Ok so I recently got two mediocre XBOX360 games for free.  Let me explain:  someone gave me a $10 gift card for Blockbuster, because the Blockbuster near their house was closing down and they had no use for it.  I visited another Blockbuster and they had a shelf of used XBox games, all $14.99 and under.

The only cash I had was a dollar.  Yea, a single dollar.  The game Fracture was $9.99 and Dark Sector was $6.99.  Which one do I get (I was curious about both)?  Luckily for all these games it was buy-one-get-one-free.  So I got Fracture with the gift card, and Dark Sector for free.  All I had to pay was 59 cents of tax.

I had played the demos of both of these games earlier and they both left me a little underwhelmed.  Yet both seemed to show promise, despite both of them having lukewarm reception.

However, so far I've had a blast playing through both of them.  Maybe I just suck at games more recently, but I died A LOT in both of these games.  It took me about halfway through Dark Sector to realize that I liked it the better of the two.  Not only that, but I also realized that this is a pretty damn good game in general.  I for one now consider it very underrated.  I had soo much fun playing through this campaign.  Periodically gaining powers and decapitating zombies was extremely exhilirating.  I also found the voice acting pretty top-notch, and while the story was pretty vague, it was definitely engaging and the cut scenes often had me saying "fuck yea!" in my head.  By the end of the game I felt like a bona fide badass.  I love games that make you feel like an unstoppable force of nature while still presenting you a challenge.

I beat the game about an hour ago.  There's something about end-bosses that always disappoint me.  They're always either too easy, too hard, and most of the time are just plain underwhelming.  The final boss seemed like it belonged in a Zelda game, not this one.  It was just tedious for the most part, which is also a huge problem with end-bosses.

I'm still working on Fracture.  It seems like the designers of this game focused 90% on the weapons first and then tried to design a game around it.  Don't get me wrong, I do get a blast out of playing it from time to time, but some of it is just so monotonous, and much of it feels like diet Halo.  Plus many of the enemies take way too many hits to kill...even on the default difficulty level.  I have plenty of other complaints, but at least I basically got this shit for free, so it's way more enjoyable than if I paid full, or even used, price for it.

I haven't yet played the multiiplayer of either of these games, but I'm guessing Fracture's multiplayer would be much more exciting than its single player.  I wish I had an XBox Live membership right now, I'm actually pretty eager to try it out.  I bet I wouldn't even be able to find a game on the Dark Sector servers, and I have a feeling it's multilpayer would be pretty standard.

What do you guys think of these games?  Are there any other games that you feel went overlooked but really shouldn't have?

What are your favorite underrated, overlooked, or just plain forgotten games?

I think you're looking at this wrong....

For 10 and 7 bucks those games are GREAT. But when they came out (and were reviewed) these were $60 dollar titles. I don't think they are underrated at all. I don't think they are terrible games by any stretch, they just aren't great games.... and aren't worth the original 60 bones they were selling for.

I say both games are worth what you paid..maybe even a bit more but not 60 $. Another game that i think was underrated  was prey for the 360,that game was a blast to play and should of got better reviews (at least in my opinion).........

I think by underrated you mean "cheap crappy games that were a low price so I bought them and they are decent for the price I bought them at, but certainly not sixty dollars worth".

Fracture seemed cool. And then you start playing it, and about the thirf or fourth level you start thinking (Is there anything else to this?). And then you realize that there isn't.

Timeshift is very underrated, very good and one of my favorite games. I even paid full price for it.

I'll go with TimeSplitters 2.
 
That game was unreal although I'm not sure how much hype it got or how it was rated.  The single player was an awesome campaign.  The multiplayer had all the standard modes and "Virus" which is it's version of Halo's "Infection" and many more innovative ones that were never done before.  There are 126 different characters to choose from in multiplayer.  And I'm pretty sure the guys who made goldeneye were the ones who made it so you know its a good FPS.

Twisted Metal II and Black

Well one game I find totally underated was saints row 2. Everything about that game is purely fun. Sure it's no gta4, however there are things it does better like side missions, continuing your missions from checkpoints instead of the beginning and character creation.

METAL ARMS GLITCH IN THE SYSTEM - possibly the most underrated game of all time.   For me it was an excellent experience. WIth a huge variety of levels and gameplay.