It wasn't that B&W was bad. It was frontloaded. In other w rds, all these reviewers played for a little bit of time and saw all this cool stuff so gave it great reviews. But all the "wow" stuff is gone in the first fifteen. The game almost seemed designed to give a better impression of itself in the first couple hours sopecifically to get a good review. Because a lot of reviews, the common reviews at Time or even major magazines, can only oput a few hours into a game before the review deadline is due.
The problem was, past the first few minutes it was nothing special. I think Greg Kasavin commented on this. Gamespot gave B&W a very VERY good review. But on looking back he commented that their review was way over mark and they had been seduced by the short term hype. After playing the game for a long period, even a week over a few hours or days, he said their review was way too generous.