I’m talking about games that you still like but you had no idea were criticized so much.
The perfect example for me is Sonic Unleashed.
I admit that the game has its bad things, but I would have never imagined that it was so hated at the time… Although, that could be extended to the entire Sonic franchise, since for many years I was not aware at all of that “Sonic was never good”, “Sonic had a rough transition to 3D” nonsense.
Fallout 4. game was pretty decent but the pacing was weird. by pacing I mean the game seemed like it was set out in a way that you wouldn’t complete the game until you were many levels up from what I was, so many upgrades that took a lot of caps left unlockable, and by the time I felt I was really starting to get somewhere, the game ended with the Institute ending
Fallout 4 is a great game.
Mass Effect: Andromeda - I knew 1 & 2 were held in high regard, but I hadn’t played them. Actually, I’d played about 10 minutes of one of them a couple years before and it just wasn’t what I was in the mood for at that time. So, I went into Andromeda without any expectations really and thought it was a perfectly fine game.
Just finishing about a new playthrough of Andromeda and I think it’s larger problem is that the good content doesn’t open up until a third of the way through the game. For the first third, you have very little to do except follow the Kett and the Angara storyline, and those are the absolute worst parts of the game.
It doesn’t actually get good until it opens up and you’re dealing with Outlaws, Collective, internal politics of the Nexus, the Krogan rebellion, etc… and your (admittedly pretty lame) companion quests. But at least it’s something more than just two new species that aren’t nearly as fleshed out or complete as what already existed.
By the time the game opens up and you can do more than just the main quest, you’re already friggin bored.
Breath of the Wild. It is such a good game and I really love it and I only have ever heard possitive things about… but than I met a bunch of old school Zelda fans and they don’t like the game that much. They say it’s a great game but not a Zelda game. Maybe they just wanted to be contrarian but I can also understand where they are comming from.
As a long time Zelda fan I never understood any of the hate for BOTW from other long time fans. That being said I haven’t been able to play it since TOTK came out because TOTK is what BOTW was missing for me.
From seeing discussions among those Zelda fans (which to be clear I am not one), the issue is that the mainline games are now a completely different genre, but treated as though it’s the natural progression of the series.
The classic zelda games are primarily puzzle games, with a little bit of combat and intricate hand-crafted exploration to spice it up a bit. The modern zelda games (BOTW & TOTK) are exploration games with puzzles to spice it up. If you were a classic zelda fan, the niche genre you loved used to have regular releases by a major developer and now doesn’t.
Plus, there’s a “all my homies hate skrillex” effect here; the series is massively more popular now, but the newcomers have a different idea of what makes a zelda game a zelda game. By sheer numbers they dominate a community that is now reshaped by their presence. In other words the zelda fan community is itself a different genre.
For what it’s worth, I haven’t played that much of the series. Link to the Past I didn’t care much for, Links Awakening (new one) I honestly hated, and BOTW I liked but had a couple issues with. All I’ve written above is based on passively seeing a bunch of discussion.
Plus, there’s a “all my homies hate skrillex” effect here; the series is massively more popular now, but the newcomers have a different idea of what makes a zelda game a zelda game.
This is wht I don’t play Warframe anymore. I started back when crowd control was crucial, and played Nyx almost constantly. But after Mesa was added, the game slowly shifted to being more focussed on killing enemies as fast as possible. I finally quit the game from a combination of the mods going crazy and newer players berating me in chat for playing as Nyx despite me dealing most of the damage in the mission we were playing.
Tears is better than Breath in every way, it’s true. It’s also more Zelda-like, in that you gradually expand your ability to explore the world.
Funnily enough, I heard a lot of people saying that they specifically liked it because it was a “return to classic, retro Zelda.” The difference being that their idea of retro Zelda was the original rather than Link to the Past or Ocarina of Time.
I ended up replaying Wind Waker and I still haven’t finished Breath of the Wild.
I think BotW is a spectacular game for kids who don’t have access to just about any game they want.
Watch Dogs 1. It was quite fun for me, but quite a lot of people expected it to create a spark like GTA 5 back in the day, so when it didn’t; they all criticized it to hell.
Same. I think “No Man’s Sky” syndrome turned people off, but I thought it was really innovative, and I liked the PC being broody and driven, but not dramatic.
Same and for me watch dogs 2 wasn’t as fun anymore.
The original iteration of no mans sky. Absolutely lied a shit ton about what was in the game but I really enjoyed my initial time with it.
There was something about the infinite emptiness that struck an emotional chord with me. That’s gone now, for the better overall, but I’m glad I experienced it.
Unironically ET on the Atari 2600
Had a lot of fun as a kid, sure it wasn’t Pitfall or F1 Racing but it was one of the few adventures on the 2600 and it wasn’t terrible
Dark Souls 2 was the first and only Soulslike game I played… Was a great experience and a good time killer during my summer break (when I still had one). Only later did I learn how poorly ppl thought of the game
they only hate on it because it wasn’t the exact same. DS2 is a great game but really should have been a stand alone title
The first Deus Ex game I played was Deus Ex: Invisible War on the original Xbox, which I loved. It’s the first foray into cyberpunk for me and sparked a love of it I’ve had since. It was not well received, and considered a dumbed down version of the original game.
Still love it. The Arcology in Cairo was my favorite part.
RuneScape 😅
Shadow the Hedgehog
Megaman X7
Looking back, I know why. I was just so happy to play as Shadow/3D Zero, I really didn’t care about the many faults these games have.
Red Steel, actually. I’ll admit to having fun memories of it from when the Wii launched.
Path of Exile
Good fun game, but online communities are committing to min/max the fun out out of it. I like blowing up monsters, I don’t care about optimising my chaos-per-hour rate.
A lot of games like that end up min/maxed like that, it sucks even more when developers start exclusively catering to the min/maxers forcing everyone min/max or gtfo.
Yeah it bothers me when the community for a game is like “{skill} is TRASH never use it” and when you do some digging you find it’s like 2% less damage per second. Or it doesn’t work well in NG+7. Some people are really obsessive about this stuff.
Unfortunately the game is specifically designed to waste your time if you want to see everything it has to offer. So it’s not really the communities fault for pushing to maximize that time spent. Just a consequence of a deliberately slowed down system
But the point isn’t to see everything. The feeling of FOMO is what’s seems to drive people to madness. For a game that’s been developed for over a decade with multiple cycles of content release every year; I’m not surprised that people don’t get a chance to see everything. I see that as a positive and not a negative.
Other games do similar things. I play a lot of Dead Cells and can’t get beyond 4BC. Most people will never get to end game content to see all bosses or unlock all items. Who cares. As long as the game is fun.
My first play through of PoE was with no guides. I made it up as I went along. Had a terrible “build”. I enjoyed taking weeks to get through the campaign slowly and reading all the lore. Every league I played, I got deeper and deeper into the content…learning to make tons of currency, getting a character to lvl 100, etc. It has been great playing it off and on. The game is fun without experiencing “everything”. But if I ever engaged with the online community, all I would hear is “I’ve played 3000 hours and this game is shit”.
I am one of the 10 people on earth who really enjoyed playing Starfield. The space combat seemed like a love letter to the old Wing Commander series, the art design was beautiful, there was a lot of fun content. I think i made it to NG7 before they took it off the free to play. When it’s on sale i can’t wait to grab it.
by comparison i hated The Outer Worlds which was the first ‘it’s like fallout in space!’ that was promised so i was tickled when Starfield actually was like fallout in space.
Overall, I enjoyed my experience with Starfield. I just wish I didn’t spend half of my time trying to build the optimal bases for trading hubs. Apart from that, everything was good
I can understand someone complaining that it wasn’t Fallout 5, but I definitely think it deserved a higher Steam rating.
To be honest, I think it had a decent chance to be Fallout 5, but in space. Maybe if they doubled the number of companions (read: not followers) and put all the new ones in different factions. I honestly expected the lady who pulls you into the gang in the ocean city would be a follower with how fleshed out she was
The bases were interesting! Getting an interplanetary production system going took some figuring and i never got an inter-system network up. If the mod scene keeps going for it they sure have a lot to work with!
I really like it until I started having problems with what I think must have been save bloating, making it more and more difficult to save. Which in turn made me quite until a possible fix as I didn’t want to risk the save becoming unplayable.
Then I played other things and sort of forgot to check if it was fixed, but I still really liked the game.
I tried The Outer Worlds but couldn’t stand it.
I felt that Starfield was good with the potential to be great (with enough added content, which they haven’t done yet, but here’s hoping).
The Outer Worlds, on the other hand, feels like it pretty much reached its limit. It’s a better game vanilla, since it has more content and far less empty space, but I don’t think that there’s any more they could really have done with it. Not quite great, but definitely worth playing.
And the “Fallout in space” line references the overall vibe of TOW, with '50s-'60s style culture and advertising. Starfield has Fallout’s mechanics, but it’s more of a Star Trek or Firefly aesthetic, depending on where you are.
Oooo now you have me interested in Starfield by comparing it to Wing Commander, damn you.
I loved Outer Worlds. Rough around the edges, sure, but it wasn’t much different than playing Fallout 3 in terms of gameplay. Also the setting made for some great satire. My only real complaint was the small maps. High hopes for the sequel.
I enjoyed it for a while, but the whole ng+, while pretty cool, really killed it for me. My first playthrough I made bases, upgraded weapons, etc. Then I learned about all the cool perks you got from ng+ and did that. The problem is you lose all your bases and material farms. So you’re in this weird spot of having to bum rush all 10 universes to get the maximum benefit before actually setting up any significant settlements. I burned out quick. Also a bunch of the powers are underwhelming, and space travel is DOGSHIT. NMS, elite dangerous, hell even star citizen are space games. Starfield is NOT.
Digimon World 4.
Granted, I was a child when I played it, but it was fun.
Years later I found a few YouTubers shitting on it due to bugs, recycled assets, lack of digivolutions, shitty camera angles, spammy gameplay, etc etc.
I agree with all of these criticisms and in hindsight yea that game was really lazy. However, I still had a good time.
I remember some people in Reddit not being too happy with It Takes Two.
We loved it and look forward to playing Split Fiction when we find the time.
I remember some people in Reddit not being too happy with It Takes Two.
They’re just mad they don’t have any friends or a partner to play it with.
Loved playing It Takes Two with my wife, such a great game I wished they made another one. The more couch coop games the better.
My kids played this co-op and loved it
Seemed like a pretty solid coop game to me!
People don’t like it takes two? Was the book too over the top or what?
IIRC it was a minority, but the critique was gender stereotypes and misogyny.
They are entitled to their opinions, and I’m glad I read it after playing the game so it did not affect my experience.
for me I just… couldn’t stand either of the main characters and thought the reviving-their-dead-marriage arc was really trite. I didn’t believe these were people that “should” be together and around the time they dismembered that elephant (???) I was fully checked out.
The game was wonderful when we were actually playing, probably the most fun I’ve had in a coop puzzle game since Portal 2. I really wouldn’t need much in the way of story to convince me to keep playing, but there were so many goddamn cutscenes! I’m glad others enjoyed it more than me, and did enjoy a lot of the gameplay, but the characters really soured me on the game eventually.
I played it with a friend and never finished it. I like the idea behind the game a lot, but for me the game was just too easy. There wasn’t a real challenge at all. So i played it for the story. But the characters weren’t really likable either and the guy was pretty annoying. Then there was the part with her favourite plush toy. And i thought they try to get rid of it and then learn something. Nope, they just destroy that thing.
I think it’s a good game, but i would never finish or play it again. And from what i’ve seen, i think the same thing about split fiction
I don’t want to dissuade you, because Split Fiction is just as fun, game-play-wise, as It Takes Two.
But the story is not as good. And the characters are even more teeth-grindingly frustrating sometimes.
But still play it, it’s a lot of fun.
Cheers mate, appreciate the advice!
