The user score can be very useful though, and that is the one I look at when checking out metacritic. But to me, by far the best is usually just reading reviews at steam.
I like to read the most critical reviews and then also positive reviews, for a good balance.
The positive reviews that say "100%! Great." obviously don't help much either
I feel the same. User scores are more representative of the general quality of a game, as the ones who paid for the product and have the right to give their opinion about it. Even if often very biased and erratic in their way to grant scores, users do form a massive collective that averages out towards a pretty valid conclusion.
All the 10/10 reviews "Awesome game" might as well just not be there, waste of internet space really. Much of the same can be said of 0/10 reviews, although they usually have an actual explanation of why the 0 was given, unlike the 10/10 reviews.
If you read for example WotR most upvoted positive user review it says the following:
"awesome game. If you need some D & D in your life, this is the game for you." 10/10.
That tells anyone exactly zero useful things about the game, other than it uses a DnD setting, which is a given.
It's normally the more neutral opinions that range from 4 to 8 scores, the ones that have the most useful insight. Even when you can't agree with the score, they do disect aspects of the game and explain their reasoning.
The bottom line is that all games go through this. Unless it's a case like Diablo2, which is getting review bombed because of recent controversy and the general corporation hate that runs rampant in the world these days, every game that gets released gets their similar percent of fans/haters countering each other, and in the end, the average user score does give a representative value of how good the game is in the grand scheme of things.
I personally don't value anyone's opinion to decide how good a game is
for me, however. What is good for me I decide on my own. What the sum and average of everyone's opinions does is tell me is what is objectively good for the majority of people who play the type of games I play, and what isn't.