If Civ V was released under the title "Emperization", I wouldn't buy Emperization 2. I won't buy Civ VI on release but I will have the money for it stashed away if the players (not reviewers, BIG difference) say its good.
Don't rely too much on player reviews either. The marketing departments are still one step ahead of you. Writing fake player reviews is common in the industry. You can hire whole companies who try to raise (or lower, if one wants to badmouth a competitor) a game's review score at popular customer review sites, or in forums.
Play the demo, if there is one. If you consider reviews, I'd suggest staying with those of people you know, or popular figures of a game's fanbase.
Yes, that question has me wondering too... I have heard the rumors regarding the reputation of such review sites, but I still resist to believe they can be true... I wonder if they are.
The publishers pull lots of strings to secure good ratings. Reviewing sites or magazines don't have to succumb to them, but it's very hard to resist - and it's actually economically less viable to write truthful critical reviews.
There was a German review site a couple of years ago that was very candid about the way publishers tried to influence them. Once they even made a list. Items on that list ranged from the not-so-problematic sending of PR material or the "exclusive invitation" to preview a game, to more shady methods such as pre-written reviews (by the marketing department) sent together with the game, to soft pressure (phone calls demanding to know the game's rating before it's being published, subtle hints about the importance of the game's success for further advertising campaigns, hints about how many jobs depend on this game's success - "Do you really want to be responsible that all these people lose their jobs?"), to open threats (canceling of advertising campaigns), to secret deals with the chief editor (who then overrules negative reviews and "adjusts" the game's rating), to actual secret contracts (see below), to having the publisher's legal department attack the reviewer (there was one instance where publisher wanted to censor a magazine's bad review of one of its games, and threatened to sue for damage compensation if the magazine went into print uncensored).
Once they had an interview with an ex-marketing guy which was very revealing. They also published a contract in which a publisher and a reviews magazine declared to support each other in the marketing campaign for a new game. The magazine received a substantial sum of money, which of course was not paid directly for a good rating, but for the magazine's work in creating advertisements and raising awareness for the game. The original offer from the publisher even included to pay the magazine 2 Euro per sold copy of the game, but only if a minimum of sales was reached, with a further incentive to pay up to 5 Euro per game if the game sold really well.
All this has been known for years, it just doesn't change anything. People apparently prefer to run with the hype, and even if they have been burned, they will still run with the next hype if the marketing tells them that the developers have "learned" and "reacted" to any fan criticism and "improved" the game. The simple method of saying "The fans (didn't) want that, we listened to them" is so ludicrously successful that it belongs to the main strategies of every marketing department by now (see 2K Elizabeth's attempt of justifying the move to Steam DRM by saying "The fans demanded that"; she never answered the question where these "fan demands" actually happened.)
2K / Take2 will of course have tried to influence the ratings, doing that is in the job description of every marketing department in the industry. We just don't know how subtle or overt the respective attempts were.
But hope's not lost as long as there are modders out there.
WHY IS IT SO DAMN SLOW BETWEEN TURNS? 
