I'd say I'm surprised, but I remember a few hatch jobs that were done back when I was part of the industry. Ones I could name off the top of my head include one of the Football Managers (published by Sega) where the entire critique of the game was quite bluntly 'The game isn't Fifa, doesn't play like Fifa, and therefore the game should be avoided like the plague with a rating of 1/10 (at the time I think?) to boot' and IGN eventually posted a retraction and apologised to Sega because well, Football Manager ISN'T a football simulator, it's a football management simulator, after all the people who read this went 'Wait, did this guy really do his job, because he looks like he's trying to project a game he wanted, as opposed to reviewing the game that was actually there?'.
Of course, no one remembers the retraction posted. There's also been other games that have had retractions after the fact, but it's just the nature that most miss the retraction.
Then there was Operation Darkness on the Xbox 360, where there was a two reviewer coordinated hatch job where two of the reviewers on the major sites worked in unison to give it the absolutely worst score they could because the game personally offended them, and I remember this because I was actually approached by one of the writers to discuss this (but I declined because I wasn't assigned to the game). It mostly worked - the game was about what happened when WW2 met... well, huge amounts of fantasy (ala vampires/warewolves etc), and as the result of the bad publicity, the publisher actually cancelled all development of future games they had planned for the JAPANESE side of things, because of the bad western press.
The game wasn't that great (athough the game was not nearly as bad as the two reviews penned it as), but as far as I can remember, that was my first contact with what you would call a SJW movement within gaming. It's hardly new, and sometimes we get a moral imperative.
Ultimately, a review can only be written as well as the person writing it, (even if we assume no malice) so if they can't play the game very well, it's indicative (at least to the reviewer) about how badly the game's designed.
Of course, if said reviewer has no knowledge of the genre, and understanding of the systems, it's going to look very clumsy to anyone going in with any knowledge of the game whatsoever... which are usually all the people who read the article, because most readers OF a review generally have some background in the game, and go 'Okay, so did the game's PR/hype actually match the content?'
There's usually a reason why most reviewers tend to be specialised in areas, and you always want to see their previous work and match it against yours on other titles. If you're a heavy puzzle player, and you find the reviewer is a massive MMO player, with no apparent interest in puzzle games, it's unlikely they would do a very good job.
For further perspective though, I also remember a conversation when I was at E3 the one year I attended, and I caught up with an executive editor of the US publication of PC Gamer, and he openly bragged to me, while we were at a party at a bar, that he often did reviews for games he never saw anything other than the intitial preview pictures for, and got them published without anyone realising it.
Take from that what you will.
