The problem with wanting a purely objective 'review' of a video game is made doubly complicated by the fact that a video game's purpose is never so narrow nor so easily defined. Consumer goods have a very clearly defined job to do. A digital camera is there to take the best possible photographs, a toaster is there to make toast to whatever specification the consumer requires in the shortest and most efficient timescale. And because their purpose is tight and the measure of the product's success easily calculable, they lend themselves to 'review' and 'score' testing.

In contrast, the purpose of a video game is much less narrowly defined. Most game 'reviewers' would say that the purpose of a game is to be fun and to entertain. But actually pinning down such abstract concepts is tricky as there are as many criteria and understandings of what is entertaining and fun as there are humans. Thus, reviewing a video game in the same way as you'd review a digital camera or other similar consumer product is inappropriate or, at very least, misleading.

All this is not to say that review scores are entirely meaningless or misleading. In fact, they do have a very clearly defined purpose; it's just that it's a different purpose to the one that's widely understood. Scores have come to represent whether a game over achieves or underachieves on the preview hype that was generated by the publication ahead of its release. As previews in the average video game magazine are so heavily influenced by advertisers (after all, a preview is offering no judgment on the quality of a game, so a magazine/website can print riotously positive spin in it and maintain clear conscience) this weighting of preview coverage sets imbalanced expectations in readers.

Rather than focusing on the most interesting, promising or innovative games coming out, readers are made to get excited about those whose publishers pay the most for, be it directly through advertising or indirectly through the general marketing promotion of a title. This is why when a game like Koei's Bladestorm gets 8/10 in some publications, readerships become incredulous. Their expectations for the game haven't been set that high because they were being fed hype of a different flavour.