It is the echo chamber effect. Everyone says it’s bad, so it must be bad. When in fact, it’s a rather decent game. It was slightly panned at the time it came out, because it offered almost no innovation. Though in retrospect, 30 years later, what difference does that make?
Honestly, I think the main issue with this game is that its starting level, the forest maze, is rather awful. If you manage to get through that, it’s rather worth playing and certainly on par with the first two.