I'd rather read WHY someone doesn't like a game rather than something like "stupid."

As a reviewer you should try and stay FAR away from the condescending attitude a some of the reviewers have when dealing with indie film and games. The way the game forces Multiplayer in not much different than the way GOG.com is forcing its Galaxy client. Only, the game is an indie game. For this reason alone, it gets attacked much more severely than even the harshest critic of Galaxy (me) ever would:

"these games are serving more as Rorschach tests than they are games. And these types of 'Please play with me' games usually read deep into the soul of the developers themselves"

The same could be said about pretty much any MMORPG. Only, those aren't indie game, so the reviewers are forced to "assume best intentions", which in this case means that the developers of World of Warcraft knowingly downgraded singleplayer to focus fully on the multiplayer aspect, without this meaning that they are lonesome or whatever.

Likewise, I have never heard of anything but indie stuff that gets slaughtered by reviewers with the passive-aggressive praise that it is "interesting" or "promising".

So, just say that the single player aspect is crap!

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How often is it that development houses, large or small, use informative criticism
to make things any better?
Usually the criticism is debated and then everyone starts taking sides and implementing the same issue
intentionally for political stance.

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I was using a hypothetical example but 'retarded' only became an offensive word because some people decided to make it so and then everyone else sheeped along with the taboo.

If kids in the Jr. High school ground start insulting each other with the term 'intellectually disabled' that politically correct term will be a social no no as well thirty years from now.

I mean the names 'Richard, Peter, Wili, Johnson' didn't start off as derogatory reference to male genitalia..... .
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For some games it's just to add a point score away from 'Overwhelmingly Positive'
You do realize that many games on Steam right now have been *Anonymously* trolled on there to make a point concerning Valve's dire lack of a Quality Gate?
Just like a troll post do you want to give a troll game a reaction other than just warning others it's a waste of money?

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I just tackled Injustice 2 for using pay 2 win tactics despite it being a really good fighter
I'll call out large development houses if they're playing up - Capcom and Koei are two of my favorite devs but I've called Capcom on being greedy and I completely ignore Koei's PC releases for being exponentially greedier than Capcom.

In this instance however adding criticism like 'Single Player bullies the player into taking the game online by forcing too many enemies on the single player at once.' is only going to get met with 'You just doesn't have TRY - I spent forty seven hours on level one so now I can do it solo with my eyes closed!'
But don't say anything? Eventually the developer thoroughly and caringly reviews what he did and goes 'Oh, alright - my deceptive tactic to engineer solo players into going online was too easy to see through....'

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There was a bundled Indie game not so long ago
(forget it's name)
that forced online play - now you would think the developers would be frequently monitoring what was taking place
but any time of the day that you logged into it there was one kid stalking the hub (from where you launch a mission) with a gun that could create walls
Since this game and it's hub was this child's only passion he mastered how to quickly encapsulate anyone entering into the hub with walls all around them and then leaving them there to cry.
I mentioned this in a informative complaint to the developer only to realize sometime later
that goofy kid WAS the developer.

It goes to show the lengths and expense that some people will invest to grieve others.
How do you give a serious review to something like this?

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Do you mean review the reviewer?
That's the comments section under the user-review

I'm not quite sure if I understand what you mean to say here, but to me a review that reads "crap" isn't much different from a troll post. If you really want to counteract false reviews, write an honest review and warn readers that the others are just trolling.

Or if you mean the devs are trolling, than yeah, go ahead and warn others that it's a waste of money, by actually saying it and why, instead of letting people guess what you mean by "crap" and whether you're even a human being capable of expressing noteworthy opinions. Like I said, customers won't take a one-word review seriously, so if your goal is to warn them, you won't reach 'em that way.

Yeah well, I've provided a LOT of Non-Constructive Criticism on these boards and, to my great surprise, people didn't learn from it either. So...

No, I mean Steam uses an algorithm to determine which games show up on the front page ("featured and recommended") and the Discover queue, based on games I played, and my main motivation for reviewing a game is leaving a rating to tell Steam whether I actually liked the game I played.

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heh
So instead of my review reading 'Crap.' It should read 'No, Steam; no.'

Review text most likely doesn't matter. If Steam used neural networks or semantics, you'd have to leave a standard human-readable three-paragraph review (likes, dislikes, conclusion). But they probably don't do this; instead (and they try to be transparent) the have a classic item-based recommender matrix: an item is characterized by tags, you as a player have a tag profile which is a weighted sum of the tags of all games you've interacted with, and some games are recommended based on how well they fit the profile.

So when I fire up Steam, I see something like "Hey Starmaker, because you have 117.5 hours in Sorcery!, here's today's dozen games about gay furries sniffing each others' butts." (I think it happens because Steam also weighs tags by popularity and the most generic descriptions rise to the top; all these "indie", "adventure", "rpg", "story rich", "choices matter" leave no way to account for "please no furry butts".)

What if I bought a game and didn't like it? Steam still sees I bought it, played it for some time (maybe I even persevered and completed it), so it's assigned a positive weight and recommendations lean more toward similar games. To get Steam to subtract it instead, I give it a thumbs down, and, because I can't do this without reviewing, I leave a review that might be useless to other players (as I don't want a shitty game to devour even more of my time).