For better or worse I think they liked the presentation of the first mission and made forward assumptions. It'd be like judging all of Destiny's original story based on the much heavier concentration of cutscenes, one time in-world events (like the Ketch jumping in), and scripting (the lights coming on in the dark room or the Fallen crawling inside the walls, or the Captain dropping down from the suspended Jumpship) we saw in base Destiny's first mission.

House of Wolves gives me some hope that missions further into The Taken King will hold up better, but unless I'm wrong, no reviewers have actually played those later missions or Strikes or the new Raid.

To be fair, if all of Destiny had been like the early missions with cool scripted events, large setpieces, and plentiful cutscenes, it would have been a dramatically better game.