Check the *paid* reviews.

Fixed.

If you check the user reviews here, on Steam, or on Metacritic, you'll avoid this one like fleas at plague time.

Comparing these quotes with the user reviews and ratings on GOG they must have reviewed a different game. :P
Anyway, it's always suspicious when something has to be hyped a second time shortly after release.

They'd be far better served by fixing this steaming pile of poo and *then* asking people to take a second look.

Really sad to see that GOG promotes such fake reviews now. Maybe it was part of the agreement with Paradox to bring the game to GOG.

Next step would be a publisher demanding that all negative reviews must be deleted from the game card on a regular basis. I think the removal of the GOG mixes / lists of shame was a first step in that direction.

fake negative reviews are more common and should be removed... i'm not interested in reviews from people that don't own the game and I mean people that actually payed their money to own it not some streamer with a free copy and 10 mins play time

for what its worth my current game is 10 hours in and i'm enjoying my purchase

Got proof to back up that claim?

What a good little consumer you are. Ready to eat whatever is placed in front of you... even if people tell you it's a bowl of shit. In fact, how dare they tell you it's shit! You should show them and eat as much shit as you can! Damn them and their high standards!

Yea. It should be waaaay lower.

What YOU seem to forget when debating the trustworthiness of professional vs. player reviews: player reviews are completely anonymous, and they have nothing to GAIN.
Professional critics have their name attached to their reviews and put their career on the line if they give it a low score, and probably more importantly, if a professional site gives a low score to a game from a big publisher, they risk losing their sponsors, and with them their bribe money.

Split personality much?

Also, new on this planet?

Professional reviewers don't give a shit about what gamers think of them as long as the ad money keeps coming. Which from the looks of it, they still have nothing to fear. There are droves of people still trusting them.
Since the early 80s that I read professional game reviews, there was never a problem of pushing a game to the public even though it was shit, name of reviewer shown or not.

As for the other guy, Jinsei, yes he does what he wants, instead of letting retards push him around. He/she wants to buy a game because he wants to play it and you make fun of his decision. What a fucking asshole you are!
Do what you want with your money and let others do what they want to do with theirs.

My experience with "player reviews" (actual events, although I did not track the impact on scores in detail):
- allow "their" as an alternative pronoun for the player character: shitstorm, lose a star.
- male RPG protagonist is not some muscle spacemarine: shitstorm, lose a star.
- touch something a group considers sacrosanct to their political beliefs: shitstorm, lose a star.
- have a female lead in a typically male-dominated field: shitstorm, lose a star (not a game, but still an interesting, recent sample).

Any player review that does not contain at least a few paragraphs of readable text which explain the rating is completely irrelevant. One-or-two-liner reviews are often actually worse than even that. I literally read one-star reviews of turn-based games (so, something genre-defining, not some minor detail) which basically stated they "hate turn-based, why is this not RT".
The only point where player/consumer reviews without significant explanation are at least slightly useful is if there are enough of them and you can see the rating distribution. If the peak of the bell curve is around three, it's probably really a mediocre game. If you have two peaks then it's either a hit-or-miss game (in which case you need to find out in which camp you are likely to land) or was the unfortunate victim of a shitstorm.

At least with professional reviews you almost always get a lot of text to form some kind of opinion. The final score under the review is not really a significant part of the review. Even neglecting the effect advertisement or 'perks' have or don't have on a review, if something is not my genre or the game made design decisions I know I don't care for then it's not a game for me, irrelevant of the score.

And, yet, I haven't experienced these same issues as you have despite looking at a lot of game reviews. Seems you are generalizing for the sake of generalizing against negative reviews.

And, here we get to the meat of your argument: Attacking negative reviews while ignoring positive reviews that have the same issues. I have seen far more "5/5" and "Great game evah!" positive reviews than the ones you list.

Professional reviews are usually bloated with empty words and padded with filler. They often drop large and rich descriptions that are devoid of sense or objectivity yet are pleasant to read. They will say meaningless stuff like "the combat is involved and interesting". Pretty much everything you learn from these reviews can be seen in a playthrough anyway.

Anyway I am wondering what is GOG's response (if they even have one) to the discrepancy between the user reviews and those that they promote. It's pretty bad for the credibility of the curation when you sell some absolute garbage then try to pretend that it's good.

I assume you mean my reply to Anamon? I was just messing with his argument. Slight changes to copy-paste for a different perspective.
Yea, that's my point. Pro critics are not very reliable and don't work for the good of their readers.

Well he complained about people complaining about Imperator so I complained about his complaining about people complaining about Imperator. I was taking the piss out of him.

So, I was right. You are intentionally attacking negative reviews because they do not fit your arbitrary qualifications while ignoring the positive ones that also do not fit your arbitrary qualifications. Thanks for proving my point.

I tend to follow this philosophy - although I tend to also add in reviews that are positive but still mention negatives. I also often find that what many people hate, are things that I actually like, or things that make sense in that particular game. Obvious examples are things like people wanting a sandbox mode for games that are clearly story-driven and where this would make little sense (and therefore reviewing it low), or people requesting some stupid, lame feature because X other games have it and this particular game has dared to go against the trend.

Also, those negative reviews that have no value with respect to actually reviewing the game, often have spades of comedy value due to the vast stupidity of the author. So there's that.

It's only totally positive fanboy-ish reviews that are completely worthless - they're worse than one-liners because they're usually many paragraphs of gushing praise.

As for this game in particular - think I'll wait until the end of the Paradox DLC/early access cycle. So I guess that's two years from now, give or take?