I still read Rock Paper Shotgun, and as for the reviews there (and elsewhere), I look for phrases along the lines of "if you like X, then you'll probably like/hate this," which is about as close to a numeric score a review can get without being nigh-meaningless.

No. All professional game reviews are worthless. Not only is their score system fucked up, not only do they not have to piss off advertisers, but their only upward career path is to be hired for PR at one of the companies so that's double extra incentive for them to shill.

Yahtzee is pure entertainment. I haven't taken a single one of his reviews seriously.

Yahtzee inserts a sensible review into his humor, much like how people hide pills in pieces of meat or cheese so that their dog will eat it without realizing it.

Yeah. Yahtzee has the structure of a generally bare-bones review in almost every video that's then built on with satire/snark/profanity that he and the Escapist hope are seen as amusing.

Like all reviewers, though, you have to know where he's coming from. He doesn't like bro-shooters where the single-player campaign sucks balls, most of Nintendo's re-hashed games, and so on.

Plus, how insanely obsolete are game reviews in the face of let's play videos?

Reviews are always best for knowing why or why not you'll like the game in question, not the score. A really low score is probably indicative of a broken game, but a 10/10 game that has mechanics you don't like isn't worth it, and reviews are good for sussing that sort of thing out.

For a lot of people reviews are becoming useless because so much money for games is about the pre-order, not the post-release reception. There's less incentive to make your product amazing if the pre-order numbers have already made you money.

What Nominal said + the fact that reviewers are generally ultra-fanboys who will be cut off of all freebies, passes, early looks or info or games if they write negative reviews of a company ever.

Game reviews are only worthless because they are. Unlike movies, games are too expensive to buy and cumbersome to steal without having some sense of what you're in for, and the slow death of rentald and demos means you're increasingly reliant on professional reviewers. Let's Plays and the like are nice, but they can't convey things like play control, level design, balance, and stability. On paper, game critics are essential.

In real life, game critics are inexplicably terrible at their jobs. They structure their reviews like a 10th grader's B+ paper on Sense and Sensibility. They talk to their audience like they've never played a video game before. They go on long, rambling, pretentious digressions, usually done as first-person accounts of the experience ("I'm all alone in deep space. Or at least, I think I am. Off in the distance, the silent twilight of a trillion roaring balls of hydrogen brings some semblance of calm to my weathered countenance. Then I hear a click, a rattle just around the corner. I ready my weapon. The ravaged visages of my dead family, killed by The Fallen, flash across my mind. It's time to party.")

Okay honestly I got sidetracked writing space commando fanfiction and forgot my point.