Mediocre games you can't help but like.

Considering these forums are on a trend as of late, I'd figure I'd spice up the formula a bit. This is a toughie considering most people's definition of mediocre varies wildly and most people use it as synonymous with 'boring', which isn't how I define it. I would define it as junk food games that add little value over your life and make you feel like you're wasting your time. This isn't a 'bad game that you like that everyone doesn't' type of thread (we already have one). A lot of us play through games that have flaws and are charming despite of or because of them, but this isn't that type of thread either. Think of this as a game that you sigh at the prospect of playing, yet bow down and play it anyway and get some sort of satisfaction out of it even tho you think the game is playing you.

A good example (for me) is The Division. On paper it's a boring paint by numbers game, but has enough engagement that I just widdle away at it and have a decent time meditating and pondering things. Diablo 3 or Destiny could be another example (tho I don't really play them). Let me know how you would define mediocre and what games in the mediocre genre that have you been playing (if any).

Hydrophobia. That game is a fantastic kind of shitty. The craziest thing about this game is that they implemented this real-time feedback feature, so as a player went through the various parts of the game, they could drop positive or negative comments within the stage itself, that the developer would theoretically receive and implement into updates. Klepek even posted a trailer for this system (take a look at the page). It takes a special kind of dedication to create a crowd-sourced solution for your terrible game design.

Two Worlds. It isn't even mediocre - it's just straight up bad. But something about the bad action-movie voice acting of the main character and the fact that you can get ridiculously overpowered by using alchemy to permanently increase your stats makes it charming in an old-school Euro-jank kind of way.

When I reach the point where I would call something mediocre that's generally when I will stop playing. It isn't good and genuinely enjoyable and it isn't bad enough in key ways to be entertaining that way.. it just sort of exists and my days of wasting time on something I don't care about at all are just about gone for good.

The Risen series. I also really dig the Spiders RPGs like Bound By Flame and Technomancer. I only consider them mediocre considering how mixed the reception to them is, but I personally think they're fantastic.

Sea of Thieves.

I kid, but seriously, the quest designer needs to be sentenced to 24 hours straight of chicken fetch quests.

Not sure if it's applicable, but would Spider-Man 2 fit in here? I don't remember much about that game being good, but I could be remembering it wrong. Web-slinging was so fun, though, I'd often turn it on for an hour just to swing around town.

Advent Rising and Alpha Protocol are the two that come to mind whenever this type of question comes up.

I played many, many, many hours of Boogerman back in the day.

FMV games like Harvester and Phantasmagoria. They're like a train wreck you cant look away from.

Going by your definition of mediocre, most of Ubisoft's games fall into that category for me. And any that fit that mold really, even well made ones like the latest Assassins Creed I feel very indifferent towards despite having an overall good time.

I still play Jet Moto on both my ps1 and vita to this day. It was the first game I bought for myself once I got a ps1. Something about jetski/hover bikes that is awesome.

Someone find a way to bring SingleTrac and the series back!

I played a fair bit of that Koei Zelda game a couple years back. Wasn't amazing or anything but it was a very easy game to play while listening to podcasts.

• Neverwinter Nights 2
• X-Men Legends
• X-Men Legends 2

They're all okay games, but I happen to really like the source material, which allowed me to enjoy these games on a much higher level. Oddly enough, I ended up befriending some university basketball players through my band, and we would play the crap out of X-Men Legends on a hacked X-Box, despite owning legit copies. That was an interesting time in my life.

• Zeus: Master of Olympus
• Orcs Must Die! 2
• Super Time Force Ultra
• Crypt of the Necrodancer
• Dragon Quest Builders

It's hard for me to recommend any of these games, as they each kind of have their flaws, but they somehow each were made in such a way that I enjoyed them on a nearly perfect level. I still do daily runs on Necrodancer and have come to accept that I'll probably never beat the game as Aria.

For me, I’m going to say Binary Domain, Dead Space 3, Fuse, The Order: 1886, and Final Fantasy 15. Binary was an off the wall Japanese attempt at a third person shooter that I was totally into. It wasn’t terrible, just didn’t do anything special. Dead Space 3 could totally work as a co-op survival horror game but I enjoyed it for what it was. Fuse, same thing. Generic in almost all aspects but I also played that game with a friend and enjoyed it. The Order: 1886 is probably my guilty pleasure. I liked the story, and the gameplay wasn’t bad, just didn’t reach its potential. I hope there’s a sequel someday. Final Fantasy 15. It was my first FF game and I loved it.

@therealturk: This. One of the worst games I've ever played, yet one of my favourite games ever.

This one for me as well. I am a sucker for open world RPGs and I'm willing to suffer through some eurojank to get my fix. I even played it on the crappy Xbox 360 version that ran at like 10 fps on average.

I also love the Gothic and Risen series and Gothic 2 is one of my favourite games of all time. That said those games are amazing and I'll fight anyone that says they are mediocre.

Going by Metacritic scores, I'd say Divekick is one of them. Don't agree with the score but it has a 65% on Metacritic (PS3). I think its a funny and interesting meta game fighter on knowing when to land your attacks and you're rewarded based on landing your strike successfully.

As far as mediocre back then, I liked Rocket Power: Beach Bandits when I was young. It didn't control great, but it had a mode where it was a kid friendly Tonk Hawk game. Plus for a game based on a cartoon about a bunch of kids who like extreme sports, the story goes PLACES (Spoiler for that linked word earlier but...The Villain happens to be a power plant boss who stole all of Ocean Shores' sand and water. The cast of Rocket Power find out about this and try to stop him. When they enter his base inside a volcano, they find out the boss (named Golem Sr.) has an earthquake machine ready to use to destroy Ocean Shores, but the machine causes him to fall into lava and it turns out he's a robot in the vein of the terminator After the gang destroys Golem Sr. they return home and find out that his alleged son Eric Golem Jr. is behind all the plans stealing the water and sand and threatens to destroy Ocean Shores with a Tsunami machine, but he is challenged to beat the gang with a series of races to save Ocean Shores. That story would never fly in the actual TV show and the fact they had such a climatic story for a video game adaptation of a Nicktoon is crazy.

I genuinely love Dark Sector.

I think the most recent example for me has to be Yooka-Laylee. It's a perfectly middling 3D Platformer that doesn't quite seem to understand some of the reasons why people liked Rare's N64 output in the first place, yet I think I still had a pretty good time overall. Well, a good enough time to "beat" the game and see my name in the credits, so maybe I'm just a sucker for collecting meaningless bullshit.

The game is definitely a C-tier adventure game but I quite liked Time Hollow for the Nintendo DS. The story is a little awkward and it has that common adventure game problem where you can't advance the story unless you click on something in a certain order but I thought some of the game's time travel concepts were fun and there was just a certain charm to the whole experience that I enjoyed.

Edit: Also I just found out that the game has alternate endings that can only be unlocked on your second playthrough, which I was completely unaware of until now. Gonna have to dig up my old copy and check this out.

Every time there's a topic like this anywhere, the same lower budget European RPGs are listed. I agree with pretty much all of them. Two Worlds, Risen, Technomancer, Game of Thrones, etc, etc. I think maybe we all just love that similar RPG loop of dialogue, loot and questing that we're willing to go anywhere to get that fix. I think the fact that these middling games exist probably explains why we have to go to them in the first place; they're extremely difficult to make and we only see maybe one big one a year.

Only one I'd disagree with is Bound By Flame. I've played all of Spiders games and that one was terrible to me across the board. Even the similar Mars: War Logs was more enjoyable to me, but that was appropriately priced and at least had Mars as the setting which automatically makes it interesting.

*Raises sign behind a steel barricade that says "Mass Effect Andromeda was an alright game that came out at the worst possible time (within a month of Zelda & Horizon) and had no hope of living up to expectations"*

They're remarstering my answer soon, but Red Faction: Guerilla has got to take the cake for me.

It's a really dumb game in most respects but it's hard for me to deny how well the destructible environments complement the simple open world design.

Kingdom Hearts...

Seems like a perfect thread to pimp that XMen Origns: Wolverine game

Homefront: The Revoution

Risen1

The Saboteur

Because, despite all it's blarney cheesiness, the game had a style and setting I really like. It was an open-world, 3rd person, shooting and car racing game, set in occupied Paris in WW2. It's visuals toned down to grey, black, white and red to signify the Nazi occupation, and the streets colour up again as you killed Nazis, spread the Irish charm about, consorted with the resistance and liberated the various arrondissements in Paris. Also, there was a really cool song subtly featured in the safe-house theatre, where a singer would occasionally get on the stage there to sing this "Koop Island Blues" song, which I think really fits the vibe of the game:

I remember running up a a half destroyed Eiffel Tower at the end, while Nazis all around were in crisis knowing the game was up, the war was over and they'd lost, so were crying in their drinks or topping themselves while one Nazi mournfully played "I'm Feeling Good" on the piano.

Like the Binary Domains and Alpha Protocols I could also include here, the Saboteur had lots of "heart".

Destiny 1 played way too much of that.

Does PUBG qualify?

Castlevania: Lords of Shadow. I love the atmosphere and lore of that game soooooo much. It's also pretty fun to play.

The Bourne Conspiracy, I even 100%'d it on 360.

Septerra Core. Western made japanese styled RPG. I never got far into it, given that it seemed to require quite some grinding, but i loved the whole idea of this world that consists out of shells. The outer layers are populated by the rich, while the inner layers contain 'junkers', which are people that just have to get by from the scraps of the rich people. The overworld had some gaps that let you peek through the clouds at a lower layer. That was neat. There was also some sort of summoning card system that made you combine cards to summon different entities i believe. Never grasped it fully, but it looked cool.

Croc: Legends of the Gobbo's. I only had a PC but every now and then looked with jealous eyes at the N64 platformers. The 3d platformers i had on PC were Gex & Croc. Gex's PC controls were absolutely terrible though, to the point where i just couldn't play that game. Croc's controls were pretty solid and it was a very colourful and cheerful game. I bet i could still somewhat enjoy playing through that game in 2018.

Gabriel Knight 3 . Seen as the game that killed adventure games by many outlets. I played it as a kid as my first mature adventure game and figured that the puzzles were just too hard for my age. I walkthroughed my way through that game and had the best possible experience you can have.

Edit: totally didn't read your description of mediocre.

I think that description would fit how i felt trying to click with New Vegas. I spent over 50 hours in that game and while some of the dialogue is fun, i just don't enjoy the quests in that game. Feel like Fallout 3 did more for me. I guess the novelty of that setting just hit me stronger the first time around. Also blowing up / not blowing up Megaton was a cool quest.

Metroidvania's eventually tend to get that way as well. I love those games but eventually it comes down to poking & prodding around to get those last few % of progress out of the game.

By your definition of a mediocre game, I have none.