Like many things in life, interpreting reviews is a skill. It's a matter of not reading too many nor too few. Not placing a singular importance on one, but noticing patterns and repetitions of pros and cons. Of knowing when to discard what is likely a personal opinion and when to notice what is a likely fact. And most importantly synthesizing this data to YOUR needs, for only YOU know which things you need, which things you must avoid, and which features you don't care about. This goes not just for games but for anything. I have become legendary among my friends for my ability to pick out new restaurants reading reviews because I take their needs and read between the lines of the restaurant reviews.
Legendary eh?
But anyway, the best thing you can do is look at videos. Then you can see if the gameplay mechanics are going to be pleasing or not. Because that's what it comes down to. For example, let's look at the RPS review for fallout.
http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2015/11/12/fallout-4-pc-review/This is unreadable. Someone trying to grasp how the game plays out has to parse the personal interplay between the authors to get at what the mechanics are. Not to mention the hyperbole. I can't get over the fact that for a lot of these review sites, many of the authors are cynical assholes that have played so many games, they can't enjoy them anymore because everything becomes derivative or reminds them of something else. In many cases, the comments section is better than the article for trying to determine whether a game is fun or not.
RPS has the added difficulty of activist journalism, where they try to push socially acceptable ideas and artsy concepts, which makes it even harder to find fun games from what they write. I wish we had a gaming website that was just about fun games. I don't want to hear about depression, death, trauma, etc. when it comes to games. They can be in the game- realistic characters are great- but I'm not going to have a fun time playing half the games they review. Gamergate really exposed a lot of the journalism issues among gaming websites. I don't agree with the harassment angle of that whole controversy, but it shined a bright light on gaming journalism corruption.
For me, I have played countless games. For something to keep my interest, it's got to have a challenging mechanism to engage my mind and/or a great story. It's similar to the same way that chess can keep my interest 27 years later. I'm enjoying Batman Arkham Knight right now because the story is great, and the gameplay has a lot of variety. I'm feeling creativity with certain missions, and the ones that don't feel like that, I don't do (such as the Riddler racing missions. I did the first one but those suck). I find it hard to be amused by single player twitch games unless it has a good story (multiplayer has a chance precisely because humans offer better AI).
Looks like I wandered off the path in this discussion. But yeah, summarized, gameplay is what keeps you playing a game. Articles can only be secondary these days. If you know any good gaming journalism websites, please share them here.
