-Requires the reviewer to actually own / play the game
-Highlights the amount of time played so you can easily filter out people who just dismissed
-Lets you know who got the game for free or reviewed the game in early access
-The magnitude of votes is shown which lets you know if it is a niche title or mainstream blockbuster
-Gives you a timeline of votes so you can see changes over time and see if there are any review bomb cycles happening
It's not perfect but I find it wild that people think there is any value in these movie review aggregator sites when you can't even verify if the person watched the movie at all and these guys can just spam votes. Worse yet there isn't any incentive for the site to change this since more traffic means more eyeballs for ads.
Well, maybe one more caveat: user expectations as they relate to the genre or company. One thing I noticed while browsing the hidden gems list* -- which have games with extremely high ratings -- is that there's a LOT of hidden object games on there. I think there's one cat series that appears like three or four times. And some more conventional genres like RTSes or action RPG's are hardly present at all.
I think this is due to expectations: people don't expect a lot out of a hidden object game, they're generally very simple, and a small indie title can easily meet those low expectations. Whereas a genre that has included many big budget titles, people have higher expectations, even larger, highly experienced dev teams have a hard time pleasing everyone.
But also, lists like that also implicitly often are euphemisms for “titles that are good, but cater to non-mainstream interests, and so never achieve vitality.” Hidden-object games get (probably unfairly and mostly self-perpetuatingly) classified as “girly games” — which leads to major game reviewers and journalists just completely ignoring them when they come out. So a good hidden-object game will almost always, inherently be a “hidden gem.”
And, if early, potentially game-breaking, bugs have been fixed. I've seen many games with poor initial reviews, due to performance problems, fixed in the next GPU driver release.
For a more extreme example, you have something like No Man's Sky, which is nearly a different game, which early reviews don't apply to.
The quality of reviews was really good.
There's the occasional "in joke" comment that usually only makes sense to people who're already past a certain point in the game (or reference a meme known about the game), but they're nowhere close (not even in astronomical terms) to being being the majority review type. Even then, they still have to rate the game.
Some games are so good that you may want to play them even if you're not the biggest fan of their genre. I guarantee you plenty of people played Undertale without being big JRPG fans.