It's not that uncommon for reviewers to be out of step with the views of gamers; currently Mario Party 8 has an average user review of 9.0 on Gamerankings.com while it only has an average review score of 70%.
The way this works is reviewers often give bad reviews to games that don't include certain features or the features are poorly implemented; many gamers may have no interest in those features so not being included (or being poorly implemented) isn't a negative at all. For example, Mario Party 8 has had several reviewers mention that it doesn't include online play ... to a certain extent this does sound like a negative but the fun in these games usually comes from local multiplayer; I couldn't imagine that these games would be any more fun in online multiplayer mode as in single player mode.
