Games that look fantastic but aren't very good and/or suck

I popped in the cart-only copy of "Flink" for the Mega Drive I have yesterday, and was astounded at how great that game looks, but also how awful it is despite that. What are some other examples of games like this? Graphically very impressive but just a bust in terms of gameplay?
The other one that comes to mind is Yogi Bear for the SNES. That game is gorgeous shovelware.

El Shaddai: Ascension of the Metratron. It's pretty graphically, but the gameplay is very repetitive and shallow.

Yep, Henk Niebork is an incredibly talented artist.

The same could be said about The Adventures of Lomax, another game with art by Henk Nieborg - I don't remember playing a lot of the game, but I didn't enjoy what I played of it...

The Crysis games. The first few hours of the first game were great but as soon as you started fighting aliens instead of commies it became incredibly boring.

Assassin's Creed Unity as we all know is visually stunning but has a ton of problems technically and design wise.

I would like to say I have not played it, so I could be entirely wrong. But god damn Destiny looks generic and boring while at the same time being visually stunning.

Oh man, Flink. So slow.

I used to buy games based on how pretty they looked. I got burned many a time. I hated Doom 3.

Before anyone says it, I want to say, I think Ryse is pretty good.

Heavy Rain.

I actually like David Cage's brand of batshit insanity, but Heavy Rain was a massive disappointment.

@jeust: I actually found El Shaddai to be an amazing game.

Beyond: Two Souls, I'm in love with Ellen Page and Heavy Rain was my personal GotY for 2010 or 2nd place 2009 I forget. However HR was a case of "babies 1st David Cage game" and Beyond both failed to impress me and was overall quite an awful game agnostic of the David Cage shine wearing off.

I just finished Enemy Front(like minutes ago). Its a nice showcase for the Cryengine and easily the best lookingWW2 game to date, but the AI sucks and the friggin protagonist is a writer...a fucking WRITER. They should have shot him when he said he as there for a"front page story". Hell, i would have rather played as an accountant at least they make an honest living. An American writer at that. Fuck.

The first Assassins Creed. It was jaw-droppingly good looking, but the sense of wonder was soon replaced by a sense of utter, utter boredom. The trio of Ezio games that came after it were genuinely excellent though.

I don't recall much about it, but Lair had some cool dragons. Not much else.

I thought this was gonna be in the Destiny forum

Driveclub was the first game to pop into my mind. Looks incredible...that procedural rain!! But the actual gameplay is completely ordinary and uninspired. They clearly focused most of their time on upping the graphical fidelity, when they could have been adding more content and depth to the gameplay mechanics. What we are left with is a totally shallow and unremarkable game that is really pretty to look at.

David Cage's last two games and the Crysis games.

Killzone Shadowfall also wasn't too good.

that's easy. Rage.

Graphically gorgeous (pop-in aside) but no memorable characters, quests were dull and had you backtrack through areas for different reasons (like Dragon Age 2 oddly enough), world was small, you fight a 8 story beast at one point cause sure and the ending was atrocious

The FFXIII saga. Visually, yeah, it's Square Enix at (or close to) the top of their game. Everything else...? Eeeeh, not so much. Gameplay in all three was serviceable at best. The characters, story, and writing though were all completely insufferable.

Street Fighter x Tekken

Holy shit, that game should have been THE next big thing. How could it not, with those 2 namesakes involved?

Fucking Gems. Fucking standardized damage on all normals.

MadWorld look pretty rad and stylized, and did the graphic novel/manga look pretty well (Sin City being the most obvious comparison).

But then the gameplay is just these 30 minute levels where you have to grind enough points throwing the Dynasty Warriors IQ enemies into meat grinders or whatever. When you reach an arbitrary point value, the boss unlocks, which were actually cool. But overall, I just didn't like playing it.

Sounded like Ryse was largely that. It seems like there's a lot of games like that. In hindsight, Super Mario Sunshine won me over on large part because of how amazing the water looked...though a lot of the objectives and overall level design was left wanting.

Yeah, that's a pretty big one right there. That shit came and went fast. The entire dlc fiasco didn't help matters either. I would love for Capcom (more like Ono specifically) to give it another shot since it seems like they learned their lesson, but it seems like they can barely afford to make their own shit these days. I'm not sure how much money Namco put up for SFxT, but unless the answer is "most of it," a sequel seems like a pipe dream these days even if someone at Capcom wanted to make another.

Beyond: Two Souls

I actually liked the game but am aware of it's terrible plot and awkward mechanics. But it's one of the few games I could forgive because it looked so damn good. Nothing on the PS4 or XBO looks as good as far as i'm concerned. And the music and acting were pretty decent too.

@babychoochoo: Well they were planning on making a Tekken x Street Fighter.

I would say Alice: Madness Returns.

It's a really stunning looking game and every area looks so unique and fantastic and Alice is going through all these really interesting costume changes and blah blah blah, but then it's a lot of not terribly interesting platforming and really shallow combat. It ends up feeling like something you basically tolerate the game for in order to see all the art and design.

I like Street Fighter X Tekken (2013 patch, at least). Gems aren't an inherently terrible idea, the strategy of activating them is interesting. They did really botch it with the one, two punch of DLC gems and setting up gem selections being a total drag in competitive play. At the very least, maybe the brave sacrifice of SFxT means that SF5 was spared some bad ideas. But also, I dunno if it looks fantastic :P Some of the character models are really fantastic and the animation is beautiful, but that engine was already pretty long in the tooth by the time SFxT came out and I think the aesthetic of that, menus, UI, pandora effects etc are all uglier than SF4.

Every Crysis game? They all look fantastic, but they always fall short. They are far from being awful, but still not great.

Most of the ones that immediately come to my mind have already been mentioned: El Shaddai, Final Fantasy XIII, Alice Madness Returns, Assassin's Creed 1. Enslaved would also be worth a mention, but I actually quite enjoyed the mediocre game behind the excellent visuals in that case.

Pretty much everything from Wayforward and Crytek.

I was going to chime in with an obvious 'Destiny' comment but I think Rage hits the nail on the head more than any game I can think of.

Haters gonna hate, they're gonna just shake it off.

If I think an unknown new property looks hot, there's a decent chance it's a 60 on Metacritic. I thought Dark Sector would be dope. I thought Brink would be revolutionary. I thought GunLoco would be dumb... but awesome dumb.

Destiny

Killer is Dead is a somewhat decent game but the visuals are pretty great.

It's too bad because I was expecting another masterpiece like Killer7.

The King of Fighters XII. It really wowed everybody before it came out with the incredible HD 2D art, and still does. Unfortunately, the gameplay was the weakest the series had seen in a while, and the netcode was absolutely terrible.

Fortunately KOF XIII fixed most of its problems and KOF is here again :)

The Uncharted games are always the games that come to mind when I think of fantastic boring games...I wouldn't call them bad by any stretch, but nothing about them has ever appealed to me. That being said, I feel those games (and Naughty Dog) are incredibly important technically and help push the industry forward. How much so, I wouldn't know, but important none the less.

Definitely agree with Mad World and Alice: Madness Returns. I tried to tell myself those games were good but they were so repetitive and boring.

Also further agree with Wayforward's games in general. I don't think I've played one that I've actually enjoyed, but stuff like A Boy And His Blob sure looks amazing.

As a slight digression, I think Rayman Origins looks GREAT when not in motion, but when those things move it comes off like some weird flash animation and I hate the way it looks. I also don't enjoy the way it plays.

Crysis 1 for me, beautiful game but just couldn't get into it the several times I've tried.

Battlefield 4 - beautiful but one of the worst stories in games I've played recently. I will never buy a battlefield again because I was so disappointed in the game in general (outside graphics)

Final Fantasy XIII. I really wanted to like that game. I hoped it would expand on what X and XI built in terms of story telling and game play. Not a sequel but a forward progression in technology. XIII was an absolute mess. The story made no sense. I could care less about half the members of the party such as Hope or Snow. The linear level design. You are constantly pursued with no resting stops until you reach Grand Pulse on Chapter 11. Just to be clear, aside from the MMO versions of Final Fantasy games. They are not suppose to be completely open world games to explore like Fallout 3 or Skyrim. Constantly going through endless straight corridors was the last straw.

On an HD TV, XIII looked fantastic. I really appreciate the fast paced combat system but the problems mentioned before soured my experience. For a game that took three years to make and to quickly put out sequels to sell more DLC is gross. Based on Square Enix track record over the last ten years. XIII seems to mark the beginning of the end for that publishing company if they keep putting out bad games.

Crysis comes to mind for me.

I remember Run Like Hell looking really good for the time but the game was kinda crappy. Same thing with Brute Force. And Shenmue

Odin Sphere I guess. It was a very pretty game with not a whole lot of interesting gameplay.

I found it to be a beautifully boring game.

Granted, I have not played it, but if Battlefield 4's campaign is anything like Battlefield 3, then Battlefield 4 would be a GREAT competitor for this.

Isn't that pretty much the definition of a launch game?

Are older games off-limits? The game "Rise of the Robots" had very advanced graphics back in 1994, but also featured some of the worst gameplay ever.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rise_of_the_Robots

No, as demonstrated by this masterpiece of a game

Seriously though, I think you're right. For the most part anyway. There are a handful of launch games that were and always will be pretty good, but generally I feel like if a game wasn't considered a bad game upon release, all it took was about a year or two after launch of people trying to go back to it to realizing how bad it really was.

Destiny.

Sort off.

In terms of the art it looks amazing to me. But then it doesn't suck to play at all. It's one of the better games I've played, it just left me disappointed.

El Shaddai was apparently the first response to this thread... So I'll bring up El Shaddai.

At the time Suikoden IV was a nice looking game; really sucks compared to III and V (I mean it's not horrible but come on). Most Vanillaware games look amazing and are just kind of okay.

Bloodrayne Betrayal is gorgeous and ridiculously frustrating; but I still beat it just to spite them. Granted Double Dragon Neon is the greatest shit ever so Wayforward gets a pass.

Deadly Premonition really brings out the heart and soul of America but plays pretty terribly.

In addition to looking amazing Final Fantasy XIII and Crysis are some of the best playing games in their respective genres.

@zevvion: Destiny only looks amazing on Venus I think, the rest of the environments are pretty bland.

Oh that's a good one, completely agree, I got halfway through that game before having to uninstall it due to its tedium gameplay that just goes on and on.
But I looked up the rest on YouTube just to see the levels and even bought the art book. If it had proper gameplay and short levels that could have been a gem but instead its more like a 20 dollar bill that's halfway stuck in the mud, it sure looks appealing but I really don't want to deal with it.

I'll also throw up Hitman: Absolution, it was a very good looking game, graphically very done, but it took a pair of scissors to the core gameplay of every Hitman before it. Though I did still enjoy parts of it, the parts that resembled the previous Hitman games were decent.

Driveclub?

I understand why people mention games like Crysis, Battlefied 4, Destiny and Rage, but I think all of them are average at worst.