"You should play the game for yourself instead of reading reviews" has the same energy as "you should buy your own [video streaming service] account instead of sharing a login."
Which is to say, yes you should take reviews with a grain of salt, but pay close attention to who is writing the review. A review outlet isn't one person; there are most often multiple people who write reviews for the outlet, and each person will have their own tastes, experience, and expertise.
Find someone whose tastes generally align with your own, or someone who has put a lot of time in a particular genre and knows it backwards and forwards, and listen to their opinions. Someone who puts a lot of time into character-action games (Bayonetta, Devil May Cry, etc.) and says that Hi-Fi Rush, a game that got released with zero fanfare and even less marketing, is a good game gets my attention immediately.
Not to mention publishers would love nothing more than for their audience to be good little consumers and purchase games sight-unseen, especially with how many games coming out that are live-service battle-pass FOMO nonsense that live and die by early install/purchase/adoption numbers being high.







