A game can hold strong critical reviews and a poor user rating at the same time. The two systems are not competing accounts of the same thing.
The populations that write them differ completely
Critics review games assigned to them, including titles they would not have chosen, and they write about every significant release regardless of personal enthusiasm.
Players write when motivated, and motivation is strongest at the extremes, which means user ratings are assembled disproportionately from people who loved or hated the experience.
The result is a distribution with heavy ends and a thin middle, which behaves very differently from a set of considered assessments across a scale.
They are written at different moments
Critical reviews are produced before or around launch, often on controlled builds with support available and sometimes on hardware provided for the purpose.
Player reviews accumulate afterwards, on retail servers under real load, across every hardware configuration, and include the first weeks of patches and outages.
Many complaints in user reviews therefore concern conditions that did not exist when the critical review was written, which is a timing difference rather than a disagreement.
User ratings absorb things outside the game
Players use reviews to register objections to storefront exclusivity, account requirements, monetisation changes and company decisions unrelated to the software itself.
Coordinated campaigns can move a rating substantially in a short period, and the resulting figure reflects an organised response rather than accumulated play.
Storefronts have introduced tools to identify these episodes, which is an acknowledgement that the number measures more than one thing.
Expectation is set by price and promise
A critic assesses a game partly against its ambitions, while a player assesses it against what they were led to expect for the money they spent.
A competent game that was marketed as extraordinary can score well critically and poorly with players for reasons that have nothing to do with quality.
That gap is largest where marketing was heaviest, which is why the disagreement appears most often on the largest releases.
Both are useful for different questions
Critical reviews are stronger on craft, structure and how a game compares to others in its genre, since the writer has played many of them recently.
User reviews are stronger on durability, technical condition and whether the game holds up beyond the opening hours, because they are written after far more play.
Reading the two as answers to different questions extracts more from both than treating a divergence as evidence that one of them is dishonest.