I have not been so lucky as to not be burned only a few times. Considering Gaming is my main past time, I play a ridiculous amount of them, so odds are I'm going to have went through a fair few terrible ones. :p

Also something to note in regards to larger company reviews, it's a really bizarre thing that many of them would do. They would receive the game, but not get any kind of restrictions on what they would talk about, and were't 'paid'.

What the publishers would then do is, on the day the review comes out, buy out the ad space on the site. There is no direct statement of whats going on, but the site get's paid based on ad interaction. So they are incentivized that way to write a positive review, so people will see click those ads. It's not something that happens as often now, but it's kind of the way a lot of big sites operate.

I remember after the FTC cracked down on them not disclosing links in their articles, a couple sites found a really stupid work around where they would drop referral links in the comment section after the article was live. Some places are scummy as hell.

I stopped reading proper reviews way back in the day when the internet wasn't quite as available too me, because I started to realize how many print publications I'd read were staffed by people who had no idea what they were talking about. Regularly you would see reviews of JRPG's pop up by people who didn't like the genre, which seemed surreal to me. Put every other review of theirs into question.

Easier to find smaller reviewers now adays that work for smaller publications or even on their own, so it's a get away from a lot of the terrible practices of the industry. Not perfect, but better.