1/3
3 Years of Service
As was already said, can't review it unless you use it. By the same token, I'm skeptical of many reviews, particularly when they are are outliers. Kind of like movies or TV shows where the critic reviews are glowing, but the "Rotten Tomatoes" reviews, driven by independent viewers, are consistently much, much worse or critic panning with high levels of public review praise. Paid critics can often be swayed or may be agenda driven - but I'll not take that thought further as politics really has no place here.User driven reviews will always be terrible
I don't think we have many (probably no) paid reviewers in a place like this, but on something like Patreon, SubscribeStar or Steam you might. I've often thought that the extreme negative reviews on boards like this for VNs like Eternum, Ripples, Artemis and other highly rated mainstream VNs are by rivals, friends of rivals, or just outright trolls that hate to see success that isn't their own. If I look to reviews for a VN, I tend to read them the way I learned to read a scatter plot - ignore the outliers to a large degree and see where the cluster falls. If there are too few points or no clear pattern, take your chances if you like the art style, move it down the list if you don't.