I don't know, I've lost a lot of respect for Jim's reviews during this past year. I think part of the reason people have issues when he likes / dislikes games is that he seems to arbitrarily hold them up to different standards. You can't be considered reliable if you do that, and that's not a good thing when you're supposed to be a professional reviewer. If a game is, say, criticized heavily for being repetitive (Mad Max for example), then other games that are also repetitive (MGSV) should be criticized for it as well even if the reviewer likes them more. That's where the professionalism comes in. It's no wonder that some people would get upset if he bashes a game that they like for something and then praises another one that has the same flaws without giving a reason why. Or even mentioning that fact (that it has the same flaws). His reviews have given me too many of those wtf moments this year. I'm not saying that the issue mentioned isn't real, you can see it on almost every review site, but in Jim's case I do think it's partly self - inflicted.
I would say that those people either misunderstand what critics do or confer much greater importance on critics than they actually merit. Possibly both. Probably both, actually.
At the end of the day, professional reviewers are professional opinion havers. Hopefully (likely), they'll offer an informed opinion simply by virtue of the fact that they interact with so much different material, but it's still an opinion, inevitably colored by their personal predilections, personal biases, personal politics, whathaveyou, most of which is arbitrary - you really can't review stuff like art, or literature, or film, or games objectively. Beyond certain disclosures which, granted, ought to be made (review copies and so forth) that's fine. A good reviewer probably isn't going to be unbiased, but they are going to be engaging and insightful to an audience whose tastes and preferences will likely already align with their own. That's how that particular sort of criticism works.
Still just an opinion, and everyone's quite capable of forming those. Personally, to speak to your specific examples - while I haven't played either Mad Max or MGS5, I can envision reasons (arbitrary, for sure) why I'd put up with certain annoyances in one over the other (for example, I'd rather run around post-apocalyptic Australia in a weathered hotrod than creep around Afghanistan in my tighty blueys on a horse, and I find Mad Max's lore and world building fun and engaging, whereas I find MGS's lore and world building inscrutable and idiotic). Like Jim Sterling, and every other reviewer, I'm a human, and my biases color my opinions.
This is why, for example, I find the reaction that Polygon review got to be so mystifying and absurd. A single reviewer, out of thousands, informed by his experience, made a sociological criticism in an otherwise positive review that you (not you you, general you) disagreed with, and this is any sort of deal, let alone a big deal? It's something that literally doesn't matter. Critics you disagree with can be freely disregarded - they do not measurably affect anything apart from informing people who already agree with them.
Also why I feel that a certain "movement" is founded primarily on something else entirely, but that's a different argument. And this is all, of course, just one man's opinion.
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