I like user reviews and impressions, but I don't tend to read them on Metacritic. The score is also often so skewed to the extremes on both ends. Doesn't help that you don't know if someone actually played the game. In that sense, I prefer the simplicity of recommend/don't recommend on Steam and that it also limits it to owners. A bit more digestible at a glance, and you have some degree of certainty that the reviewer spent some time with a game.
This is gonna be a bit of a tangent, but the distinction between on and off-topic review bombing is also relevant. So on Steam at least, it will filter out reviews that don't relate to the game as such once it's flagged. That makes it a bit more palatable, I suppose. On-topic "review bombing" is basically just a game being received negatively by its audience, whether it's for qualitative or more technical reasons.
There's a difference in what mass negative reviews from critics or users can say about the game. If a game just runs badly (when it shouldn't by all measures), it's worth leaving a negative review for. See Monster Hunter World PC at launch. Good reviews from publications; negative reviews from players who, despite being within system requirement margins, got very uneven performance. That's valid, I think, and tells me as much about the experience of playing the game as a critic's review on the more esoteric aspects of the game.
I've read some comments from developers as well as (potential) consumers themselves about being unhappy when reviews do take this approach and while I do understand where they're coming from, that is nonetheless that player's experience. A user review is not per se reflective of the quality of a game within the context of the pantheon of all other games, its predecessors, the zeitgeist, etc. But that can skew both positively and negatively. Plenty of games that would've barely squeaked by with a 6 critically have generally favorable reviews regardless.
This type of user-dependent variability doesn't always tell you something about the underlying quality of the game, but if that's the only thing you care about there are plenty of professional reviews you can turn to. User reviews tend to get a bad rap for this, but I think it's a matter of setting expectations. Even if individual reviews are lacking, there is value in being able to sample a large collection of brief non-holistic opinions. Scrolling through multiple user reviews, you can usually get a good sense of the quality of a game, even if no single review is on its own informative enough to make a judgement on whether you'll purchase it.
So (on-topic) user reviews reflecting just the user's experience only makes sense. Distancing your own experience with a game for the sake of writing a more "legitimate" or generalizable review is not the point of user reviews, I think. So expecting them to adhere to abstract concepts of validity would diminish the accessibility and value of collective micro critiques and what these say about a game's reception.
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