Of course a game review is the view of a single person and is in effect quite subjective. Where a company is involved there may be some kind of committee that has an influence on the review but I don't know for sure about that (sounds a bit conspiratorial). Anyhow my thought is that it's good to find a reviewer that you generally agree with, someone you identify with that you feel has an approximate taste in games to your own.

Unfortunately for me Greg Kasavin left Gamespot a while back. I knew I could trust a Kasavin review, he seemed to like the same stuff as me- RPG's strategies ect and he had a review style that I could go with. I was thinking now Greg has left that Kevin is the most approximate reviewer to reflect my taste but I'm not sure. He seemed to like Assassin's Creed quite a lot more than I did and I was surprised to see Mass Effect getting 8.5 (from all the hype I thought it'd get 10!). I havent played Mass Effect yet though so the jury is still out on that one.

I find player reviews really helpful in informing my purchases too, and even customer reviews from Amazon ect because it's good to get a wide spread of opinion. If people from different communities are saying similar things about a game then I find it easier to trust the hype. Assassin's Creed and Mass Effect are good examples of games that have split opinion recently. Games are expensive so it's best to make the most informed purchase you can. I recently got into renting games too (I used to rent themback in the days of PS1 but I moved town ages ago and never got around to joining the video shop) I'm so glad when I rent a game over a weekend and beat it that it onlycost £5 rather than £45!