trip1eX, I get what you mean, and it is a much larger issue.
It is a very tricky rope to walk across because it all comes down to the whole "greater/less than the sum of its parts?" argument. In this case, while the game looked beautiful, sounded decent, and controlled fine, it just wasn't fun to play. I'll also still stand by my reasoning for the gameplay score and the final score. Half of the gameplay was good and half of it was bad. About 40% or so of the final game was good and the rest was bad.
As a note to everyone that's speaking up about this review and its scores, I'm enjoying this thread even though my review's getting questioned. None of you guys are throwing out personal attacks, and that's great.
Note: After saying that, this is probably going to get slammed by some Sonic fan site.