Video Game media hype is useless nowadays too. There's pretty much an article or video every few days now documenting how game "journalists" are in cahoots with publishers. Pretty obvious when you check out a game site and see it framed by characters and scenes in ads for recently released games...

On top of that, responses to subjective reviews are polarized. Maybe its due to the mix of demographics that are into games that makes it seem so jumbled, but for every glowing review there's a counterpart saying "oh, it wasn't that great."

I agree that demos would be a good partial step to fix this. Be also people should start expecting game criticism to look like (good) literature and film criticism rather than just a collection of numbers. The industry has matured enough for that. A number rating isn't intrinsically useless, but if that's all you look at and don't have a demo, you're flying blind.