Highly rated games you don't get

+1

I'm with you on GTA IV. Firstly it took ages just to get it running - then when it did run it performed terribly.

The characters presented in the first few hours seemed like horrible people who did not engage me in the slightest, and the checkpoints were far too far apart for someone as inept at the game as I was.

I feel like GTA4 is superior to SD in almost every aspect, except maybe optimization. Philosophy of the main character is questionable, and Roman is annoying, and yeah it's touched with Slavic depression,but there is no game with greater attention to details in world creating. Also Ballad of Gay Tony is the ultimate GTA4 experience, it got rid of all problems, except optimization

Yeah, I agree that GTA IV was mediocre. I wouldn't call it bad or a waste of time, but certainly not a GOTY material. I'm not aware that people praised it though, always though that "it's mediocre" was the consensus.

I have to disagree. I loved it because for the first time it was real. Loved the car handling unlike GTA V where everything just slides around without traction. Relationships were worthwhile e.g I never had to hunt for armor because I could call Little Jacob to hook me up anytime. I could call someone to get the backup for a mission, Firefights were also more fun, and the cops are actually intelligent. True there's not as much to do like in San Andreas and I missed the planes but it still their best work IMO.

Youre lying, the characters werent deppresing, none of them were, Roman was always upbeat, Mallorie was always sweet, Jacob was always cool, Manny was so alive, etc. there were some deppresed characters but they had GOOD reasons to be deppresed if you payed attention to the story, you cannot be serious in believing deppresion doesnt exist. The Driving didnt feel awfull, it felt very interactive and actualy challanging for once in a GTA game, it shouldnt be a breeze driving cars, it takes skill and the driving was well made to incorporate the new pyhsics and changing up the way you drive from past games which was always the same way. The missions were not often boring, there might of been some boring missions but often? No, not realy. Maybe youre just too used to the action type of missions. You dont need armor for every challanging mission, what you need is to actualy use cover, proper timing, all given mechanics, positioning, instead of what i might guess what you did, is, run out in the open all the time presenting yourself to the enemy. Fair enough on dates though, find me a game that handled the dating good, haha albeit TO BE FAIR if you did date enough each person, you would get some benefit like car bombs, free taxi rides, cheaper guns or the ability to buy guns anywhere, etc.. The dozens you killed were bad people, the lives you spared were not bad people and infact did impact the game by returning later in the game to meet you or changing up the gameplay by providing a safehouse, phone call or alternative missions and ending and most notably dialogue changes. Sleeping Dogs is less realistic (you jump from car to car like its Pursuit Force, enough said) and the game is also far far shorter than games like GTA IV but what Sleeping Dogs does better is melee combat, graphics, maybe city design? and more action oriented maybe, just dont pretend though that Sleeping Dogs didnt have its fair share of boring missions, i clearly remember the tailing, the following, the chauffer, etc. You simply dont have the attention span or the patience to play a great slower paced master piece that is GTA IV, you need less story, less subtelty, less common sense/realism/logic, you just need action action action and if GTA is not fast enough for you, then i guess its a good thing Sleeping Dogs and Saints Row exist then.

You have to consider the time it was released. Previous GTA games were more arcadey, which was also fun, but GTA IV was the first game to set a more realistic tone, which made a big impression. Also GTA IV was released in 2008, obviously more recent titles will be more refined and therefor be better. The game was relatively cutting edge when it came out. Driving gets better once you get used to it. I found Niko and his cousin hilarious at times, I can get why you'd find them depressing but again they were going for a more serious tone so yeah...

I played GTA IV much later after it's release and I don't hold it in high regard, but at the same time I can understand the praise when it was released.

I loved GTA4. Emphasis on Loved, past tense. It was fresh at the time & all the floppy ragdoll-ness & squishy car physics were awesome novelties to mess around with when I was younger. But if I were to play it now it would just be slow, full of story stuff I don't care about because I wanna drive & shoot, but the driving & shooting ends up being too floppy & frustrating. GTA5 improved in some ways, but the story's even worse & the cars are just as floppy, only they don't even get damaged in fun ways anymore. I loved flattening a car as much as possible while still having it be driveable. In GTA5, cars barely get dented.

I feel very similar with the Red Dead games, used to love 'em, but they're just so slow & pointlessly floppy to me now. The Youtuber NakeyJakey made a great video on why Rockstar's games just aren't as good as they used to be.

It's part of the Xbox PC Gamepass if that's easier.

buy it if you're into chess and puzzles, cause it's basically it
It might fell like let down for FTL fans, but in really it's so solid and fun, if you are into this kind of fun. Games just on completely different side of the specter

Did you play it in coop?

Game has an uniqe sense of humor.
A different kindish story and characters.
It is FPS but has RPG elements.
Plus it is fun to play with friends.

I enjoyed 2nd to bits, went back to the first and it feels forced and unfun(ny), with mechanics that worked better in the second. In this way I also don't understand people adoring the first, difference of taste can be interesting :)

+1 Probably because it was over-hyped. Finished it and was disappointed as there are only a few unique enemies and all bosses were just bullet sponges with no real tactic or skill required. Only liked the cell shading

I couldn't play it for more than a couple hours. I'm usually the one-shot type-kill of guy, and having to empty like 82039284 (scientific approximation) magazines just to kill the first creatures felt so tedious and unfun, and I'm not going to grind for 30 hours to find a weapon that will finally get me to destroy a glass of water in less than 50 rounds. ^^

+1 I find the Borderlands series as a whole "ok", but I don't understand people who love it, it's a bit of boring even.

I never got into bastion myself, but I did love Transistor and found that in my second play through where I could really upgrade the skills and the combat was more difficult it did have a different feel. That being said if it takes until the second play through to feel like a real game to you, you probably won't bother with a second play though.

And yeah, I can imagine that the mechanic of having to control what is it three different characters with specialized play styles might not appeal to the same people Transistor would

lol, I couldn't get into Rage after BL2 :D BL2 had a pretty open map where you could go off from multiple times to find secrets, while Rage was super limited in that aspect...
That difference was very blatantly present, but I really want to retry it after a year or two passed. It may has less freedom than BL2 and not a "real" RPG as the aforementioned Fallout games, but I want to see it being what it is, not just compare it to others.
While the setting of these games are kinda similar, the genre/gameplay is vastly different, and they should be treated so.

( I don't have Mad Max and I'm unsure how it will turn out for me, story-style-lore-gameplay is my main focus and openworld games with too many activities get bland... I'm sure it will be fun for a while... we'll see!)

I felt like Bastion was a nice game just because the narrator.
Other than that it was just a normal game.

Personally I enjoyed Transistor for the amount of tactics involved. It wasn't designed in a puzzle way, which only had one answer, but instead let me organize my attacks and skills according to my own play style and preferences. And the story with all the programming metaphors certainly didn't go unnoticed by a software developer like me lol.

I liked Bastion, but it felt more repetitive to me, and I guess I was just progressing through the levels only to learn more about the story.

And of course both games have awesome visuals, music and sound design so that's definitely a plus.

+1

The backstory of Transistor wasn't as engaging for me as Bastion, even though both games' backstory were similarly embedded in the areas & environment. A talking sword is a little weird too. The gameplay has cool & unique concepts but when executed just didn't do much for me:

• The ability to pause & plan attacks should be conceptually ideal for me as a fan of turn based games, but it reduces your post-attack actions to run-around-and-dodge until you regain your attack power

• Combining abilities didn't add much to the game play or tactics for me

i loved bastion and beat it a few times already, but i couldn't get into transistor either. i only put in an hourish, so i was thinking maybe i just didn't give it enough of a chance, plus that was years ago so i don't even remember what i did and didn't like about it. i've been playing a whole lot of hades lately and was considering giving transistor another shot.

Hah, I personally enjoyed Bardbarian, even though I'm not a fan of tower defence games :D

• day of the tentacle

Now that's the kind of comment I'm looking for in this thread. It's universally acclaimed as the best lucas-arts game, and possibly the best P&C game of all time. And yet, for some people it just doesn't click.
I think its the humor. you either think it's hilarious, or you're bored

Only the new generation of gamers like it, not actual gamers.

Nothing wrong with hero shooters... you never played Saints Row?

(Edit) @ soulnibbler: my comment wasn't for argument's sake, it was merely to point out maybe not all hero games are cancer.
@artuurs: and this is why redefining words causes misunderstandings. While i agree the first two are basically gta clones, and bear no resemblance to this "hero shooter"

It also popularized loot boxes and i agree with all you said, one time it was free for a weekend, i tried it for a day, i had my fill of that game for the rest of my life. Garbage.

I guess youre too old for Killing Floor, it was the shit back then. Huddling toghether as a team was the only way to survive, the way the enemies menacingly moved towards you was scary, the graphics, screen style, music didnt help but it made it better, the gore, the guns and shooting, music, dialogue was fucking Ace, it was fun to try and survive to reach the final boss who would most likely end your whole squad, he was badass, came with badass music, it felt epic, game was scary, the atmosphere hostile and intimidating, it was great. The second game lost everything in favour of frantic twitchy twatchy chaos shooty shooty bang bang times... swapping hororr for sci fi, cartoonifying enemies, nerfing enemies, ruining map design, shittier sound design, it was just worse in every way... and yet everyone still plays it in favour of the first game...

in response to the previous comment, I guess you and I are too old - if it requires you to be a pre-pubescent teen.
I've also outgrown dick & fart jokes, for that matter

I also didn't like Limbo. I feel like the only reason Limbo ever got popular was because it was the first indie game to have that kind of atmosphere. The puzzles were either too easy or deliberately hidden among the monochrome graphics so that first-time-players would inevitably die/miss the solution, and like you said, the (fair) action didn't evolve past timing challenges.

Yes, SOMA has a gameplay vs story issue which is really jarring at the end, but I liked the idea behind the monsters. Humans that went mad because they were unable to adapt to the machine body. They are well contrasted with Cathrine and highlight the flaw in the WAUs plan. In execution they aren't that great. What saves them for me is the screen effect and the amazing sound design.
They add nothing to the game, because what they represent is already something we can see when we look at the bodies, and the added horror feels lacking, since it's not nearly as terrifying as the underlying horror of the conversations. Ultimately, for me, the story of SOMA is just so good that such issues are forgiveable.

I strongly disagree with humans going "batshit crazy" over such a revelation, this doesn't happen in real life either. Most people have fairly stable minds, only a small group of people will respond in an extreme manner. I actually detest the over-hysterical reactions popularized by popular media.

I liked SOMA ... in theory. Had the same issues with it that you did, it felt like it did itself a disservice by trying to be horror in the 'traditional' sense. If it really wanted to be horror, it could've been psychological. It was just forced stealth that didn't feel like it belonged, but I do applaud the devs for adding the passive mode where you can just skip all of that. Still doesn't fix the lack of depth though.

Honestly, the ending was sorta dumb because of how Simon reacted. I was fully with Catherine on that one, since by that point Simon should've already known this was how it was going to work since he had experienced with the diving suit "switch" not too long before. Simon throwing a temper tantrum just made him feel incredibly slow.

Atleast the first WD had puzzles, the latter didnt, but they werent realy puzzles if you had played their previous games, Sam and Max, those had actual real puzzles. The choices did matter for the most part but they were getting largerly phased out as time went on. It got worse and worse, it happens when the original devs leave.

l consider later TellTale games to be more interactive movie than game. You push the right arrow to move your character along, as the movie unfolds. You get the occasional meaningless choice, which shows a slightly different clip, but in the end it's the same movie.
Viewed that way, the puzzles are more of a hindrance.

you don't have a controller, you missed whole point of the game, like you didn't even play it

For me Brothers lost it because the depressing story felt incredibly forced. I actually said outloud "wait, this is for real?" when one of the brothers died. And then it made you play the slooooow burial of him, it felt like its only purpose was to make the player emotional over what was happening rather for it to actually be emotional itself. In the end it was just an "exchange brother's life for father's" journey and that simply didn't work for me.

You can't really compare to Resident Evil 4 as they have nothing in common...maybe Silent Hill series. If you played those you may get why its great. I guess people love it because its relate-able and very different from other horror shooters

Correction: you not liking a game doesn't make it garbage. Opinions aren't facts.

I liked it, but I don't know why it's so highly praised. Had a few creepy things that were nicely designed and neat puzzles, but the trial and error was real. Maybe it was just an early indie to pave the way.

I think Limbo is highly overrated, too. And lol yeah, those ratings from gaming outlets aren't worth shit (for the most part, at least).

I understand all that. But normally I can see why a game is highly rated, even if I don't like it. If it's not my niche, I can often still tell the difference between quality and mediocrity. It's unusual for me to see a game with near-universal acclaim where I can't even figure out why people think it's great.

I can see why people like it in 5-minute increments as a bit of a time waster. I can't figure out why on earth it could possibly be considered GOTY material, even by category.

and no, I don't worry about it. But after playing it once again, I thought I'd ask what games other people have felt similarly about, as it might be an interesting discussion.

Dude, i played that game as a wee kid, i loved the graphics (a massive jump from the previous games i played which were the first command and conquer, warcraft games haha) you have to understand, Land Warrior, the first mission, those beautifull blue skies, the bright sun, the vast massive open ended desert, the larger than life pyramids, the cool looking weapons and sick green awesome interface, the realistic scenarior of engaging long distance enemies, the ambient noises of wildlife and wind, it was awesome, immersive as fuck. Heh, its hard to die when the enemies are storm troopers, but its easy for them to die since the same rules apply.

yeah, nostalgia really makes evaluating classic games difficult. I know that some of my favorites haven't aged that well and I don't recommend them to people. I also know some that still hold up great that I have no problem telling people about.

I find particularly that the more realistic they tried to make the graphics, the worse it is. Cartoonish graphics generally held up much better. mid-nineties 3D games are awful, while the 2d games from the same era look gorgeous. And while almost imperceptible over time, UI has improved with leaps and bounds.

Haha, you think that was pixelated? The older ones were even moreso - and they were so silly, it was fun trying to snipe some randomly interchanging pixels from a KM away.

damn. I just traded for it the other day.Hopefully I'll enjoy it more than you did

Do you enjoy rogue-like games?: Permadeath, procedural generated dungeons, etc.

If not, then I can definitely understand not enjoying Slay the Spire.

At its core, the game is mostly about literally how you play the hand of cards that you are dealt while almost always knowing the intent of your enemies.

I think people who enjoy it tend to focus on its deck building, since that's where there is a variety of strategy. But when you could come across an almost different set of cards throughout each play through, strategizing with your deck can seem overwhelming compared to other games where you have a handful of fixed strategies/abilities up front to select from.

having played it, I totally agree with you
(not the slot machine part, the overrated part)

+1 for Slay the Spire. I've played other card games which I really enjoyed and this one seems so uneventful... Only played about 15 minutes or so.

Oh, I absolutely love this game. It's one of my favourites and I wasn't a fan of rouge-like tbh. Okay, it's very difficult at the start because you need to unlock your deck. It remains difficult, but you have to think ahead and strategize in order to win. It does take time to learn, but then, that's the appeal I think.

I love cyberpunk and sci-fi combat rpgs so I've had Deus-Ex recommended so many times and I've tried really hard but still can't get into it.

You seem to focus on the story, but the reasons Deus Ex is so highly rated is because of its gameplay.

The first Deus Ex ran pretty crap when it originally released, and wasn't even that impressive, visually. It had a fairly decent setting, but I wasn't able to play it long enough to get to all the clichés. Maybe I should revisit it again and see what i really hated the most about it.

I haven't played the game myself yet but recently I stumbled over this video that sparked my interest:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rxOKEsBx4NU

did you get to play it as soon as it came out? i still remember playing the demo of the first level 20 years ago at least 100 times ultil i got it to perfection. if i try hard enough, i think i might remember the patrol routes of every baddie. and some passwords too.
it was a collection of cliches, that's true enough. every conspiracy theory stuck together, but somehow along with it's great gameplay, it just worked.
i can see why playing it now might be a sub par experience, since every part of the story has been repeated to infinity in books, series, even other games. but at the time it came out, i can't remember any other game that had an engaging story that let you affect it with "decisions" and let you tackle each level with enough freedom as to let you finish it without "leveing up".

Edit: MGS came out before deus ex, but it was console only at first and i didn't get to play it. the premise is the same, every conspiracy mixed with gameplay that let's you beat maps your way. it's more on-rails though

Haven't played it yet, but based on countless toplists i've seen and reviews, you like the strongest points and don't get the weaker ones. You're well calibrated, fellow human being.
I think even the fans of the original know that the voiceover is meme-level bad.
( itsa bom )

As someone who isn't particularly keen on high fantasy, both Fallout and Mass Effect depend heavily on their settings. Sci-fi players are going to eat anything up because there just isn't a lot of character driven open world sci-fi, so please just take your fantasy game, replace the dragons with spaceships and the orcs with frog people and take out money.

As someone who doesn't generally play big game names that much, my eventual first play of the original Mass Effect earlier this year was... interesting, to say the least. While the over-arching story was nice, visiting all the planets ended up all feeling the same. The main story missions were generally a bit better, but the whole "choices matter" part didn't seem to stand up to my expectations. The voice acting was ok, but there was a lack of any real connection with the crew (even if you did manage to romance one of them). Even though it's third-person, I couldn't help comparing it to the original Halo, which I had also just completed for the first time this year.

This. I couldn't really get into it. I just didn't like the writing, the repetition I could tolerate, but I just can't wrap my head around why everyone and their dog seemed to adore it so much lol

Huh, you think so? Personally, I loved To the Moon :)

I am a TtM series fanatic. o-o; I found it amazing, especially finding out why he wanted to "go to the moon", because he couldn't remember why at all due to reasons of the past.

The gameplay was more filler, but the story is where it is all at. :]

well, when did you play it. I wager people who defend it to the death will have played it when it came out and was the culmination of years of waiting for an upgrade to the engine that was lauded in HL1. But if you played it after Episode 2 came out there were probably tons of other shooters with better environmental effects and AI that made it look it age.

I like Mini Metro, but I can certainly see it's a very niche game, and I wouldn't recommend it to most people

Mini Metro works much better as a mobile game. I play it on phone casually maybe once a month when waiting for something. It really doesn't have much replay value to keep you interested after half the maps wth slight variation in upgrade unlocks. I would compare it to a quick match game of any sort where you can daze around for a few minutes. It probably helps I turn off music in games 99.9% of the time.

I think Super Meat Boy is so overrated because it was the first game to popularize the "it's not incompetence on our part, it's meant to be difficult" bullshit. Ok, there are some alright ones, but honestly, half the games that boast about being "difficult" are just plain trying to excuse the dev's inability to balance things properly.

I liked Binding of Isaac though, even though it could have used some fine balancing as well. I still found it fun to play and liked the graphic, so I can see why that one is popular.