I get plenty of value from reviews. First thing I do is check negative reviews to see if many of them are talking about similar problems. Positive reviews are a very mixed bag, but the negative side is usually decent for highlighting major issues and much faster than forum crawling. Positive reviews are mostly just simping, but if someone I know has good taste posts one or it's getting a lot of comparisons to other games I like I'll give it a second look if I was on the fence.

It's a tool, that used along with others informs the consumer. It's not ideal as a sole metric, but it's useful to look at aggregate opinions.