I would agree with the difficulty curve in SoTN, even though it never really bothered me.
As for Yahtzee's reviews, I never really liked them. The humor never appealed to me, and some of his points can seem pretty biased or badly constructed like the free roaming thing mentioned in the LoS reviews. A better criticism would be explaining why the stage-by-stage approach is actually detrimental to LoS's gameplay design. Thankfully, Yahtzee makes up for his bad reviews with some pretty decent games.