all gameplay becomes repetitive after a while

well, there's repetitive and then there's repetitive... there are some games where you'll have millions of options to beat various enemies, but you figure out pretty quickly that spamming one or two combos kills pretty much everything in five seconds, and then there's others where things may be the same moves over and over, but you don't even notice because the developers actually hit on something that stays fresh throughout the combat loop.

and then there's games that fall somewhere in the middle.

that being said considering this is a gaming 'journalist' we're probably dealing with somebody whose "gamer cred" was they once played candy crush for fourteen hours straight