Game Journal: Getting Past Technical Issues

I've been taking a bit of a break from console gaming (aside from a bit of Halo 3 with my brother) - I've been focusing mostly on playing Chrono Trigger (DS). However, I have a new game incoming from GameFly - The Last Remnant. The reviews weren't encouraging, but almost all of them focused on one aspect of the title - the technical issues. To me, that's a little dense and I'll tell you why. For starters, there are quite a few games in the past that received high praises where certain technical issues continually emerged. One that I can think of off the top of my head is Mass Effect. I loved the game, critics loved the game. What's the problem? The texture popping is out of this world, and it didn't get much better when I installed the game to the hard drive. Let's not even get me started on Fable II.

Now, I haven't played The Last Remnant yet, so it may be that the technical issues are too much to get past, but from what I hear, the extra polish that was applied to the PC version of the game actually makes it a very good game. My question is, why can't reviewers push past the technical issues and actually review the game play itself. Several reviews I read spent half of the review or more discussing the technical issues and not much time on the game play itself, the story or the innovations.

So, I'm actually looking forward to trying the game out, especially after hearing several people express their thoughts on the PC version and how well done the game is overall. If I can learn to tune out the texture issues in Mass Effect and the myriad bugs in Fable II and still really enjoy the games, I'm sure I can with The Last Remnant, as well.