Now before we go any further I believe that the Escapist does a good job as they do not rely on Scores alone and are critical allowing players to make their own decisions (they don'treat us as 4 year olds)... although I could be an escapist fanboy and have rose tinted glasses.
There are times when the critics are at odds with the public, the most recent example being SimCity.
Just to quote metacritic (not a reliable source but...) the Critics 64% average compared to User's Score of 19% (and the majority of Most helpful being in the Red score band)
Now the obvious ones spring to mind after the Alien's Colonial Marines fiasco and the Kane N Lynch stupidity where there was an intention to Deceive and Intimidate respectively.
There are also two potential other reasons. Firstly they could be too close to the development of the game, they see elements in their best form, there's no active DRM on the games when they get their review they are tainted by what they have seen before so even if the DRM causes problems they can still technically review it.
Another problem is that they don't necessarily see what is game breaking as what we see as game breaking suggesting Critics out of touch with an audience. This is imperitve as the DRM effectively breaks the game so in thoery if they agree with the audience; EA will be banning a lot of Critics from a lot of parties but they don't clearly with higher ratings.
I'm just curious to know what everyone else thinks to why Critics get it wrong and (just as important) does it shake the faith in any of the parties involved (exclude EA in this case as we all know the general opinion of EA)?
Escapist Rules.