What reviews were wrong? And who said you can't get a reivew wrong while still playing the game? And who's to say someone's opion is wrong?
Too lazy to dig up examples. If we were talking about Joe Schmoe then getting a review wrong is nothing, but we're talking about places that pride themselves on their reviews. They're held to a higher standard.
I'll skip the last question, that's a different subject entirely.
And just to expand a little bit on my above statement, lets look at Dewey's Adventure (since that's one of the things I'm playing right now). The basic mechanics of Dewey's adventure is sliding around in his various forms, stomping with water, freezing with ice, combo and spining with ice, expanding and melting things with steam, lightning strike, making wind by shaking the remote up and down, and making earthquakes by shaking the remote side to side. Those are all of the Dewey gameplay mechanics (aside from a few envinroment cannons and the likes). You don't get any new abilities at any point in the game and you just use and combine those mechanics the whole game. This isn't a bad thing, it's good actually they have a small rule set to base their puzzles on.
So now that I know what Dewey's Adventure is about and I've experienced a good amount of puzzles with each of those, I know what this game is all about. Of course there are puzzles that I haven't experienced because I haven't finished the game, but I still know what the game is about. The story isn't particularly anything interesting and doesn't do a thing to affect the game and won't do a thing to affect the game so there's no worries there.
So there you have it, I'm only a few hours into a game and I could easily talk about all the gameplay aspects of the game along with anything else I needed to talk about a review. Remember, you don't give spoilers in reviews so there's no use talking about and explaining the story in great detail beyond the basic idea.
You can talk about all the gameplay aspects you've seen. You don't know if there could be more. You're assuming based on what you've seen so far, what you've read about the game, and a whole slew of other things that you're right.
Sometimes assumptions are good ones. Not always though.
And even with the other game I'm playing, Eternal Sonata, I'm barely into that game and I'm nearly at a point where I can review it. I'm not going to for a while because I want to finish this game so I don't mind waiting to write a review, but it's nice to know that I can fairly soon. So why can I write a review on this massive RPG while only being 6-ish hours into it? The have simple gameplay that's easy to manipulate to fill an entire long game. True, you get new powers and abilities, but these are still going to be the same tricks just dressed up differently. Line up enemies, get in light or dark, use an area of effect, ect.
Again, you assume for better or worse that the game will not surprise you, it will not switch it up, and will continue to just put out more of what you've already seen.
When you understand the base gameplay it's really easy to see what the game is doing. I know how to do this because this is the kind of stuff I make for a living and reviewers know how to do this because they constantly play these games and have to analyze them. Next time you pop in a game, really think about what you're doing and just start paying attention to the base gameplay. Try to think of a x is fun type of tagline for the game and build from there. Every game has one of those. For any Mario game it's jumping is fun, for Gears of War it's shooting from cover is fun. What quick one liner about the game you're playing is fun?
The moment you become so closed minded as to believe you understand everything about the game you are playing before seeing it all the way through to the end, either you have failed or the game has.
I find that people are too quick to assume and too quick to judge. Once upon a time, when gaming was new to you, when you hadn't experienced all the genres in some form or another, and when gaming still had its shiny wrapper on for you... I'd have trusted your opinion much more.
