Those were just quick examples usally more details can be had from the reviews. And after reading reviews for you you can pick up on the meaning what people mean when they say "It is too dark" or "There is too much blood."   And keep in mind that I'm not stopping on just those two points and making a decision. I'm reading a lot of reviews before deciding.  And yes I can most of the time tell if I will like a movie/game buy reading the reviews. Don't just look at the numbers read the reviews.

...and you can see the quantity and quality of your city defence in the city screen.

A thousand times this. I find it preposterous that you can score a game on a 1 to 10 scale to begin with. Modern games are complex, and all have strengths in some areas and weaknesses in others. Sometimes they have great designs, but poor implementation, sometimes the other way around. Sometimes they're ugly but fun. Sometimes they're beautiful but boring. All of that goes into the quality of the game, and I refuse to condense it down to a single score.

With that in mind, there is a lot to learn about a game from professional reviewers (what they leave out can be very revealing), from thoughtful metacritic posters, and from game forums, as well as Let's Play videos of course. By reading closely I've found many a bad scoring game that I love (Romance of the Three Kingdoms XI, which was nonsensically excoriated for being difficult) and avoided many a high scoring one that I'm pretty sure I would have hated (Dragon Age 2, I'm looking at you). 

That is a really good point. Many of those same critiques by players say that the D3 gameplay is "boring". I guess these gamers were spoiled by Blizzard's early days when they were the 'Pixar' of the gaming industry and kept giving us fun, unique, polished games over and over again. Now we're getting stuck with Cars 2 and gamers are disappointed.

I agree... they should have a series of survey questions for each aspect of the game. But this system can be just as abused anyway. There is no good way to get voluteer data to be necessarily good data.

Actually, it takes only one 10 to counter a 1 star review.  Both are extreme.  The second type of reviewers cancel each other out in the end.  If those people objectively gave 3's and 7's instead of 0's and 10's, this wouldn't change a thing, average would still be 5.

Let's take your aforementioned 4 out of 5 game: XCOM, for instance.  This was probably the best game I played recently.  Based on the multiplayer chats I had with players, we agree that it is a good game that needs some things to be better, so 4 out of 5 seems reasonable.  This consensus fully reflects in metacritic player average of 8.2.   And XCOM had many people who gave it 0's.

That's only true if you think you only have '5' game. Say you think you have an '8' game, then it would take a bunch to cancel it out.

That's actually an interesting side effect of the review scale being biased for games. An 'average' game is somewhere around 70, anything 50- is trash and shouldn't be touched, we're not even using the bottom half of the scale. This gives extreme negative reviews more weight than extreme positives: if a typical game deserves a 75, a 0 drags the average down more than a 100 pulls it up, and in our lopsided reviewing system most games belong in the 50-100 range. As metacritic puts it:

Why is the breakdown of green, yellow, and red scores different for games?

The reason for this special treatment for games has to do with the games publications themselves. Virtually all of the publications we use as sources for game reviews (a) assign scores on a 0-100 scale (or equivalent) to their reviews, and (b ) are very explicit about what those scores mean. And these publications are almost unanimous in indicating that scores below 50 indicate a negative review, while it usually takes a score in the upper 70s or higher to indicate that the game is unequivocally good. This is markedly different from movies, TV or music, where a score of, say, 3 stars out of 5 (which translates to a 60 out of 100 on our site) can still indicate that a movie is worth seeing or an album is worth buying. Thus, we had to adjust our color-coding for games to account for the different meaning of games scores compared to scores for music, movies and TV.

Why does it matter what you think of your own game?  I am sure every developer thinks their game is good.  The reason players reviews exist in the first place is to give them and other players an idea of what the majority thinks.  Sure, the scores are somewhat skewed towards the average score of 5 if you have equal amount of fanboys and haters, but, if that is the case, it simply means your game is not that good.

You brought up a good point.  In games, the problem is not player reviews, which are fair as a sum, but rather critic reviews which are grossly inflated and influenced by things like how much advertisement money a game studio spent on their site.

Depends on the sample size.

For every XCOM there's a Diablo 3.

I Have to add my 2 cents here.
Even though any ratings given out to games are arbitrary. I do not agree with the statements that they have absolutely no value, and could easily be rated in colour codings, or that people tend to rate in extremes.

It is like asking a person if he liked the dinner he just had.
The chances are very low you will get an answer like: "It was the best meal I have ever tasted in my life", or a reply that touches the other opposite of the spectrum. Unless you are dealing with a 5-year old, most rational people can give moderate ratings. In fact, I think that people tend to give lower ratings, and avoid giving extremely high ratings.

Unless you are a teenage girl at the eve of your favourite live boyband concert, or your average kid with a severe sugar trip, people tend to devalue rather than overvalue.

But that is just a major you know what from Blizzard.  In movie industry, an opening weekend of a big movie is arguably the most important event judging the success or failure of the film.  A decision to make Diablo 3 online-only without having sufficient network infrastructure to handle the volume probably deserves the initial scores it got.  A common practice in gaming industry, and which is not acceptable in other software fields, is consciously shipping products containing bugs and defects.  While not exactly a bug, Blizzard was simply too cheap to buy enough logon servers to accommodate all the requests.  You live and die by decisions you make.

If you are familiar with MBTI, some personality types are more likely say that "it was the best meal they have ever tasted" or "the best game they ever played" than others.  That does not mean they are 5 years old, it just means that's how they perceive life.  Only roughly half of people are thinkers, and less than a fifth are rationals, but if everyone was a thinker and a rational, the world would be an awfully gloomy place.

I think player reviews are worthless, as I've said many times in many places. People tend to be drama queens or fan boys. So you see tons and tons of exceedingly high and low reviews on games. Very little actually reviewing for content, mostly either gushing over something because they think it should be great or hating on it because it wasn't precisely what they wanted in every way. Also people will often hand out a negative review based on something that isn't related to the game content itself, even for games they don't own. The number of 1 start reviews I've seen because people think they don't like a DRM system for a game they don't have is massive.

Professional reviews have problems too, don't get me wrong, but users reviews tend to be totally worthless.

I've seen it with the new X-Com game. There are people on the forums who just spit bile and demand a refund because it isn't just a HD remake of the original X-Com. The fact that they changed things is completely unacceptable in their minds. You'd think the game was worthless by those, but then you play it and it turns out to be fun, though quite different than the original.

So when are we going to get some pro reviews? I understand that given the release no journalist could have reasonably played long enough to write a full review, but when will they come?

Island Dog just posted the link to this:

http://www.gameinformer.com/games/elemental_fallen_enchantress/b/pc/archive/2012/10/25/elemental-fallen-enchantress-review.aspx

As someone said earlier, if you think Diablo 3 is a bad game you have become jaded about the passion of gaming. Diablo 3 was a disappointment, but not a completely bad game. If it were renamed and released by a different company I think a lot of people would think differently. 

Whats funny is the reviewers who write the reviews tend to disagree with metacritic about what their scores mean.

As adam explains a 2 out of 5 stars is not = to 40% on his scale.

I'd have to disagree here. Fron what I've seen over the years out of every 10 games only 3 are worth buying and playing. The rest are just fillers and hopers to get revenue until the better games arrive. It really takes a lot for a game to really stand out these days and even games that get 90's to 95's aren't always great games. The 3 out of 10 still stands even if all 10 got 90's.

One of the things that made Diablo III a "bad" game was it didn't give us "more" like Diablo II did for the origional Diablo. Diablo II moved on an away from Diablo I whereas Diablo III basically stayed in the same spot with a smaller storyline and an easily figured out plot from the beginning. For $60 it wasn't worth it. Diablo III felt more like an Expansion than a brand new game with brand new elements and a whole different story. I fell into the story of Diablo II so hard and it made me wish for a "movie" of it. I finished Diablo III within 2 days and was bored shiiteless. To me it was a "Ripoff" of $60 but fortunately I found a way to get my money back before time ran out. Diablo III is too much about the real money auction house and inferno was way too hard in the beginning because of the real money auction house and Blizzard wanting to money grub every penny they could out of players.

So it deserved the low user score it got based on what the users saw out of the game and not how well the game was "made". Users don't really care about that kind of crap they care about what the game "gives" to them and delivers upon its promises. Diablo III didn't deliver.

Diablo III is no mystery.  Blizzard was looking for the next WOW (i.e. revenue stream).  Some poor executive had it all figured out... a cash store for items.

Q: How the *bleep* is a loot driven game supposed to work when you can "buy" better gear than you can find?  They removed the goal!  The driver.  Brilliant!

Well, in this case the goal is the same; get better loot. But they just made it so much easier to spend real money to achieve that goal. I think it's actually a brilliant profit making strategy. Diablo 3 will probably make 20 times more revenue than Torchlight 2 ever will. Too bad the game and customer experience suffers in the meantime.