Valve Software has announced that the Steam community recommendations system has now evolved into Steam Reviews, a bonafide user reviews system for the popular digital games distribution platform:

Users considering a purchase on Steam may now browse reviews from friends and the community, leave comments on reviews, and indicate which reviews they found helpful.

Once a user has played a game or used a software title on Steam, they are able to write a review of that product and share their experience with everyone on Steam.

Steam Reviews is an evolution of the Recommendation system that has been a part of Steam since 2010. Over the past few years, Steam users have written over 7 million Recommendations of games and software to their friends. Those Recommendations have been upgraded to Steam Reviews. As such, users may now choose to make their past Recommendations visible as Reviews to everyone on Steam, if they wish, by visiting their list of Reviews and changing the settings accordingly.

Like most other new features launched on the Steam service, Steam Reviews kicks is considered to be in beta. Although the reviews don't presently attribute an aggregate score to a game, Valve explains that such functionality is in the works:

Many products on Steam change significantly over time as the game or software is updated and new content is added. In order to form a score that accurately reflects the current state of a product, we first need to gather and evaluate the data from reviews.

Metacritic scores will reportedly also still be shown on store pages alongside Steam Reviews. Find out more over at store.steampowered.com/reviews.