At the end of the day a review is the opinion of the individual who played through the game. Nothing more, nothing less. The last 10 years have seen review scores become pointless in many ways , if anything the recent meltdowns over uncharted 3 and zelda just further showcase how people don't care what a game gets....
as long as it's a 9 or 10
I've been on the net for a long time , just like most people my age and I too was once a teenager that angrily disagreed with 1 review or another wondering what kind of crack joe critic had smoked that week to think he could give the likes of "anticipated game I wanted to play X" a score of "less then I was hoping".
Sometimes I'm still guilty of shaking my head a bit at the "bad review" for something I'm interested in or a "good review" for something that I think looks like crap. The thing is though, again, these are all opinions. Opinions can be ignored , agreed with, disagreed with but no one is ever wrong. I mean , would people rather every site/magazine out there use IGN's rating scale ? sure, it's basically 100 points but they only really use 90-100 at this point. It's like they gave up, realized that showing honesty when reviewing something cost them money and fans. Occasionally honesty and integrity overlap and it works out for them but most of the time you get "this game is going to sell 5 million copies and everyone wants to play it so we're giving it a 9/10 but it's actually closer to a 6 if we used the scale we came up with but that would piss of fans and cost us publisher advertising so 9 it is!". Sure , IGN does occasionally hate on a game but notice how the tend to REALLY trash stuff that's bad? you don't see 5 or 6 or even 7 handed out often, instead you get 3 or 4. That's what the fanbase wants to see and it does wonders over there but someones gotta bite the bullet and use the full point scale.
I just really wish ALL these sites would simply do away with scores all around. At the end of the day people just want to hear their anticipated game is fun. If there simply must be a number affixed to that, how about just using a single word rating at the end of a review ? It's either a BUY or maybe just a PLAY and at the end of the spectrum an AVOID. No math, no in between, no scale. With the way games are currently rated, converting to something like this would be simple- anything over a 7.0 would be a BUY, 5-6.9 a PLAY and anything 4.9 or lower gets an AVOID. Sure it might put metacritic and score aggregates out of business but they do nothing aside from perpetuating this over-reliance on quantifying a games enjoyability with numbers.
TL;DR- Just play the game for yourselves and form your own opinion, who knows you might surprise yourself and have the same issues, or you'll look past them.
