I don't think there's any question that that's what caused so many low scores. Arena was one of several similar top-down planar space shooters released around the same time (including Star Trek and BattleStar Galactica tie-ins) and it was streets ahead at every measurable level--better gameplay, more options, better visuals, more players in multiplayer and so on.
The more worrisome thing, though, is that we live in an age when everyone from you people to developers themselves use a single "metacritic" score to decide how to think about something. I mean, that's *insane*. How insane? For the benefit of idiots, I will give it a numerical ranking so you don't have to read any further explanation: it is 743 insane units.
Criticism isn't some scientific measure of whether or not something has merit, it's one person's opinion influenced by their particular school of thought. That second part is key, because it informs the whole thing. Different reviews have different value to different people. You're all sci-fi geeks--every professional critic with a string of letters after his name and deep thoughts about cinema and culture and so on is probably going to tell you that the last space movie you enjoyed was a tremendous puffy waste of time. You all implicitly understand that he's not the audience and you don't listen to him.
And Arena isn't being reviewed by some intelligent person who thinks but just doesn't happen to line up with what you enjoy. It's being reviewed by slobbering cynical half-brains who aren't remotely professional writers--they're bloggers paid by Red Bull to push .gifs of dinosaurs drinking energy drinks next to whatever text block they can spit out quickly.
Those people shouldn't decide what they're allowed to eat for breakfast, much less the success or failure of a video game.
(Sadder: companies pay outside developers like Gaia their bonuses based on metacritic scores. I don't know the financials here, but they suck for some cool people who tried to do right by us.)
