So which middling games did you love but the world has forgotten about?
I loved Viking. A gorgeous open countryside, brutal but not challenging limb-severing gameplay. Enough collectables to give you a reason to explore but not so much that it felt like a slog. I've been thinking of playing it again for years. If I do I'll let you know if it still holds up.
That was great! Wasn't it? Now you're making me want to play it again.
I'll add in Dark Sector and Singularity.
It's a bit of a dying genre, most full-price games are AAA these days and anything smaller in scale gets lumped into the indie bracket and a lower price point. Also with digital sales everything has a longer shelf-life so stuff doesn't disappear in the way it used to.
The 360 seemed to be when the 7/10 middling games had their peak. From those days I would nominate Pure, which has the added bonus - common to these games - of having a generic one-word title that tells you absolutely nothing about what the game actually is.
More recently I'd nominate Invisible, Inc - which is a fantastic turn-based stealth strategy game that everyone seems to have forgotten about. Maybe Hand of Fate. Definitely Slime Rancher.
There were some really trashy tie-in games on 360 that I loved that might, might, charitably scrape a 7. Wanted: Weapons of Fate had a tremendous cover system, and X-Men Origins: Wolverine was tremendous fun.
The ironically-titled Remember Me and the slightly-immature but mostly good craic evil-Pikmin-em'-up Overlord spring to mind as well.
I also want to say Dark Void, but that's mostly just for Bear McCreary's brilliant (though heavily Galactica-riffing) soundtrack.
I almost mentioned Remember Me, but didn't because I feel it is genuinely excellent.
+1 for Overlord. It really helped to scratch that Pikmin itch I was feeling so badly at the time.
I'd also nominate the Sniper Elite games, for all the reasons stated in the recent PS+ thread. It's nice that these have carried on. The Zombie Army Trilogy offshoot is another decent example of a AA 7/10 game as well, IMO.
I'd like to nominate Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning. Generic-ass fantasy setting, decent combat, pretty good RPG elements; my memory is it was a bit like Fable, with a less ambitious social side, but a much bigger and more varied world map.
Driver: San Francisco gets my vote: it's glossy & well made but also bonkers.
Warhammer: Space Marine is still pretty much my gold standard for a 7/10 game. Looks good, is fun and challenging but there's not much you need to think about after the hand holding tutorial is done.
Shadows of the Damned is another; dumb, gross etc. etc. but simple & fun.
Eurogamer are doing a series on this very phenomenon called The Double A-Team. Argues that these dumb, mid-to-high budget action focused games don't get made any more, that they were a peculiarity of the PS2/xbox/PS3/360 generations where a game could hang off a couple of interesting mechanics (mind control, jet pack, dead wife in main character's bionic arm).
Well made variants of this genre are by far my favorite games and I kind of agree that they don't exist as a thing this generation. You could probably lump things like Shadow of Mordor and Mad Max into this category but they're more like the low(er) end of Open Worlds.
Nine posts in and no-one's mentioned Spec Ops: The Line yet?
Nine posts in and no-one's mentioned Spec Ops: The Line yet?
Because it wasn't any fun? The video game equivalent of Brenda Romero's Train board game.
Nine posts in and no-one's mentioned Spec Ops: The Line yet?
I wasn't entirely sure if this was a genuine AA, or just a flop, to be honest. I'm also not giving you the benefit of the doubt, on the basis that you've also already named Invisible Inc, which both feels better than a 7/10, and is the very definition of an 'indie' game.
I'll concede that it's really tricky to gauge what counts though. Does Catherine count? Gravity Rush? Sleeping Dogs? Trackmania? Then there's Hellblade, which seems to have specifically aspired to be an AA game with AAA presentation (and pretty much pulled it off). Those two new Lovecraft-inspired games (Call of Cthulhu and The Sinking City) look like they would probably count too, though I've not played either yet.
The most recent ones I can think of that haven't been mentioned and likely do apply are the Styx games. They're great little proper fantasy stealth games, and seem to fit our criteria here very nicely.
Of the ones already mentioned above, I'd second Driver: San Francisco as an excellent call (it was pretty much the first thing that popped into my head), and I knew as soon as I saw the thread title that Dark Sector would (rightly) get a mention from cav (though I had forgotten about Singularity).
Nine posts in and no-one's mentioned Spec Ops: The Line yet?
Sounds rubbish.
//runs past topic, yelling//
SEVEN IS A GOOD SCORE, MOST OF THESE GAMES ARE FIVEEEEeeeeeeessssss
//vanishes into the night//
Some great game experiences mentioned so far. The Club would be one I haven't seen mentioned from the 360 era.
The Punisher for the OGX and PS2 count for this? wasn't tremendously well received but was enjoyable.
Spec Ops the Line is a 10/10 game hiding in a 7/10 game's clothing. Not sure it counts.
Here's a few more (to debate):
Just Cause 1
Binary Domain (an absolute nailed on 7/10 spectacular)
Dead Island
Alice: Madness Returns
Transformers: War for Cybertron
Darksiders
FEAR (maybe - controversial that one perhaps)
Saint's Row?
Last Remnant (and indeed any workhorse JRPG)
Carrier Command: Gaia Mission (now we're back on track)
Zombie Army Trilogy
Nine posts in and no-one's mentioned Spec Ops: The Line yet?
Sounds rubbish.
Keep going.
Enslaved: Odyssey to the West is a good one. Didn't set the world alight but was solid and the story was engaging enough to have you pressing forward.
I love Enslaved. If anyone hadn't played it, you really should.
I think it's better than a 7/10.
Me too.
I remember Enslaved getting 8s and 9s at review, and I enjoyed it as well. I have a weakness for anything that adapts 'Journey to the West', though. I even started playing Unruly Heroes last night just because of this.
Enslaved did some things well but I found it pretty forgettable overall. It’s a definite 7 for me, and not even one of the good ones.
From a similar vintage, Castlevania Lords of Shadow would be a nailed-on 7/10 banger were it not for the franchise name which gave it a greater stature than it arguably deserved.
+1 for Lords of Shadow. Just grabbed it in Games with Gold, going to play it again. Great 7/10 game.
Shame they fucked it with the sequel.
I thought that was a really good game, and definitely not as disrespectful to the series and its fans as people might make out IMO. IIRC there was way more to the combat than most of these GoW/DMC clones usually get too, with the Light/Dark thing iirc rewarding you for fighting well or something to that effect.
Spiderman Web of Shadows! I think I actually gave this one 7/10 myself, the review is no longer online though.
It was great, really felt like Spiderman and Manhatten is huge. No one but me ever played it.
The Saboteur. I think it was Pandemic's (off of Mercenaries) last game, and I bloody loved it.
You were tasked with liberating Nazi-occupied Paris; your progress literally brought colour back to the world as you played.
It was full of jank, but it really captured my imagination.
Is Mercenaries a shout? Or was it too good?
I really liked it at the time, it's definitely an 8. Having played it recently on Xbox One BC though, it's aged really badly.
We all have, to be fair.
I loved Viking. A gorgeous open countryside, brutal but not challenging limb-severing gameplay. Enough collectables to give you a reason to explore but not so much that it felt like a slog. I've been thinking of playing it again for years. If I do I'll let you know if it still holds up.
I've had a copy of Viking for a long (long) time and this topic made me go back to it on Friday evening. Classic 'wife is out, what am I going to do' evening…
I bought it at the same time as something else, I forget what but that game did draw my attention away from Viking. At the time I played through about half of the first island and then watched my flatmate play through most of the rest of it.
It's not aged terribly, it's maybe not as high def or as lush looking as my memory of it but it does what it does well. I was surprised how little hand holding it does and how it balances the challenge it presents quite finely. The dodge mechanic is a bit unnecessarily clunky but otherwise it's a solid 7/10.
Can anyone remember the Xbox/PS2 (I think) era game that Control is strongly reminiscent of? I haven't seen it mentioned anywhere - but it was mind control, you could throw things about, inhabit soldiers minds and get them to commit suicide etc…. It was a 7/10 classic but I can't remember its name….
Psi-Ops: The Mindgate Conspiracy. And that was awesome.
That's it! Nice one.
Psi-Ops was the first time I'd ever seen ragdoll physics. I seem to recall it was the first game to use physics in its gameplay, even before HL2.
There are many great nominations in this thread already, but one I'm confident no-one but me remembers/has played is Warzone 2100. It's an ancient RTS from the time of Total Annihilation, and I reckon it's one of the best post-TA RTSs, but no-one bought it except me. It had a well-told, bleak story and a hugely satisfying research tree (from what I remember.) You can get it free as abondonware now, but you probably shouldn't.
A game that is objectively a bit rubbish but that I really liked is Fahrenheit. That was an early Quantic Dream game, a collection of daft story and QTEs. The story branched a lot, to the point where I discovered scenes that didn't appear in any walkthroughs, and developed into something hilariously ludicrous. Your character became a super-powered zombie halfway through what had been a sober crime thriller.
I loved Warzone 2100. Best RTS EVAR!!1 It had three wonderful features:
All levels were timed so sitting back until you had 300 tanks and then clicking ATTACK was never an option.
You only built one base in each of the three campaigns expanding and upgrading it level by level making the game less repetitive and more strategic. It just made me care about the base more too.
You gained new tech for your units by researching the stuff you find. This meant that you could start a level being attacked by superior forces and you would have to hold them off until you could research their tech and hit back. Wonderful stuff.
Fahrenheit/Indigo Prophecy was….. quite the thing.
I had Fahrenheit but never played it. It was during my graduate but living at home disposal income era, where I bought everything.
I played a chunk of it, but I seem to remember it had ridiculously difficult QTEs and a plot that could only have resulted from enormous amounts of psychotropics on the part of renowned EEEMOSHONN auteur Daivid Caige..
enormous amounts of psychotropics on the part of renowned EEEMOSHONN auteur Daivid Caige..
You think?
Fahrenheit was an interesting mix of good ideas on ways to progress videogames and awful cinema tropes which have no place in decent films, let alone videogames.
DC then completely failed to realise what worked and what didn't and doubled down on all of it (other than internet-as-supervillain) for Heavy Rain.
Some of you claimed to like Heavy Rain at the time. You were wrong. I dare you to go back and try playing it again now.
Heavy Rain did some interesting, ambitious things, but it was also batshit mental, all over the map tonally, and gave zero fucks about its own internal logic.
Most of which is pretty disastrous when it was supposed to be a revolutionary mystery game for adults.
Can't argue that it was interesting and ambitious though.
Any project is ambitious when a creator is not good at what they're trying to do.
The only interesting thing about David Cage is that he has somehow managed to repeatedly convince people to give him inordinate amounts of money to make this drivel.
Any project is ambitious when a creator is not good at what they're trying to do.
The only interesting thing about David Cage is that he has somehow managed to repeatedly convince people to give him inordinate amounts of money to make this drivel.
Quantic Dream's real money maker is their motion capture work for movies and simulations. That's where they make their money. It's the videogame stuff that's their side gig as far as I'm aware. It's weird that they would take all that money and have their sidegig be… that.
Detroit Become Human was a fucking great game.
There. I said it.
Detroit Become Human was a fucking great game.
There. I said it.
Good lord.
It's a bold statement.
After recently re-buying Bastion for the 450th time on Switch I'm calling it as a 7/10 game.
Blue Dragon on the 360. Utterly generic JRPG with a very nice cartoony style and an insane amount of grinding. I loved it but you'd struggle to give it more than a 7 out of 10, if you even remembered it at all.
It also had some stupidly over-the-top boss battle music, with long-time Deep Purple überfan Nobuo Uematsu getting to work with Ian Gillen and not holding anything back. It was Sonic Adventure levels of ridiculous.