At the same time anonymous players/reviewers also have nothing to lose. It's one of the benefits of anonymity and luxury of not putting your credentials on the table with every thing you publish... ;)

Professional critics lose their credibility if they publish poor, misguided or factually wrong reviews, and no critic with one ounce of credibility will risk potentially career ending repercussions for some big publisher.
It has nothing to do with "bribe money", it's just people doing their job in accordance with their ability, some do it better, some do it worse.

It seems, in case of the Imperator: Rome, problem is mostly that it's a niche game where fans of the genre are more knowledgeable of the game intricacies then your typical "I review Madden than COD than Imperator than Anachronox..." critic, they just view it from different perspectives. Paradox bribing major gaming sites and their critics is maybe 10th or 15th on my imaginary list of possible explanations for discrepancies. :)

I'm attacking negative reviews which are just part of the usual "Outrage! Anger!"-atmosphere you get in some parts of the Internet, yes. I was under the impression the point of reviews is finding out if a game is good for 'me' ('me' here being a variable for whoever looks at any game and tries to decide whether it's worth to give it a try, not solely the me me).

The fact that someone dislikes a game is completely besides the point for anyone else. No game appeals to everyone. The point is about *why* a game is disliked. You cannot convey that meaning with a low rating and a snarky one-liner. As I have experienced in the past, everything from some kind of shitstorm, to personal vendetta's to complete genre mismatches lead people to negative reviews. In an ideal, sensible, rational world, these people would not write reviews.

You won't find me reviewing every sports game with one stars. That's my opinion of these games but it's a completely irrelevant opinion to anyone who actually likes these types of games. I don't have the tools, experience or patience to properly review them, so I don't.

Unfortunately, this is not the world we live in, so the first step is filtering out all the useless reviews. And if someone cannot explain *why* they dislike something and *what* leads them to a relatively low score their opinion means nothing to me. It could be something completely irrelevant to me or it could be a problem I can agree with. But I already knew either of the two is possible without that review, so I have gained no new information from it.

The point is, you are finding a lot of these types of reviews because you are intentionally looking out for them. My experiences with reviews are quite different as I don't specifically look out for specific types of reviews like you are doing. I look at random sampling of reviews of games that I maybe interested in. It's a self-fulfilling prophecy on your part: You figure there's a lot of these "shitstorm" reviews so you actively look for them and you find them. You can't see the forest if you only look at specific trees.

Oh come on, don't troll! You have the brain, use it for something good in life. Like ... anything but troll! :p

Yea, I guess I've become too cynical about most of gaming journalism. I do trust them when they review an indie game. But AAA games... nah. Way too much money involved.

I used to have a system for game review sites where I would see how their SimCity 2013, Diablo 3 and Rome 2 review was. If they praised any of those games to high heaven with 9/10 scores - on the blacklist they go. Worked well for a time. :) Finding decent and truthful critics was a game of its own.

Anyway, while I don't blindly trust all user reviews, I consider them far more informative than a random critic review.

Honestly wasn't my intention to troll but I can see that it could look like a trolling attempt.
Eh, shitty weather today so I guess I'm a bit grumpy. My bad. :) Anyway, I'm outta here.

I find your fixation on "shitstorms" to be slightly weird. I went through quite a few examples of what I have personally seen as source of wonky reviews. Sure, shitstorms happen, but they are not *that* common and you far more often have to deal with the terminally stupid, misguided or just cranky. But the exact reason why you end up with such a review does not even matter. The only question is: can the reviewer describe a problem/issue/whatever you can relate to?

I was not the one that coined the phrase "shitstorms". You did. On multiple posts I might add. And, based on your prior statements it is clear that you focus on these negative review "shitstorms". Again, as I stated before, you are finding these "shitstorms" because you are intentionally focusing on them instead of looking at the whole picture. You can't see the forest if you only look at specific trees.

So, how does this game at its current state (not with the usual 1000+ DLC) compare to Europa Universalis Rome?

Salve Imperators!

Yesterday, GOG staff has added the fallowing information about this game to the store page:

Multiplayer Notice: Please note that the GOG Galaxy Client and Paradox Account are required to access Multiplayer

Multiplayer is available only between GOG.com users.

So they didn't include this one in the beta trial of the "Paradox Launcher" that does allow cross-platform MP, unlike Stellaris?

I can't say. I don't play this type of games online. And I don't own any Paradox games here on GOG.

When in comes to reviews I have more trust in reviews from the player base rather than reviews made by
professional reviewers. Over at Steam IR have mixed reviews (42% positive). I can`t see any reason to buy IR in its current state.

I just don't see how a developer known for "realistic historical simulations" decided on putting literal magic into this game

https://www.reddit.com/r/paradoxplaza/comments/bhxk76/imperator_is_essentially_eu_rome_with_a_better_map/