Rinelk it was more to do with the way I read your review it would appear that the whole reason it gets 4 stars is because of no online play. I constantly see here and on BGG the same voices complaining about multi player but then see not many people available to play a lot of games multiplayer, especially after the initial rush is over.
So your view is that even the people who claim to value multiplayer don't back that up with their behavior, right? That makes sense to me, and it's pretty much what I've heard from several devs, but here are two reasons to suspect that people available to play online may not be the ideal gauge. First, I suspect what a lot of people who want online multiplayer want to do is play with friends--these people aren't going to show up as seeking a game. Indeed, I imagine that those who've played against random opponents sometimes friend those opponents who suit them and then play against them preferentially or exclusively, so even if the number of online games were constant, you'd expect the number of available online players to decrease over time. Second, it might be the case that people play online rarely but value that experience highly.
Both of these are true of me. I very rarely play online against random people except when I want to check the robustness of online capabilities for a review. However, there are some folks I met on BGG and some old friends who've moved away whom I'd quite like to play a game with (indeed, one of them recently posted in a private Facebook group for BGG RSP participants that she was downloading this very game, and looking forward to playing online with the rest of us. She was crestfallen to learn there was no online play). I'd happily pay the asking price of most apps for even a single game with members of my various game groups over the years--that would be about the best I could hope for out of a digital boardgame experience (though I agree that it would be much less sociable than in-person play). I've also played in some tournaments here at Pocket Tactics, and for a long time after them would occasionally start games with the people I friended for the purpose. I still play Ascension every day, very rarely online, but it wouldn't have become my go-to five-minute game if it weren't for the online games I played in the past. Titan is an even more extreme example--I only played that online ten times or so, but they were so fun I haven't deleted off my iPad even though I haven't played in over a year. Heck, at this point I don't even remember how to play, I just like seeing the icon and activating my positive associations with it.
All of that said, I still think there's a lot of truth to the claim that many of the people who claim to really want online play are inaccurate predictors of their own behavior. I remember seeing a tweet a bit ago about people who vocally supported a boycott of some major game, juxtaposed with evidence from Steam that they not only bought that game, but played a ton of it. So it's absolutely true that skepticism of claims that multiplayer is necessary is justified. I just think that some of the evidence used to justify that skepticism reflects the values of the person making the argument more than they notice (as is true of science generally; this is not the sort of criticism which justifies dismissing science whenever it's uncomfortable).