Why is "Silver Surfer" in particular always criticized for having deadly walls etc?

[Peter1986]

It seems like "Silver Surfer" for the NES has taken a lot of unfair criticism lately, and I suspect that this is because of Angry Video Game Nerd's rant video of that game.
A lot of "Silver Surfer review" videos on YouTube follow roughly the same formula - about 50% consists of complaining about how the walls kill you, and the other 50% consists of swearing over the enemy attacks and how much the game sucks for being "too hard" - they really aren't "reviews", they are more like rants (one exception is AqualungGameReviews' video of that game, which can actually count as a thorough review).
But isn't this exactly how a lot of other space shooters work?
Ever played some of the Gradius games, for example?
All of the first major Gradius games from the NES and SNES era have deadly walls and tons of projectiles swarming the player all the time - especially on the last few stages.
Sometimes it is even almost impossible to survive if you haven't boosted your ship enough, because you will keep getting attacked from all sides and it's almost impossible to avoid all enemies and projectiles.
This is also true in Life Force, where the final stage is absolutely insane and throws all kinds of stuff at your from every direction - it's practically a "bullet hell" type of stage.
Oh, and yes, you get killed by everything on the screen, including small stones and essentially anything that isn't the background.

I never hear people complain about these things in those games, but in Silver Surfer it seems like a very big deal.

[Rez09]

If I were to guess, I suspect the size of your 'ship' in Silver Surfer compounds the issue more than in most other games from the era, and the game has a steeper difficulty curve than most of its contemporaries in general.

Welcome to the forums, by the by.

[Peter1986]

If I were to guess, I suspect the size of your 'ship' in Silver Surfer compounds the issue more than in most other games from the era, and the game has a steeper difficulty curve than most of its contemporaries in general.

Welcome to the forums, by the by.

Thanks.

Yes, I guess that's the reason.
I personally don't really consider "Silver Surfer" too great of a game, although I dont consider it that horrible either.
It has a few issues that make the gameplay much trickier than it needs to be - like the ambiguous foregrounds and backgrounds, the large sprite of Silver Surfer himself and also the fact that there is no autofire function.
But apart from those flaws, I think Silver surfer has potential, it just needed to be fixed a bit.
I don't mind the intense difficulty - it's pretty fun to figure out solutions to each section, and it is wonderfully rewarding when you actually do get past them - but sometimes the graphics themselves are an obstacle.