.
Watch for alignment across both. An 85 from critics and a strong user score together? That's real signal. Critics loved it and users are mixed? Read what users are specifically saying. Both sides confused? The game probably has genuinely divided design decisions, and the answer is buried in the review text on both sides.
Your Reviews Are Part of This Too
Every review you write is a data point, and data points are only useful with context. A score from someone who bombed a game over a pricing dispute and a score from someone who finished it three times at maximum difficulty are both technically "user reviews." They don't deserve equal weight, and there's no way to tell them apart on most platforms.
That's the gap the fragmented review ecosystem never fills: a place where your review history, your taste profile, and your time with a game all add context to what you actually think. If you want to understand how gaming criticism arrived at this fragmented state in the first place, the story of how review culture has evolved from print magazines to TikTok takes is worth reading for the bigger picture.
Build Your Own Review History
The EndWiki lets you write long-form, multi-aspect reviews for every game you play and attach them to your profile. Your scores sit alongside your play history, so anyone reading them can see whether you put in 8 hours or 80. That context is what aggregate scores have never managed to provide.
Browse the games you've been meaning to write about at /games, or bring your existing library over from Steam, PlayStation, or Xbox with the import tool and get your history in one place before you start.
If you want your opinions to actually carry weight over time, create your free account on The EndWiki. A considered review attached to a verified history is worth more than any number sitting alone on an aggregator.