This is just another reason why you can't trust scores anymore, you always have to read between the lines of what the reviewer is saying to get a feel of where they're coming from.
Reviews from any publication that posts advertisements from publishers is essentially a compromised review... and that's pretty much any publication either in print or the internet. The problem comes when reviewers - who are supposed to be able to sort through the hype and shovelware and detail which games should be up for consideration for your hard earnt money - by into the hype and feel 'pressure' to deliver high scores to big franchises. There are obvious ones - IGN, primarily - who lost their credability long ago. Others, such as 1up or even Rockpapershotgun.com, aren't 'bought' just inflated.
Dragon Age II is, by all accounts, a decent game. Unfortunately, it's simply not as good as anything Bioware has done before. Easily their worst game, from what I've been told. The strange part is that the reviews for the game settle on Dragon Age II being a 8/10 or a 9/10 game and undermine a lot of the major issues. Considering that it's essentially a copy-paste job from Dragon Age, with less features, less customisation, less environments to explore and that the game simply isn't as engrossing as Biowares previous effortst, 8/10 and 9/10 are obviously inflated scores.
When reviewing games, major reviewers often use two scales. The first scale ranges from 1 to 9, and is used for your unknown titles that have little hype, little marketing and are released almost without fan-fare. Little things get big mentions in these reviews, and less attention is paid to what they get right compared to what they do wrong. Unless the game is amazingly good, like Torchlight, they'll be lucky to get anything over an 8.
The second scale ranges from 8-10 and is used for all major titles. Anything from Activision Blizzard, major franchises from EA Games, Square Enix, etc. Final Fantasy, Call of Duty, etc. Regardless of the quality of the game, it'll be polished to perfection. This gets it an automatic 8. Final Fantasy XIII is widely considered a terrible, boring game - and yet it scored 8s, 9s and even a few 10s. For what? The game had no actual gameplay! It scored it based on sheer production vaules; its graphics and sound design were amazing! Blizzard figured this out long ago; the flawed Starcraft II scored nearly universal 9s and 10s despite a garbage single player story and sterile multiplayer environment because they took their time to make it feel polished.
Ultimately, I read forums rather than reviews these days. Unless the game is an Activision Blizzard game or a FPS, it's community is going to be non-toxic enough to be able to ascertain the actual quality of the game from the forum.
