I've been part of the Steam reviewing community as a writer for many years now, and currently manage one of the largest, most active curators around. And one of the LAST honest ones i might add.

Without making names, i'll have you know there are many people out there that use the curator system to get a literal truckload of free games, promising reviews in return. Some of them are honest of course, but many more are not and make fraudulent reviews, without even playing the game in some cases!

I'll tell you some tips to spot such scum and avoid them in the future. A practical guide to see if a review is legit or not. Because i absolutely loathe these people, and want to make you aware they exist.

1. Check the reviewer's achievements
Achievements, for those games that have them, are the best indicator to know if someone really played the game or not. Go on the Reviewer's profile and check the game list, then statistics, achievements section. There are two things you need to pay attention to.

The first and most simple, is when the reviewer played an extensive number of hours and has zero achievements. This means with 99% probability, he did not really play the game. It could also be (less probable) that the achievements were added in a later update though, you should check the recent Game News in the Game Hub to see if this is the case. If you see this in multiple reviews of the same person, then there is very little doubt.

But there is more. Some people even use scripts to unlock achievements in an unintended way, to make it look like they played the game... when they did not. To see if it's the case, look at the unlock time of the achievements: if many achievements have been unlocked at the exact same time, down to the minute, it much probably means a script was used to obtain them unfairly.

2. Check the total playtime
Steam indicates how much time a Reviewer spent playing the game before making a review. If you see a review done only after a couple hours, then unless the game is extremely short which can happen, it would mean this person did not play it long enough to give a valid opinion. Use the website "How Long To Beat" if you want to know how long a game takes to finish - then compare it with the review, you will soon know if the reviewer played it enough or not.

Now onto curators, which are another important part of the review community around Steam. There are some red flags to consider when looking at a curator, which can tell you if they really play and review games properly, or not.

1. Absence of negative reviews
Look at the curator page. If you see there are hundreds of reviews (or even thousands in some cases) and none of them - not even ONE - is negative, then with good probability it means this curator writes a positive review no matter what - in exchange for a free review copy of course. The logic is simple: if you review a thousand games, there have to be some bad ones in them, even if you take the best care in selecting them beforehand.

2. No link to a full review in the curations
Curations and reviews are two separate things. A curation is simply a post inside a Curator's review feed, which then should link to a full review on the reviewer's profile, or in some cases on an external website. You can see in the curator's review list a small writing that says "Read the full review here", clicking it will open the "real" review.

If a curator has no links to complete reviews, or very few, then it is a red flag to consider, because any serious reviewer does write a full review, curators that don't do so often are used only for promotion/advertisement in exchange of free keys - which is NOT the right way to do things, but only an abuse of the system.

3. The curator's info description
Always look the about section and the homepage of a curator. If anywhere you see something along the lines of: "For promotion requests contact this address" or "advertisement requests" and so on, that means it's just a curator that spits out positive reviews for free keys, no matter how the game might be bad. A lot of curators do this, more than you think.

That would be all, i hope this helped you in dividing real reviews made by dedicated community members, from fake ones made by clowns.