We chat about videogames and videogame accessories.

So, on the one hand GTA's score is really dumb
I mean, it very well could be the Prophesied Ultimate Car Stealing Game but 97 is still ridiculous

On the other hand, the way metacritic works seems to, on the whole, produce very accurate predictions of game success (at least in a relative sense). They can't prevent individual reviewers from inflating their scores like crazy, but relative metacritic scores (at least if you change the range from 60-100) are pretty close to how popular the game ends up being among the "core gamer audience". You could put that down to people buying games based on review score, but if that's really the reason then I'd expect to see more people complaining about how the games they bought sucked.
It would be stupid to expect game reviewer scores to track my tastes, since I like things that aggravate a lot of people, and dislike things that are normally considered fun. No system of reviewing can actually capture "good-game-ness", because that's a matter of taste. Majority taste is pretty much the best we can hope to predict.