I just beat Pyschonauts today. It was fun and the Milkman Conspiracy was absolutely amazing. I didn't find Meat Circus to be difficult at all. Sure, I died a few times, but there was nothing that struck me as particularly difficult. IMO, the only problem with Psychonauts was when it made you collect 800 arrowheads to buy the cobweb duster.

Well, the same question may be ask for many other games, like Max Payne, BG or GTA: San An. Or music, for example Metallica. Or movies, like Matrix.
One thing i've learned, is that some questions are better left without an answer, even though they are good questions.;)
In the age of internet, when everybody seems to be a homegrown critic [-> imdb, and all those "10/10 'cause i liek it"] and when big companies get interested in pre-release reviews [-> cnet's gamespot/metecritic and their 8/10 2 weeks before release and 5/10 a month later] i wouldn't pay much attention to certain reviews. Some things will be underrated, and other things will be overrated no matter how much sense one's arguments have.

Is it because people who played Psychonauts aren't usually used to platformers? Because while Meat Circus was hard, it wasn't half as hard as the last levels in many other platformers.
The levels in Psychonauts were all interesting, varied and original. The gameplay was fine. You gained new moves and powers that allowed you to access more and more previously inaccessible areas, and there were some cool things to find along the way to collecting things. Don't really know what else people were expecting from the platforming...

I'm about halfway through (currently in "Gloria's Theater"). So far I think it's a fantastic game, not so much for the gameplay mechanics as for the dialogue and sheer creativity. It is well worth the $10 I spent when GOG released it, let alone the ridiculous $2 deal on Steam last week.

God, how I hate App Store Reviews. "1 star! It wasn't free!" Really, asshole? That means you bought this app just to tell us how much you were displeased with its price. What's even worse is that some people do it with $10 and $20 apps!

On another note, Bad Company 2 received a 9.5 score from Game Informer. The game's still in beta, for crying out loud.

Personally I loved the game. The first level sucks. If that's where you are, play past that.
FYI, you NEED to play it with a gamepad, though - or it's unplayable. I used my legacy sidewinder. Worked fine.
After Alice, probably my favorite PC platformer. Sadly, it's turned into a rather neglected genre.
I think the major problem with the game now is that it suffers from years of critical acclaim to the point that no matter how good it is, it won't measure up to expectations (unless it's Planescape - which really is that good). When I bought it years back, it was a game no one heard of relegated to the bargain bin. It's a very quirky, funny, very good platform game with memorable level design and stylized character design. That's it. The story isn't Planescape. The gameplay isn't Ninja Gaiden.

This. I'm still on that level, and I haven't played it for quite some time, having gotten frustrated with it by now. I hate, let me stress that, HATE unforgiving timed jumping puzzles. That is one reason I quit PoP:SoT very quickly.
The rest of Psychonauts has, for me, been amazing. Some people seem to equate a story about children with a children's story, which is a big mistake.

Exactly!
There's a band, maybe not the most awesome band ever, but they have a neat lyric somewhere.
"Just cause you don't understand what's going on don't mean it don't make no sense
And just cause you don't like it, don't mean it ain't no good" - Suicidal Tendencies "You can't bring me down"
Taste =\= quality. They should tattoo that on all the foreheads of those dumb a-holes who go "the graphikz suxx 1/10", "i leik it 10/10". As if i was in the head of the reviewer and knew his taste better than the contents of my pants.;P
[Oh, don't be offended by the "i leik" part;P]

I still rate Psychonauts as the #1 platform game of all time.
Of course, there were issues, the two main ones being the rising water in the meat circus, and the double jump on from the knife throwers knifes on the rotating boards, everyone i know who played it spend at least 1+ hour on THAT jump, the rest of the game just rocks.
If you dont love Lungfishopolis, Milkman Conspiracy and Velvetopia i dare say you have no soul :)

I've had Psychonauts on my to-do list for a while, but didn't actually start playing until I read this topic.
Thanks, OP, for bringing me around to playing one of the best platformers I've ever played.
I agree with what OIS said, except that I played it with a gamepad. Maybe modern platformers are much easier than those that I grew up on in the 90s, but I found Psychonauts pretty forgiving. On top of that, there's the unlimited continues, generous save/load capabilities, and the show-me-how-to-beat-the-boss bacon (something that always made me laugh).

I ended up going through all the tips (long after actually beating the relevant enemies) just because they were so amusing. I particularly loved the one where the conversation quickly turned into a discussion of whether a hyphenated word is actually one or two words. Any game that can make discussions of grammar humorous is clearly doing something right as far as I'm concerned.