Games reviews come in all different flavours, and having recently started to follow Cara Ellison's (@Carachan1) and Chris Priestman's (@CPriestman) reviews, I've also been subject to their ire at responses along the lines of "This isn't a real review, all you're doing is talking about things you thought about while playing."
Now I profoundly disagree with the "not a real review" standpoint. Besides, what is a REAL review? In these reviews, the writer gets to lay out the way they felt, the symbolism and the references they picked up, and generally their rather abstract opinion of the piece. This makes for entertaining and useful reading.
The usefulness of the reading isn't quite as pronounced or easily detectable than more by-the-numbers approaches to reviewing. Some reviewers prefer to keep their inner dialogue to themselves, and describe the game as a product. They'll talk about how low a match lasts, and that it makes for a good lunch-break game. That there are over 15 classes to pick from, each with three ability trees, offering huge amounts of customisability and playing time before depletion of content. They'll mention that they were impressed with the number of players in a single match, and how the high perfomance physics engine is used to allow players to modify the map dynamically, bringing another level of strategy and tactics for more skillful players.
This is a completely different kind of review, and neither of them are a REAL review any more than the other. The former is useful for people wishing to experience games as an artform and explore the possibilties and intricacies of games, they're also very fun to read, and often thought-provoking. But when I'm about to drop some of my hard-earned money on a game, I sometimes would like to have some more concrete information, the latter kind of review, with their simple, no fuss writing, allow me to get a nice evaluation of a product before I buy.
ps, scores are stupid and stupid though. What does 7/10 in gameplay even mean?