Poorly reviewed games that you enjoyed- GO.

Man you and that other guy make we wanna play that game, is there anyway to get it now besides emulation?

Halo Spartan assault apparently, it's not perfect, but I couldn't believe how over the top Jeff's reaction to it was.

@buft: I really enjoyed Dark Void. The soundtrack by Bear McReary was great too especially as you launched into the air on your jetpack.

I really enjoyed the characters and the fact that Hawk had a voice. Made it feel less like an empty husk for RPGing (dragon 1) and more than a real person. Yea the combat wasnt Baldur's Gate style and that sucked, but I'll look past a lot for a good story, even if the end was kinda dumb

This.

And also Urban Trail Freestyle, which although took some adjusting to after used to Trials definitely doesn't deserve the 70 or so it has on metacritic.

My perception. It wasn't a great game, or a terrible one. It was a game. I played it.

As for the game that always comes to mind when this topic pops up, it's gotta be the King's Field games and Eternal Ring. They tend to be pretty heavily slogged, but they're fun exploration games that did open world gaming wonderfully in the age before Oblivion and Skyrim.

Alpha Protocol, first 4 hrs are god awful thanks to terrible combat and stealth but once you get out of the Middle East and start choosing where you want to go and start making decisions the game gets a whole lot better, its like Mass Effect if your choices mattered more. The combat stays bad but you just get a silenced pistol and the ability to aim while blind firing, you just cheese your way through the combat. Not a game I want to replay or one that I would necessarily recommend to many people but it has its moments.

And Catherine if we are going by Jeff's review. The review averages for Catherine are actually pretty good. Unlike Jeff I didn't think that twist with Catherine's character undermined the narrative because the question that game is really asking isn't what girl Vincent should get with. I also enjoyed the puzzles more than Jeff and thought that the feeling of being desperate and overwhelmed that those puzzles elicited mapped well to the story beats.

Ah, yes, time to pull out the ol' "Advent Rising" card.

Crap game, crap mechanics, crap everything... but the last 5 minutes make me wish they finished the trilogy.

Also, in an alternate timeline I would have played the shit out of GunLoco.

Also, I won Dark Sector in a contest once; I thought it was okay, then people shat on it. Bummer.

These are games me and my friends LOVED as kids, and only found out they 'sucked' after the internet got big. Ignorance is bliss.

Scarface The Game, don't like the movie but the game was great.

/Viktor

Agree completely. I remember when The Dig was released, I was a huge LucasArts adventure fan at the time. And my memory is that The Dig was generally not very well received at all. It's easy to forget that it was delayed a bunch of times and had a lot of bad press surrounding its development. And seeing as Full Throttle came out the same year, and when you compare the two The Dig looks positively ancient by comparison, not to mention painfully dull. Graphically, The Dig is barely a step up from Monkey Island, which I'm sure is due to its long development cycle.

Personally I think The Dig is better than people gave it credit for back then, but it's certainly not some classic game that deserves any level of reverence or nostalgia. The pacing is awful, the characters are one dimensional (and Robert Patrick is terrible in it), unlike most LucasArts games the puzzles are poorly integrated into the story; they're the kind of arbitrary "someone left a puzzle lying around for you to solve!" puzzles that end up feeling like leftovers from Myst. It has its charms, but it's certainly not one of LucasArts' best games, not by a long shot.

same for me man, i played the absolute life out of that game and at the time i couldnt even play online, i went back to it once i got the internet back in but by that stage the multiplayer was dead. shame i would have loved to have seen more of it. I also really like alpha protocol.

two of most underrated games and at the same time two of my fav games last gen. The darkness1 and Timeshift and Binary Domain ofc

Biofreaks

But, dude, it was so damn unforgiving. From what I remember, there weren't any checkpoints, so I had to stop playing when cops killed me for like the tenth time on a certain mission not too far into it.

I thought The Cave was awesome, but it got middling reviews (middling by game review standards). Same for Beyond Two Souls.

Games I like that others seem to hate: GTA4, Catherine... There are probably others but that's all I can think of

Totally agree. I loved Alpha Protocol as well. Fantastic premise for an RPG.

MUA2 is one of my favorites. Didn't age that well though. Remember playing the hell out of it and enjoying it when it came out. Tried it again after playing a ton of the console verison of Diablo III and it colored my look back a bit. Still have a ton of fondness for it.

Ryse: really bashing it because of microtransactions?!?

Beyond two souls: an elegant game. Graphically amazing and an epic story. Just a game a really felt accomplished when i finished it.

Duke Nukem Forever

Batman: Arkham Origins (not very poorly reviewed, but I like it more than most critics did)

Ninja Gaiden 3

Dante's Inferno

Beyond: Two Souls

Deadpool.

As you can see, I don't have very high standards.

More than I can count, but Blitz: The League 2, Dante's Inferno, Mortal Kombat 6 and 7, and Manhunt 2, to pick some at random.

Does Diablo 3 count? Because Diablo 3.

But let's be honest: you seem to love all things Halo, haha. I've been meaning to try Spartan Assault, but just haven't gotten around to it.

Quantum of Solace, I thought it was a good James Bond game. I even played the multiplayer for a while, it's basically Call of Duty with third person cover mechanics.

Very recently I've bought Killer is Dead and Bureau for a good price. Nothing I don't like so far. I reviewed Alone in the Dark quite well. I tend to enjoy the Death Jr. franchise. Quite fond of Epic Mickey. Dungeon Siege III's ok, but maybe I'm partial to the voice actors. Big fan of the Ghostbusters game, Overlord, massive Tron 2.0 fanboy. And I bought Cobra Mission; back when it was released (alongside Metal & Lace), reviewers felt obligated to reject localised hentai games. This was way before Newgrounds of course. Zing!

I own two copies of Dark Void.

Shadows of the Damned

Beyond: Two Souls

Two games that at best got a lukewarm reception. They are far from my favorite games, but I atleast enjoyed my time enough with both to finish them and I genuinely think that Shadows of the Damned is a fun game.

I was gonna say Sonic Unleashed, but it has a 60 metacritic score. I guess Sonic isn't as hated as I originally thought...

Azure Dreams. It wasn't reviled, but folks didn't consider it to be great fun. I enjoyed going up the Monster Tower and try to get to the top before running out of HP. Also, the town-building aspects were kinda cool. I liked how the money you got from dungeon crawling can actually help improve your hometown. Plus, I liked the monster designs.

I feel the opposite haha. I thought Dragon Age II was the biggest letdown ever. After loving Origins, DA II felt so....lazy, and boring. The repetitive environments, the fact that you are just stuck in a city the entire time. Little control over characters.

And there were some weird changes like the camera couldn't go high enough so I can properly use my wizards AOE spells.

Yeah, I was expecting some sort of half-assed, Arkham-esque game based on everything I heard about it, but I was genuinely surprised at how good it actually turned out to be. It feels like a great, "AAA" passion project from head to toe. It has it's flaws, sure, but they swung for the fences and, in my book, it was a beautiful homerun.

It really bums me out though that because so many people have written off the game at this point, Nilin will probably fade into obscurity as we look back over not just great female video game characters, but great video game characters in general. I certainly won't try and argue she's the greatest character ever, but if people wanna sing the praises of characters like Nathan Drake and 2013 Lara Croft, all I'm saying is Nilin certainly deserves some love too.

To add to that, I especially liked the look of their neo-Paris. Very cool aesthetics. It's a shame so much of the latter part of the game is indoors.

Alpha Protocol certainly comes to mind. Barring the jankiness, it was a fantastic game.

I am playing through Jericho right now. Its not a good game, certainly, but its a very enjoyable one. Those enemy designs are great and the shooting is visceral.

Binary Domain, personally, is better than all the Gears Of War games combined. Yes its shooting isn't as good, but the story and the character interaction mechanics were really interesting. It did things that no other game has done, especially no action game. Also, BIG BO.

I echo the love fro Shadows Of The Damned and Dragon's Dogma, those games are criminally underrated. DD, especially.

Finally I wanna give a shout out to Anarchy Reigns. The red headed step-child of Platinum Games' gameography so far. I had some serious fun with that game's singleplayer and (when I can find people to play with) multiplayer. The story was ridiculous but oddly poignant and the two main characters were actually fleshed better than they had any right to be. Its a shame it got criminally overlooked by pretty much everyone.

I had an absolute blast playing Ryse: Son of Rome.

@shagge said:

Yeah. I think it's fair to say Diablo 3 counts. It was reviewed well by most people and outlets, but I feel like a lot of very vocal people consider it to be some sort of absolutely irredeemable train-wreck. It was my first Diablo game though and I had the time of my life with it.

Maaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaan. Amen, my brother. A-fucking-men. It didn't help Sega didn't seem to have any semblance of faith in the title. I don't expect them to give it a giant marketing budget, but they just kinda threw it out the door without any support whatsoever. I really liked it too. Made my personal top 10 list and had both my favorite soundtrack and cast as a whole of 2013. it's an incredibly dumb, crazy, and awesome brawler that you can just lose yourself in for hours. I like to think of it as Power Stone: The Later Years.

Amnesia: A Machine for Pigs while not panned or anything, just seems to be underrepresented. The ending is kind of a mess after the streets scene, but everything up to that point is so good not to mention how fucking terrible the ending of TDD is. People wanted the game to be jumpy and have the usual pseudo-adventure game puzzle scraps I guess, and what they got was something built entirely on atmospheric, psychological, and introspective horror instead. Not that The Dark Descent doesn't do that, but the mechanics and usual Frictional dumbness got in the way of the game being enjoyable.

Yeah, at least The Darkness got some retrospective recogition, Timeshift seems to have been just about entirely forgotten despite doing what Singularity tried to do much better, as well as having the best rain of the generation!

STAR FOX ADVENTURES. Played that game through like twice Playing catch with my dinosaur. Helping other dinosaurs. Such a good time.

• E.Y.E Divine Cybermancy
• Total War: Rome II
• Fallout: New Vegas
• Inquisitor

Indeed. I really loved all the memory-tech and applications they devised from the fiction. The ghosts and recordings, the memory sickness, the abilities, it was all really ingenious how they tied it all to this singular idea of what would happen if we unlocked the potential of memory-access in human beings. The world they created in that game felt like something that could actually happen. I also found the idea of memory remixing fascinating on a moral level. Not to spoil anything for people that haven't played it, but some of the memory remixes you do in order to achieve your goals seem morally reprehensible.

I liked Final Fantasy XIII and I think Lightning is actually an ok character which makes me look forward to playing her again in XIII-3.

Come at me!

To be fair it was mixed, there were some really high scores. But personally I didn't have many technical issues (besides the turns getting longer) and it otherwise was like all the TW games at launch. Since it's polished up and I really enjoy that game.

Conan: It is a complete God of War knock off, but I had so much fun.

X-Men Origins: Wolverine A very good game with some flaws. This may be the only M rated Wolverine game we get.

The two Toy Soldiers games and Defense Grid on XBLA are really fun.

@friendlyphoenix: Yes! Although the story was a mess, the structure of The Bureau was a great Mass Effect knock off that I found really enjoyable. Dragon Age 2 is a good game as long as it's not compared to its predecessor. The only annoying thing for me in that game was the reuse of dungeons.

I still come back to Kengo now and again. The pacing and atmosphere of the daily grind of a samurai in training is just really different. The controls are pretty awkward at first but once you're used to it it's perfectly playable. Then, once you're comfortable with it and those imperial tournaments roll into town, that's some of the most on-edge fighting I've done. There's basically no story and that's fine. It's total comfort food for me.

@librariangmr:Man, Rule of Rose. What a creepy-ass game. I ended up buying that on a whim from a Kmart since it was in a clearance bin (lucky for me, it seems to be a super-rare game now), and was not fully prepared for that experience. Everything except the part where you play it is pretty good, though.

For me, I'll back Alpha Protocol, which everyone has mentioned. It probably helped that I did a stealth/pistol build, which helps minimize the janky shooting. The story/choices/dialogue aspect of that game is still top-tier stuff. And Nolan North kills it as Steven Heck.

The two games that come to mind from 2013 are Remember Me and The Bureau: XCOM Declassified. I thought there were a lot of things to like about Remember Me, and I think if they were given the time and resources to make an expanded, more open sequel, it could be a revelation on the scale of the jump from Assassin's Creed 1 to 2. As for The Bureau, I had a lot of fun with the combat (which is like 90% of the game), so I enjoyed it. I guess I didn't have as much trouble commanding the AI folks as other people.

I really liked I Am Alive. I understand that it's still a pretty janky game, but I enjoyed my time with it.

All of them

• Remember Me
• Dragon Age 2 had its flaws but was cool overall
• The Club (not sure how badly it reviewed but I never hear anyone say anything good about it)
• Brutal Legend

What about games that were critically acclaimed when they came out, but received public backlash years later for no discernible reason?

*cough cough* Twilight Princess, Metal Gear Solid 4, Heavy Rain *cough*

Also I have a cold.

• Trespasser
• Chaser

Twilight Princess is fantastic. As is MGS4; in its own ludicrous way. Never cared that much for Heavy Rain but can appreciate it from a distance.