User blog comment:LilyheartsLightning/Metacritic Effect/@comment-4967682-20130106013945

The general feel of a Metacritic page can be useful. But the numbers themselves aren't.

To elaborate: the users of Metacritic tend to give things either very high or very low scores with no middle ground, while critics will pretty much always give a game a 9 or 10 out of 10 if it is a big game, despite the fact that most games that I've seen get those ratings have a HUGE number of glaring flaws.

Even if I knew nothing about it aside from a few preview videos, I'd know Mass Effect 3 is NOT a 4.5 out of 10 game as it is on Metacritic. The gameplay, sound, voice acting, and graphics are all very good, and despite anything else that should at the very least get it 7. However, even though I know that the actual rating of 4.5 out of 10 is inaccurate, it is valuable information since I know that it has some glaring flaws that pissed a lot of people off.