I don’t want to go back into the depths of time to try to remember an obscure game I played decades ago. So I’ll do a recent one that people didn’t necessarily hate, but didn’t like as much as its predecessor and were pretty open about it.
Doom: The Dark Ages
I ended up liking it more than Eternal. It wasn’t as fast paced, even though it was still fast, but you could FEEL the combat more in Dark Ages. The devs made the movement and hits FEEL more substantial. I was skeptical about the shield, but ended up loving it. Chaining together the shield attack, melee attack, and gunplay felt great. I liked the levels more than Eternal too. And they added a lot of lore to deepen the Doom universe. Main story was whatever, but that’s typical for the Doom franchise.
Ngl, I’ve really enjoyed Fallout 76. It’s still a lot of people’s least favourite in the franchise, despite the updates over the years, but it’s a lot of fun!
I played for a few hours because I got it for free. I’ve been begging my gaming buddies to give it a shot but the initial impressions and reviews still have them scared.
Seemed pretty cool imo
I was nervous to try it because of initial reviews too ngl but then I tried it and realised how much better it is than the mess I heard it was at launch!
I didnt think Starfield was as bad as folks say.
I had a lot more fun with Starfield once I stopped forcing myself to try to explore all planets. Once I realized they were all copy/paste with the same copy/paste bases I just started ignoring them. Game was more than long enough without them anyway.
Starfield is “fine” if you compare it to stock Skyrim or fallout 4.
It continues the aggravating tradition of being a rubber-banded pseudo-sandbox with just enough randomness to make you realize how little randomness there is in the game.
Everyone is just saying actually popular games, but ones they don’t think are popular enough. If people don’t have to look up the game, it’s probably not answering this question (with a few infamous exceptions maybe).
Mine would be Stationeers. There’s no real action or anything. It’s a game about designing, building, managing, and automating a station on another world. Each world has its own issues, be that Luna with a vacuum, Mars (the easiest) with storms, no breathable atmosphere, and cold, Venus with all the Venus issues, or some made up planets with crazy problems. It simulated gasses and liquids, replicating the refrigeration cycle so you can make your own heat pumps for cooling. It’s really cool, but complex and potentially boring for most people.
It’s made by the studio making Kitten Space Agency. It’s a studio created by the DayZ mod creator, and they seem really cool. They’re very much not profit motivated, and I think they’ve said developing Stationeers is costing them money, at least at one point, and KSA is planned to be free and donation supported.
That sounds kinda awesome, I’m gonna have to look into Stationeers.
It has probably the highest learning cliff of any game, but there are also guides for everything. At the higher level, once you’re surviving, you’ll hopefully be programming stuff too. That’s all done in Assembly, so ideally you’ll have experience with that, but it’s not that hard to learn for doing basic programs. If you need any help, let me know!
Not a favourite but back in the day, me and my friend played the shit out of Battle Arena Toshinden on the PS1. Have since heard on various podcasts that people hated it. I genuinely loved it at the time.
Forspoken has one of the best battle and movement gameplay systems in gaming, or at the very least in the “power fantasy sandbox” genre. Its story and dialogue are also a very cute, earnest take on Isekai that didn’t deserve the backlash they got. It has its flaws but it’s absolutely nowhere close to being the utter cringe-fest and terrible game that people like Asmongold successfully convinced the rest of the internet it was (because it has a female POC protagonist, basically). Personally, as someone who wanted to live the ultimate elemental wizard power-fantasy in a game since I was a child, Forspoken gave me everything I wanted and more (like cats! Lots of adorable cats).
The main issue, to me (based on videos), was how empty the world was.
Seems like they had great gameplay, but at some point it doesn’t matter when you’ve got nowhere interesting to go and you’re fighting the same enemies over and over
But yeah, I agree with the unnecessary backlash. Just reeks of right wing gamer gate chuds.
Suddenly they were super worried about good dialogue in video games, and I’m sure it had nothing to do with the color or gender of the MC.
Yeah, Forspoken has been on my list since I saw some high level gameplay and someone saying the traversal was like having inFamous with more lateral speed.
Mass Effect Andromeda. It’s a lot better than people give it credit for. Sure it has its issues, but no more than the original trilogy which is so revered. And the game is gorgeous, definitely the best looking ME to date - even with the trilogy legendary edition. The story was good too, it could’ve been the start of a great new trilogy. It doesn’t have Shepard, but female Ryker was a lot of fun.
I loved bulletstorm.
I think most people liked Bulletstorm. It’s just that not a lot of people played it, and the reviews were - for some inexplicable reason - tepid to negative.
Dark Souls 2
Finished the first one, never the second. May need to give it another go soon. Couldn’t get into it the first time, second time around my build was better and therefore the experience too. (without guide)
I’ve been meaning to give it another go, I only found out recently that weapon durability was bugged this entire time
I found I was pretty much running bonfire to bonfire because of it and didn’t get that risk/reward for being able to explore areas of the map before resetting enemies.
Whether deserved or not Star Wars Jedi Knight Jedi Academy is always forgotten compared to its predecessor. But I don’t care, it’s the best one for me.
In the same vein The Force Unleashed II is the one I remember more fondly. It’s worse than the previous one certainly, but the story does have some nice moments and playing it on the hardest difficulty makes you actually have to block correctly and plan your movement right to survive the onslaught of fire by the stormtroopers.
Ohhh my god I played so much jka in 2005-6. It is the best sword fighting mechanics ever imo
That first time you land on a rainy biome and the rain drops sizzle on your saber…
Running atop a flying tram while the most tense parts of Hyperspace play in the background
Bubsy
The new Bubsy game is actually decent, albeit short
I loved Bubsy.
Watch Dogs, the first one specifically. I know Ubisoft has had a pretty bad track record, especially in recent years, but I’ve played through that game a bunch of times and always had a good time with it. Even in its worse parts its still dumb fun.
The story honestly aged really well too for better or worse with how tech companies and governments are mingling now.
I didn’t like that game for the most part, but for reasons I find difficult to explain, I really enjoyed that minigame with the robot spider.
that’s from WD2, the first game was way more grounded.
It was definitely the first. I don’t own and have never played the sequel. They called them “digital trips” or something like that. It was supposed to be like an in-universe computer game, I think? There wasn’t a lot to it–you piloted this tank thing and had to clear a level, by jumping around and sometimes killing some enemies until you reached a checkpoint, in a certain brief time limit. But I found it kinda weirdly compelling.
Right, I remember now
I played the first one for a while and enjoyed it, don’t really remember if there was a specific reason I put it down. I didn’t realize a lot of people had beef with it. I remember that the driving mechanics were clunky as hell after playing things like GTA or Mafia, but other than that it seemed like a pretty cool game.
Can it be played on Steam Deck without much tinkering? I’ve always wanted to give it a try.
Dont forget you can check ProtonDB and see how users have found it on the Steam Deck! The site is a great resource for checking in advance:
https://www.protondb.com/app/243470
There’s 30 separate reports there for you to check over!
It says it’s playable with it on the Steam page so probably. I’m not sure if Ubisoft made it extra janky with something like Ubisoft Connect though.
Saints Row IV - I liked aspects of the earlier games, but I actually really enjoyed the meta silliness of IV. I accept that I don’t have a lot of company in having this opinion 🙂
EDIT: I guess I was wrong! I swear every time I’ve seen SRIV mentioned, I’ve seen tons of hate directed at it. Glad to see there are a bunch of us! Dozens even 😄
Definitely not alone! It was the first one I played, and I had some genuine laugh out loud moments in the intro alone. Flawed but so much fun.
Got to love it just for a giant robot fight to The Touch, or Roddy Piper fighting Keith David. Or the Biz Markie singalong.
I think 2 was the pinnacle and a spiritual successor to Vice City, but 4 has its moments.
Legitimately, SR4 was my introduction to the series and I absolutely adored the shit out of it.
If you haven’t checked it out yet - The Gat Out of Hell expansion had a very similar super-powered play-style.
I LOVE Saints Row IV! It’s my favorite of the entire franchise. Yes, it’s extra campy and over-the-top, but that just makes it more enjoyable.
Probably my favorite mission of Saints Row III was where you took an experimental drug and it gave you super-speed for a little while, so you could sprint across the city faster than if you were driving a car.
Saints Row IV just gives that to you as a permanent upgrade at some point. You don’t need cars later in the game, you can just run ridiculously fast and leap skyscrapers in a single bound.
I can’t remember if you can fly too, but I wanna say you can. It’s been quite a long time since I played that game.
I had so much fun in Saints Row IV, most of my playtime is just running all over the map and dicking around with NPCs once I was too OP for them to do anything to me. It’s hard for me to go back to the other games after that.
Im glad Im not alone here! I loved the shit outta Saints Row IV
Underneath the silliness, SR4 had a good story and great performances. I remember tearing up a bit during the car segment of the final mission.
It is one of the few open-world sidequestapaloozas I have ever beaten because the story and insanity kept me coming back.
Vindictus, pre-2015
Holy ball knowledge. I used to play a little of that in the early 10s, what an insane combat system for an MMO.
I regret being distracted with other stuff because when I checked it again much later it seemed to be going… As most other mmos where going.
I really miss it. Unfortunately, as you said, it’s pretty terrible now. The sequel/remake is shaping up to be just as terrible as the modern version
Star Wars Outlaws.
I started playing maybe a year after release. I found a lot of negativity about the game. I am pretty sure that it had a really rough launch and by the time I got around to playing it many of the launch issues had been patched. Based on the stuff I read the game was pretty much a disaster until it was patch.
It did get repetitive at times and the stealth system was either a complete mess or completely OP.
Anyway I had a lot of fun with the game and was bummed when I learned their won’t be a sequel.
Also Nix was such a cool companion.
There wasn’t really much of anything broken at launch. The updates added a couple of QOL changes but the gameplay was much the same. The „insta-fail“ stealth sections were trivial, not really instantly failable and low consequence but I get that the broader market doesn’t really want stealth games with any real consequences (there were similar complaints with a trivial stealth section in FFXIV).
Honestly, it was my favorite SW game I ever played. Yes, better even than KotR. I felt like I was IN the Star wars universe. Not as a mystical space wizard, but just like… A person. And I loved every second of it. The world felt so alive, especially the cities. There were so many small elements that didn’t need to be there but I appreciated nonetheless, like the street food mini game. Did I need a weird QuickTime event mini game to eat food? No. Did I enjoy the fact that you would get served a big dish of alien cuisine and then actually get to see your character eat it? Like bite-by-bite and could watch it disappear with incredible detail? Sure! There’s a lot of points like that where you can see a lot of love and passion for the game shine through.
It makes me so sad to hear how poorly received the game was. Coming on the heels of Andor, it felt like it was supposed to be a big push in trying to move the SW franchise away from the constant Jedi/Sith space wizard conflict and focus more on the universe itself. Hell, even the rebellion/empire conflict took a back seat in favor of exploring the criminal underworld. I would LOVE more of that (and yes I know about the Maul show and have been enjoying it, but it too leans heavy on the space wizards).
You make such great points!
I love games that have an over all “main” mission but also offer heaps of random side quests that you can just do.
I am bummed that the sequel is scrapped as well.
Launching in a workable state is criminally underated by publishers. A bad game can eventually be patched after launch, sure, but a botched first impression takes decades to switch in the public eye. Look at cyberpunk and witcher games. Beloved after decades of bug fixes, but not everyone has the good will of CD projekt red to burn through. A bad first impression can turn a good if unimaginative game into “that ugly game that was broken at launch” forever. And let’s be real, 90% of a game’s lifetime profit comes during the launch window.
Absolutely!!
I’m surprised how much hate it got. I can barely think of any Star Wars games that give you a ship, full planet travel ability, and open world within those locations, letting you experience the vibe of Star Wars environments. Even if the fights were lack luster, that’s pretty impressive.
Some games come close, but prioritize fights (so Cal only sees a quarantined part of Coruscant filled with stormtroopers) or MMORPG design.
This game is really good. I enjoyed the hell out of it and wish we’d get more Star Wars about being a regular person in the world.
I played this on PS5 at launch, and while I maybe hit a few bugs through the whole game, nothing was game-breaking for me. Maybe I got lucky, who knows.
But I also really enjoyed the game. I’m sad we probably won’t see these characters again any time soon.
