Its OXM, can you expect much more? Most games journalism surround reviews is pretty awful....actually most games journalism is all round awful. The main issue being there is no target demographic. You also have the issue that it seems most children and teens cannot read or write without it being digitally displayed for them. It boils down the fact that the reviewer had no idea of the subject matter and had done no background work, claiming its a clone because it uses the same button layout for weapon selecting? Sorry how many games use Y or Tri to swap weapons? Or how many racing games use the left stick to steer? Yes it may have the same play style as Gears but when was the last time you heard them complaining then yet another CoD game was coming out? Or another football game?
The quality of journalism is in general decline anyway, at the rate people consume information and the rate it is published, and the fact there can be mass up roar for misleading information most websites post exactly what they are told and not much else. Its very easy to put Space Marine in and find what is exactly the same article 100+ times on many websites.
There will come a point for a lot of things where information is directed into a single stream, it happened with newspapers, they originally only reported on specific subject matter now most papers are tabloids reporting on everything from politics to what famous people ate for dinner. It's already happening to an extent on website such as Kotaku, who have for a long time just posted a snippet of information and then link to the original article on another site. Services such as reddit are the same just user powered. Metacritic is the be all and end all of poor journalism. People who use it (out goes the rational argument) should be shot. The idea of collating numbers and not written words, not that they evidently have any value anymore, into one large database to give an overall opinion is ridiculous. It harks to the days of mass societal acceptance! Does this look cool? Well instead of making an informed opinion for myself I will ask a mass of people and then make my decisions that way. I can't wait till someone gets asked to marry someone and it goes as a facebook status asking what the reply should be and a poll vote.
But I digress, (see I told you the rational argument went out of the window didn't I!) The fact is the number system is floored to its very core. Nothing have be represented by a number in depth, "Oh I gave it a 10, the game is awful but wow it look better then real life"...and the devs paid £/$1k to get it. The way to go with games like this are demos, thats what they are for to let you evaluate the game, do you go out and ask is it time to go to the loo before you do so? The issue is devs have become aware that people do listen to reviews and that is why demos are losing momentum and are getting thin on the ground. If you can get a 9 review (from a system that really never goes much lower then a 7) a lot of users will buy it if they have nothing else to go on. If it get a 9 review but the player gets a demo and doesn't like it, not matter what happens they won't buy the game. That is often why demos are more action packed then the game as a whole and often seem to cut abruptly short to leave the player wanting more, they are also often easier then the end game will be to make the player feel more comfortable with the game and get more reward from playing it then they would otherwise receive.
Also +1 reading skill for getting to the end of my post and if you agree with my post you will get an angry nerd available to your landing party
Also nerd trivia here, Contra had 3rd person sections inside enemy bases, you moved through fixed screens, it was amazing (and hard) but it was a 3rd person shooter, in historical terms the first TPS is accepted to be Radar scope (either 78 or 79) an angled top down shooter giving the idea of depth, while by todays standards its known as a fixed shooter (as there are that many games out there and TPS wasn't a term used then) as on one screen (like space invaders) and angle does change it from top down to 3rd person. Devastators in 88 was the first TPS in the way we think of them now, that lovely old coin-op.