For what it's worth...
The reviewers in the Yahoo!, Gamespot and 1Up reviews all had final code for about three weeks. We're fairly sure that they played the game because we could see their activation keys. Any technical problems they had with the game were addressed to us (and they had almost none.)
So the quality of the review is based on their experience with the title, and Midway respects that. Each of these reviewers are professional and knowledgeable, and I personally hold them in high esteem.
NEEDLESS to say, their experiences have been quite different than ours. I STILL play the demo mission single-player part, and I showed it personally to 300 people at E3, who invariably said "Aw, COOL." The demo skirmish gave everybody a taste of the multiplayer component and a sense of what hero mode can do in multiplayer.
Personally, I've never doubted that R&F is more fun than AOEIII. There's just too much innovation in Hero Command to ignore that what we've ALWAYS wanted to do in an RTS is get down there and smack fools around like all our troops.
I agree the most so far with Yahoo!'s statement here: “If you've ever gotten the sense in an RTS that it's all those little guys down on the map who are having all the fun, then this game is your chance to join in” It's the first thing I recognized about R&F when I started in January 05, it's the first thing I discussed with the folks at Stainless, it's the idea that really captured the imaginations of our competition when they first saw it, and it was extremely popular with all the gameplay testers, internal and external.
R&F has legs, it's fun, and in our experience, these reviews just miss that a little bit.