You can't trust these reviews, for the most part the people online gaming journalism sites hire have no knowledge of the hobby's history or the development process, thus they are not fit for examination on a technical level. Because of that, they cannot easily extrapolate the good from the bad and usually tend to ignore problems because they simply can't put a name to it.
In other words, if something feels "wrong" but they cannot figure out exactly what it is (because they know nothing of the hobby's history and its regular problems) then they will assume nothing is wrong.
That's the gist of what reviewers on GameStop and most publications do. You're either stuck with paper publications that are tainted by advertisement money that essentially forces them to give good scores to high profile titles just so that publishers will provide them with more advertising in order to compete with the online gaming journalism spectrum or online publications run by idiots.
I can already tell you some things about Fallout 3 that most reviews will not, the game crashes, it has frequent lockups, there are security problems with the PC version, there is too much copy and paste in Metro areas, leveling is far too fast and you hit level 20 before the half-way point, the writing is terrible with your character stating the obvious for Intelligence checks and NPCs responding in kind, the game is severely inaccurate in regards to the previous titles in the series (Jet is on the East Coast with no explanation for one thing, Vault-Tec for whatever reason has an FEV testing center - and we all know what "game" had that, Brotherhood of Steel, the shitty console game) and at worst anachronistic, AI pathfinding is atrocious, NPCs will get themselves killed by falling off ledges, disappearing or simply dying from mysterious causes, you will find the most powerful guns within the first ten hours of gameplay (out of around fifty), you can max most skills out (around six out of thirteen if you barely plan), there are several useless perks (Strong Back, Little Leaguer) and almost all of these perks are boring skill bonuses.
There is graphical pop up, the party member NPC trading is broken, the hacking and lock picking minigames make no sense and the only reason to improve the related skills is because it allows you to actually attempt infiltration at higher levels (or else they are locked), the game is far too easy with Very Hard being equivalent to Easy on the original Fallouts, the ending vignettes have been removed and the ending is simply atrocious, VATS aiming calculations are broken with pistols outclassing rifles in distance and accuracy.
The list goes on and on. You're only going to be seeing the positives if you read any of those reviews.
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