In fairness, I don't think the gamespot review was as guilty of this. But I agree that it seemed rather....a waste of time (for lack of a better phrase) that most reviews spend so much time talking about the graphics, and so little time talking about the story or the new features when, in fact, it's been known by most who have followed the development of this game that graphics was never going to be it's selling point.
IMO, that would be like spending 75% of a review talking about Halo2's character development, rather than focussing on the fact it's a FPS and discussing aspects that are most sought after in a FPS.