I thought I recalled reading some negative reviews for this game on the store page, that now seem to be deleted/censored, is this the way GOG is moving?

I just went through the reviews on the store page and it's got a 3.1/5 rating, 4.3/5 from verified owners. There's 12 English reviews (what my default is), 2 1 star, 1 2 star. If I include all languages there's 5 1 star, 1 2 star ratings.

Yeah, I was wondering if they were censored as I saw a review stating the game's story was full of SJW jarate.

It's gone.

I think I'm most of the way through the game & I'd disagree with that assment, but I don't think real reviews should be removed.

There's still a whole lot of negative reviews here and they're mostly "real reviews", i. e. they have an issue with the game's gameplay, graphics, game design, features. And that's okay.

However, GOG has pretty clear rules about what constitutes a review and what does not. A lot of games that deal with social issues, have female protagonists or don't have much of a budget are often bombarded with negative reviews that aren't really reviews. And with some shock I've come to realize this year that some of those reviewers would actually say a lot of things that simply aren't true just to justify their one star review.

Sadly, that happens far more often on GOG than it does e.g. on Steam. For example, Cloudpunk has an excellent "very positive" rating on Steam with over 9000 reviews and counting. Here, it has an odorous 3.1 rating based on 13 reviews, and the most helpful review pinned at the top is (as almost always) a one star rating. That is a form of extremely common abuse here, because negative reviewers will serially downvote everyone who liked the game.

Now GOG's business clients see that negativity, they compare that to Steam, then compare sales GOG vs. Steam, and that almost always means they turn their back to GOG because why bother? So I guess I'm okay with GOG deleting some reviews that are more of the frothing at the mouth hate garbage slander kind of utterance. :|

Steam only allows Steam owners of the game to post reviews, GOG allows anyone. Steam has a 89% total/84% recent overall positive score (from only owners, which is disappointing when I review a game I own on GOG), GOG has a 86% overall positive from owners, 56% by unverified owners. One of the 1 star unverified owner reviews didn't even review the game, just complained about GOG (I reported that one, it's not an actual game review)

I normally just look at the verified owner reviews if the # is low.

Good idea. I really don't see what GOG gains from reviews that weren't written by people who don't even own the game.

I assumed it had to with the fact that with the "old" games there's many users who already own them. so why not let them review it. IE games pre-2015 or so.