Game Recommendations: Whose opinion do you trust more?

I learn slightly more toward customer reviews than critic reviews.

I trust TA. iTunes reviews suck and critics aren't harsh enough.

I agree, TA is my gold standard too.

TA has only let me down twice, but, overall, I've enjoyed most of their recommendations. Pac-Man Championship Edition has been a blast.

Usually just TA, STP, User Review Section, and Reactions in the game's respective thread. These things usually do a good job telling what is good and bad, but they aren't flawless (still mad I was convinced to buy Soosiz)

I think both are important.

Formal reviews are nice because it offers a more structured view of a game, especially in the context of many other games.

That said, I mentioned in a podcast that reviewers have a skewed view of the world, since you are playing literally hundreds of games. So, it's not necessarily going to match up exactly to a casual gamer's perspective.

One good example is Star Wars: Trench Run. I think as an iPhone game in the sea of thousands of other iPhone games, it's not great. But the random non-serious gamer seems to love it.

The forum threads here let you interact with all types of gamers. But there's always a mix, but usually you can figure out who you agree with and who you don't so you can figure out if you are going to like the game or not.

arn

agree with you

I only pay attention to apple store reviews if half or more of the reviews are frustrated by the same problem such as poor controls or something like that.

Same here, there are way too many people who either skip the tutorial, never read the help section, or don't look in the options. Most of the people giving 1-star reviews to 5-star games do at least one of these things.

I always read both critic and customer reviews. I place a lot more value on the TA forum members' reviews than I do on the app store reviews, because they tend to be less biased.

I've noted that there seems to be more and more shill reviews on the app store lately (i.e. a lot of 5-star reviews by people who have only reviewed one game, or several games by only one dev.)
Maybe it's a coincidence; maybe not...