The Gang of Five
Beyond the Mysterious Beyond => Hobbies and Recreation => Gamers Zone => Topic started by: Midnight on January 10, 2015, 11:46:00 AM
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You know what I mean... those games that everybody seems to be crazy about, but when you finally have a chance to play them, you find out that they are simply average (or good but not that good).
I have many examples to share, but the one that easily tops my list is ´The Secret of Monkey Islandª.
I know, I know, it’s a great classic and all, but I honestly don’t know why most people seem to have such a high praising towards it. The game is funny and the story is clever (not to mention that great intro music that it’s still stuck on my head) but there are so many games that are far better than this one and neither of them seem to have gotten the same level of recognition. Maniac Mansion came out earlier and I find it more enjoyable, and Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis features a stronger story with multiple paths to choose, but it's still getting less attention than the pirates game. Not to mention... Shadow of the Comet came out a couple of years later and very few people (that I know, at least) seem to have acknowledged its existence.
I only played Monkey Island from beginning to the end once, and that was because the first forum that I joined was full of people discussing it in every other thread, so I figured that I needed to play it to... you know... post? (yeah, they were that obsessed about it).
Another one was ´Crysis 2ª. They assured me that it was going to be good, and the only conclusion that I could draw at the time was ´I’m so glad that this have come as a giftª. The game took forever to download from my Steam library, and I didn't find it all that good to be honest.
The Legend of Zelda games are usually a missed cause to me, but I ended up loving both "A Link to the Past" and "Wind Waker".
Also, I'm not that crazy about Duke Nukem 3D.
How about you, guys?
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Pretty much any Nintendo game, but I'm mainly thinking about the Mario and Zelda games. They've always seemed a bit too cutesy to hold my attention for long.
I don't really get the hype behind Halo either. It's not bad, but I think some other shooters are a lot better.
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You know? Someone got me a premium account for Minecraft (impossible to afford for me) and I still can't find the global appealing to that game. I can play it for two weeks straight if I want to, but then I end up needing two MONTHS of recess from it.
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I get what Spec Ops:The Line was trying to do, but it really didn't seem to accomplish its goal in any meaningful way. The moral choices people said were so heart-wrenching suffered because the "noble" choice was always hidden from the player or deliberately counter-intuitive.
Take the infamous white phosphorous portion. I fight my way onto the wall overlooking the next base and see swarms of baddies assaulting my position in a huge 180 degree sweep. Next to me is a console with targeting system, so I target the bad guys and kill them all. The game proceeds to lambaste me for using white phosphorous against my enemies, saying "you could have totally just sniped each badguy one-at-a-time for thirty real-world minutes until they were all gone instead of resorting to such a violent solution!" Well, I fail to see why one base full of dead guards is worse than another, plus it was a new game mechanic brazenly indicated to the player. It's like saying the player makes a moral choice when they find a new type of gun on the ground and pick it up to test it out for a while.
Not to mention they just stole the plot from Heart of Darkness/Apocalypse Now. I can't give SpecOps' emotional aspects any real credit when its just reusing them wholecloth from another story.
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For Spec-Ops, I don't think the focus was on the moral choices themselves but more on the fact that you're playing a game that lets you do that stuff to begin with. I remember some of the loading screens sometimes say stuff like 'You don't have to be playing this", or "Do you feel like a hero yet?".
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Did anyone here had the chance of playing "Rush Bros?" The Art in that game is fantastic, and so are some of the songs but... the game itself left me with a pretty bad taste. Too unforgiving, too frustrating.
Also... My girlfriend was amongst the first people that bought PokÈmon X and Y when they first came out... the only thing that I have to say about them is that, I'm so GLAD that I didn't have to spent MY money on either of them.
This has been my favorite franchise ever since I played PokÈmon Yellow back in 1999... that was one of the very first games that could successfully prevent me from going to sleep for several days in a row (in fact, I didn't return to my regular schedule until AFTER I finished the entire thing). I have played pretty much every installment on the series and with every new one that came out, I felt a little less attracted to the whole thing: PokÈmon Diamond felt like a chore during the majority of it and it was downright unfunny, PokÈmon Black insisted on hold my hand thru every step of the way (I kid you not) and PokÈmon Black 2 improved a LOT over those two, but still felt bland.
I would love to know why critics keep being so enthusiastic towards this series when it is obvious that it had reached it's limit a long time ago. New PokÈmons? That's a disadvantage really, as it is really hard to keep track AND most of them are horribly uninspired.
... And to think that every new Sonic game that comes out it's received like a wounded seal on a shark tank :anger
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This is probably just me, but when my sister got me Skyrim for my birthday last year, I just couldn't get into it.
I remember playing the game for a few hours. I got through that little tutorial bit with the execution/excape from the dragon, and then I just got lost. I wondered around for a couple hours, fighting stuff and talking to people, but never figuring out what I was supposed to be doing. I remember I had to got some village to speak to somebody, but I could never find theme in that village.
I can go back and actually get through it, but I'm not really motivated to. I've got too many games to play through right now, other things to do, and I don't know if I'll ever get back to it. :/
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For me it would have to be "5 Nights at Freddy's". This game got a lot of attention, and many people are calling it the "scariest game in years". My reaction was, meh. While it is mildly creepy, I think the scariness factor is overstated. I've seen much scarier games. I mean, Arkham Asylum was scarier than "5 Nights at Freddy's".
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I don't necessarily think it's that big of a deal that they keep coming out with new Pokemon. It used to bother me, but I came to realize it was pretty silly to get upset over something like that.
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I don't necessarily think it's that big of a deal that they keep coming out with new Pokemon. It used to bother me, but I came to realize it was pretty silly to get upset over something like that.
I agree, but isn't "catch them all" like the whole point of te series? Hard to focus on accomplishing that when you have no interest in grow your collection.
BTW: A few more:
I'm having big issues with the "Portal" series. I have heard so many times that these games were the new standard and the best thing that so many people have ever played but... you know what? I hate to admit it, but I found them really boring.
While everything seems to be fine about them (controls, graphics, music and sounds...) I just can't help but feeling them like a chore. I guess that I'm so used to the other releases by ValvE (ya know, the ones that involve pointing a gun at everything that moves until it stops doing it) to fully enjoy the series but... I don't know, I know I could pick up and play Left 4 Dead any day (even when I also found it to be really annoying at times -especially the second installment-) but that doesn't seem to be a possibility with Portal.
The first Diablo was also a top candidate to my "Are you serious?" list, but that one has won me over.
Yes, I'm hard to please :lol:
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The old Resident Evil games. Why? TANK CONTROLS. The on-screen character should NEVER be so difficult to move around. And don't you dare feed me that line about "it makes it scarier", because it doesn't It just makes it annoying. Plus, given the fact that most of the original cast of the RE are all ex-military and therefore would very agile and quick-footed, the reasoning falls even more flat to me. Give me Resident Evil 4 and onward anyday. At least I can play those games. Oh yes, I just said that I prefer the newer RE games to the older ones.
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I tried playing the first RE game, but I ended up stopping. Never before had I play a game that was so limiting on saves. I know it's not exactly new (for instance, Enemy Zero does the same thing), but I wasn't prepared for it. I had to find these ink rolls or whatever they were calleda nd each time I saved, it used up one of those. It wasn't the only reason I stopped, but it was a contributing factor.
The controls didn't bother me too much, but that's only because I had long gotten used to similar controls in Dino Crisis 1 and 2. I don't mind them, but I can see how frustrating they can be, plus the fixed camera angles can be annoying. This is most problematic in Dino Crisis 3 for the X-Box. While the first two games were more forgiving and made it easier for you to deal with foes by only having the enemies on screen to worry about, in the third game, it's like a normal action game with enemies swarming around you....and it still has the tank controls and the fixed camera angles. Not exactly a great combination.
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To be fair, RE 3 control-skin didn't bother me as much (greatly because of the story of the game, that kept me hooked up) but every other installment of the series seemed to be a miss cause for me, as the "tank controls" were too frustrating to master and the story didn't won me over.
I managed to finished Code Veronica on the Dreamcast, but I honestly don't know how I did it, because that game added dizzy camera angles (for scary purposes, I guess) to the mix. Nothing like walking into a room with the guard all set, just to have the music changing and the camera finding itself pointing down a ladder.
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Well, they bothered ME. If you point the stick left, the character should go left relative to your position, not theirs'. Period. It left like trying to steer a drunk across a high wire.
Plus, the plots of the RE games are moronic at best. I could write a whole series detailing how stupid the people who work at Umbrella are.
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I never had much of a problem with the tank controls either. That being said, I do think the story for RE is crap :p
I never understood why Final Fantasy is so popular. The storylines always seemed a bit boring to me
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I thought this topic was about expressing our less-than-impressed opinions of acclaimed games. Now that everyone please stop butting in with this "tank controls aren't bad" crap like they're trying to tell me something about my gaming ability?
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It's a discussion. Nobody's butting in, and nobody's criticising you :p
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I never had much of a problem with the tank controls either. That being said, I do think the story for RE is crap :p
I never understood why Final Fantasy is so popular. The storylines always seemed a bit boring to me
I know, right? I found them all boring at best... and God knows I tried to give them a fair chance.
And for the cherry on top... the Spanish translation to the seventh installment looks like it was made with an online translator from Japanese to Spanish... dude, it doesn't make any sense, plays around with upper case and lower cases as it pleases and the results are so bizarre that they are actually hilarious in a twisted way.
I kid you not when I say that is nearly unbeatable that way.
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bushwacked: Sorry.
I think it depends on which Final Fantasy game. Yeah, I don't get the popularity for FF7-onward at all. 4-6, though? Absolutely.
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Just gonna move this topic over to the Gamer's Zone! If I find the time I'll get my list of games on here.
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Just gonna move this topic over to the Gamer's Zone! If I find the time I'll get my list of games on here.
Sorry about that, I just found out about this sub-forum.
Anyway... PES 2012. The game is beyond broken; most than half the time the computer would do whatever it wants in terms of ball possession. If your opponent threw the ball out of the field, chances are that he would get to do the following throw-in.
Scoring is here a matter of luck more than ever, the comments are bad synchronized (the guy tells you about a situation that happened like fifteen minutes ago -in game time-) and the physics are just weird.
We had to return it to the store, and THANK GOD we didn't buy the digital copy.
PES 2014 and FIFA 2015 are far better options and I'm fine with either of those.
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Minecraft-whats the appeal?
It's just computer legos pretty much, what do people find so interesting with playing with blocks? I personally like a goal in my games. Then again The Sims series has no real goal but I like it because you can set your own, raise a family, earn a living with no cheats, get to the top of a career and then theres all the challenges fans make. Like the legacy challenge or the one I'm attempting for the 50 foal challenge-it has a point.
Minecraft..has no goal at all, unless one of your goals would be to make the worlds largest computer lego mansion or something.
Minecraft is so..blah to me, I fail to see it's world wide appeal, not to mention it's price. In my currency it's $31. Sorry but $31 is insane for what the game is, the account was given to me by a friend who got it to see without trying the demo and hated it, I hated it and gave to to my nephew who was begging his parents for the game.
Maybe I'm just missing something, but Minecraft bored me to tears. And fans get butthurt when I say I think it's a terrible game..uh sorry my opinion offended them so..
The best game I've played is Okami, it deserves every bit of praise it gets. Didn't like Okamiden much though, felt more like a spin off then a sequel. Okami is such a beautiful and well made game.
This Minecraft however..is not.
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I didn't really understand the appeal of Minecraft either. I heard people talking about it, but never really understood why people loved it so much. So when I started playing it for the first time a few years ago, I thought 'why not, I can play a little bit of this to see what it's about'. The first time was with some GOF members with some texture missing (I couldn't see the water :p ). I did eventually start to play it on my own to figure out more about it. What started as just a quick play soon became longer and longer and longer... and soon 2 hours had passed and I was shocked. And I kept on playing. I just wanted to build, keep building, keep crafting, etc.
Exactly how this happened, I cannot explain. Even in the free alternative to Minecraft, Minetest, without the mods for animals and monsters, that game still had me going for hours and hours as I crafted and built. Something about the game just draws me in. What that is, I don't think I can ever say. It's just...one of those things I suppose.
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This might sound weird but, aside for the first installment, which I really really love, I cannot stand the Mario franchise... ummm, and the same thing is going on with Kirby, actually.
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I used to play the first quite a lot when I was a kid. Although my favorite was Super Mario World. I haven't really played too much of the later games, so I don't really have a strong opinion on them.
As for a critically claimed game I'm not a huge fan of, Doom. The original classic. I don't hate it by any means or anything, but I never could play it for too long. The controls were too swift, the inability to manually aim makes it hard for me to tell if I'm hitting someone, the lack of a jump button put me off, and I easily got lost when trying to find those keys to advance.
I don't mind playing it for short periods of time, but I never get far in the game because of frustration and a rapidly declining interest as I play. By extension, I'm not overly fond of games using the same engine, such as Heretic (which I tried and got bored of quickly) and Freedoom.
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I didn't really understand the appeal of Minecraft either. I heard people talking about it, but never really understood why people loved it so much. So when I started playing it for the first time a few years ago, I thought 'why not, I can play a little bit of this to see what it's about'. The first time was with some GOF members with some texture missing (I couldn't see the water :p ). I did eventually start to play it on my own to figure out more about it. What started as just a quick play soon became longer and longer and longer... and soon 2 hours had passed and I was shocked. And I kept on playing. I just wanted to build, keep building, keep crafting, etc.
Exactly how this happened, I cannot explain. Even in the free alternative to Minecraft, Minetest, without the mods for animals and monsters, that game still had me going for hours and hours as I crafted and built. Something about the game just draws me in. What that is, I don't think I can ever say. It's just...one of those things I suppose.
I can relate to your feelings on Minecraft. Though I haven't played it in quite a while, there was a span of about a year that I would play it quite heavily. It was mainly the building element that appealed to me. You can never have too many castles with lave moats. ;)
As for a popular game that I never really cared for, the old game Myst never really appealed to me though it was popular in the 1990s. I usually enjoy puzzle games, but for some reason Myst and its sequel never caught on with me.
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Everyone's got that big title that they just don't agree with. Mine for year just past happened to be on the top of an awful lot of YouTubers' 10 Best games of 2014 list but for me it just didn't float my boat. That game was Shadow of Mordor.
Now let me explain before I get pelted! The game itself is not adherently bad. In fact, it is solid in its construct, excellent roaming and movement mechanics, the Nemesis system is a brilliant addition and the combat has that gross but satisfying gore fact to it... but there in lies my biggest gripe with SoM.
Whilst the combat is heavy hitting and flows very much like Batman: Arkham Asylum/City's multi-directional fighting mechanics, I just found every battle I was in a chore. The enemies swarmed you in droves and by the time you've dealt with one or two baddies, another flock of about 5 are already on their way to join the fray. On top of that, the enemies are damage sponges. You deliver blow after blow just praying that eventually they'll keel over but reinforcements have already piled in before you've dispatched even one of the lowly peons.
And the roaming bosses only add to the frustration I found. Because they had special attributes that could either be exploited or you had to avoid triggering, killing them was nigh on impossible with the hoard around you. The killing animation for defeating bosses just took far too long and before you could safely strike them out, someone would be ready to attack you from behind forcing you to counter their attack and thus interrupting you slaying your target. Who would, by then, have gotten up, recovered a portion of their health and started fighting again!
Because I found one of the major mechanics of the game such hard work to deal with and I ended up losing out under sheer number of enemies, I felt cheated and completely despised the idea of fighting knowing that I was just going to be swarmed in minutes. As I said, the game is structurally sound in its design, but the fighting mechanics just didn't do it for me. The first rage quit in a long time for me. I'm just glad I borrowed SoM from a friend rather than forking out full price for the damn thing.
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^ I never really had a problem with the amount of enemies - with the executions, teleport executions, arrows and that head-explody thingie, along with some of the upgrades, isn't it possible to take out about 15 enemies at a time?
That being said, I do find that I can only play about an hour of Shadow of Mordor before I start getting a bit bored and need a break. The game can be quite repetitive.
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Maybe once you started levelling up and gaining more skills it got easier but at the time, it was just winding me up and I wasn't enjoying my experience. And for me, if you're not enjoying your gaming experience, then it's not the game for you.
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I don't know how I missed this for so long but... GTA: SAN ANDREAS, man. This is the first game that made me feel INSULTED.
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I played GTA: San Andreas before. I only remember 2 things of my experience.
1. Using the jetpack to fly around.
and
2. Brushing up with a group of black people, then getting followed by them, and then getting beat to death by them.
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How did San Andreas make you feel insulted if you don't mind my asking?
As for a game I didn't like: Ico. Normally I can understand why people might like something I don't. With Ico, I just don't get why people say it's so great. The graphics are pretty nice for an older game but the combat is some of the worst I've ever seen in any video game. Ico gets knocked flat on his butt with just one hit, the puzzles aren't very thrilling, some of which aren't even well thought out and the female lead(whose name I can't remember right now) is so useless and helpless she makes Princess Peach look strong and independent. That's pretty bad when a character who's more of a plot device than an actual character is better than you.
My mom bought me a Japanese import of Ico for Christmas and I really don't plan on ever playing it again. I don't want to sell the game because I think that would be a jerk move on my part but I really don't think I'll play it ever again.
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How did San Andreas make you feel insulted if you don't mind my asking?
Of course you can ask :) It made me feel racist... I don't know why, but that's what I got from the experience.
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I guess hearing the "N" word spoken so often in the game can make you feel that way. I dunno, it never really bothered me that much.
Going slightly off topic but I think I'm starting to get more into the Saints Row games than I am GTA. I've been doing an SR marathon leading up to the latest game, Gat Out of Hell and I've been having a lot more fun with those games. I think it's because GTA just became so restrictive and tried too hard to be realistic. Not saying the GTA games aren't good. I'd just rather get paid to cause destruction around a city than play virtual tennis with my virtual wife.
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This is an old game but Starcraft just never appealed to me.
I guess it's just me liking the "near-future" motif of the Command and Conquer series over the "space opera" motif of Starcraft.
Also, Starcraft's gameplay seemed really crude next to the gameplay of Total Annihilation.
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There have been so many games in my life that I REALLY wanted to enjoy. So often though, I find myself being sucked out of the experience by some game design decision(s) or technical limitations that just kill the game.
I consider this relevant to this topic because plenty of VERY critically-acclaimed games fall into this category.
It kind of bugs me how often I'm just not able to enjoy what's considered a very good game by many people. This isn't an issue of "oh, it's just not my genre" or "I'm not pro enough to enjoy it". No, I'm referring to game design decisions that I just find myself disagreeing with or letting bug me to the point where I just don't get much out of the game anymore.
Let's look at some examples:
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Cities: Skylines - Steam reviews: 15,981 positive, 893 negative.
Don't get me wrong; I LOVED this game at first! The playerbase at large often calls this the SimCity 4 KILLER. The game that will replace Simcity 4 (finally, as it's 10 years old now). That's where a STRONGLY disagree. This game falls into its own little world, far from Simcity 4. I'd love to see a worthy successor to SC4. I really would. I want this to be it. At first I thought it was. I soon found out how wrong I was.
I loved it until I learned how simplistic the simulations are and how limited the engine was in terms of simulating anything larger than a 65k population.
I understand that these limitations were put in place to improve accessibility to players with slower computers and to make the game reach a wider audience due to its relative simplicity.
Between the questionable traffic AI, the REMOVAL of features that I saw as must-haves from SimCity 4 (a game 10 years older) and the fact that this game was often being tossed around as BEING the next SimCity 4 by city building fans, this game drove me insane.
The fact that so many city building decisions really had no effect whatsoever on the state of the city (especially the fact that traffic simply doesn't matter. Commute time has no effect on city efficiency or happiness) bothers me to the point where I just can't get into the game, despite its exceptional reviews.
At first, sure, the game did feel like the next Sim City 4...until you start to see the cause/effect of what's going on and start reading around forums regarding how the game REALLY works.
Sad days indeed that a game is ruined once you learn how it works. I find this problem all over the place in simulation-style "realistic" games. Once you learn how the simulation works, you can min-max it and ignore the aspects of the simulation that don't do anything significant. The experience quickly becomes hollow once you learn what actions just...don't do anything.
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7 Days to Die - Steam reviews: 19,640 positive, 4,156 negative.
Alright, two things regarding this game:
1) It's still Early Access so maybe I shouldn't pick on it...but I have plenty of reasons to pick on it anyway. :p
2) It has a larger proportion of Negative reviews than Cities. It still has A LOT of people who love it.
Anyway:
This isn't a game that was ruined by learning how it works. On the contrary, learning how it works is part of the game and actually makes it more enjoyable.
No, no, no. My problem with this game revolves around its pacing. I wrote a whole Steam review on it so I won't get it into it here (you can read it HERE (http://steamcommunity.com/profiles/76561197967318885/recommended/251570/http://).)
I wanted to love this game as an alternative to Minecraft. In reality though, it's a poor substitute for Minecraft. Between its SLOW pacing, complete lack of powered structures (no electricity or redstone equivalent whatsoever) and transportation (Minibikes exist now but they're nowhere as near as interesting as the Minecart system of Minecraft).
Another big problem with playing this game like Minecraft is the atmosphere. It's a post-apocalyptic world...about as far from "fun, inspiring world where anything is possible" as you can get! It doesnt' make you want to spend hours there to build something cool...which is fine because this isnt' meant to be a Minecraft clone, but...
I wanted to love this game as a zombie survival horror game. In reality though, it's unable to fill this void because of the REPETITION...holy crap, is this game repetitive. Between the fact that there's just nothing to do unless you're trying to build something that has no purpose and the fact that there's nothing to do once you reach the higher levels.
That's right - it's one of those games. Your purpose in surviving is to gain levels so you can...survive to gain more levels. That's monotonous enough, but what happens when you reach the max level? Nothing? Right you are! The game becomes even MORE redundant because there's nothing to do that has any purpose.
Why not just play "see how long you can live before you die" then, and reset the world when you die? We've tried this and it fails, too. Why? The randomness of the items you need combined with the repetition makes the early part of the game interesting for the first 1 or 2 playthroughs...but that's about it. It quickly gets old and the last thing you want to do is have to start all the way back from Day 1 AGAIN.
...Apparently I got into reviewing this game again here anyway. Sorry about that. :lol
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Burnout Paradise - Steam reviews: 5,488 positive, 834 negative (many related to DLC release issues, not the game itself).
This is an open-world racing game that is about as monotonous as it gets. I really didn't feel like the open world nature of this game served it well. A few people agreed with me but apparently an overwhelming majority of people still liked this game.
The fact that there are only 8 possible ends to a race, combined with the fact that 100% of your playtime is spent in the exact same environment, results in a game that starts to all look the same.
Again, I wrote a steam review for it, HERE (http://steamcommunity.com/profiles/76561197967318885/recommended/24740/).
Basically it can be summed up if you changed the name of the game to "Burnout: Orienteering". Memorizing the city layout is the absolute best thing you can do..and WOW are you screwed if you don't. The game forces you to navigate the tracks using street signs and a minimap. GOOD LUCK WITH THAT when you're driving at 200 km/h through a city you're not intimately familiar with!
This game, to me, is just a trainwreck. The fast-paced action-oriented gameplay is overshadowed so hard by the requirement to mapread and memorize the ENTIRE GAMEWORLD that it's just obnoxious. The game is just a royal pain to get into. I'll just go back to Burnout 3. :p
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Well. for me the reason why I normally can't play games, is due to the fact you can barely do anything without paying for more. $10-15 a month for me is not worth it, I'm in High School and my Mom payed $120 for my Swim Team swim suit, I really can't go barking up the money tree and take another $15 from it each month. A lot of others have this problem too, we all have finances to play and when their are really cool fun games and you can't play them for whichever reason, can be very disappointing.
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Well. for me the reason why I normally can't play games, is due to the fact you can barely do anything without paying for more. $10-15 a month for me is not worth it, I'm in High School and my Mom payed $120 for my Swim Team swim suit, I really can't go barking up the money tree and take another $15 from it each month. A lot of others have this problem too, we all have finances to play and when their are really cool fun games and you can't play them for whichever reason, can be very disappointing.
Try retro gaming and freeware gaming. Old games all come in one complete package even if they are... older. Of course, they also don't tend to be as buggy, because back in the day before this mindset of having to get these damn things out as quickly as possible (looking at you, Assassin's Creed: Unity), companies USED to have quality standards for the most part. None of this 'Eh, its good enough, let's just release it and fix the bugs later' nonsense.
I can recommend some good freeware games if you're interested.
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Well. for me the reason why I normally can't play games, is due to the fact you can barely do anything without paying for more. $10-15 a month for me is not worth it, I'm in High School and my Mom payed $120 for my Swim Team swim suit, I really can't go barking up the money tree and take another $15 from it each month. A lot of others have this problem too, we all have finances to play and when their are really cool fun games and you can't play them for whichever reason, can be very disappointing.
There are some great Free-to-play games. Team Fortress 2 will always be my favorite game, and you don't have to pay anything to play the whole thing. There's some great variety (http://store.steampowered.com/genre/Free%20to%20Play/?tab=MostPlayed) in the selection on Steam, and that's before branching off into other providers like Origin and Battle.net.
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Would Jak 2 count as a "critically acclaimed game"? Cause if so, then that's one I...no, actually, don't like is too nice to a disgrace like this filth. I loathe just about everything that it is. Behind Spyro The Eternal Night, this is the second worst game I've ever played in my life. I'd rather play Superman 64 than play this putrid excuse for a game (and yes I have played Superman 64).
I played the first Jak and Daxter and while it had its flaws and was frustrating at times, it was still a pretty interesting game. This thing (I won't call it a game) takes everything that made the first one so good and takes a big shit all over it. Now Jak has to be dark and brooding because...well because that was the thing back in the early 2000s. We saw it with movies like Daredevil, games like Shadow the Hedgehog (AKA Ow the Edge), etc. Take a character from a relatively fun and light hearted series and make them dark and always angry (I never really read or watched Daredevil so I don't know if he was necessarily light hearted but the point still stands). Yeah, that's good character development.
The game play is atrocious. Nothing is done particularly well. The hoverboard is a pain to use and feels like it's trying to appeal to fans of the Tony Hawk games (without realizing why they're fans of that franchise). It goes so slowly (yeah I know I can press forward on the thumb stick to make it go faster. It's still pretty slow either way), handles poorly, and is just downright terrible. The driving in this thing is a nightmare. You're either crashing into cars endlessly or people. Pick your poison. The vehicles also make no sense. Sometimes a vehicle that hasn't taken even an ounce of damage will blow up from colliding into one and other times they'll be able to take multiple dings until they can't take anymore. The driving also feels like it's trying to appeal to fans of GTA without realizing why those games' driving work while this one's doesn't.
The shooting is also terrible. Sometimes I'll be locked right onto an enemy and the blast won't hit them. What purpose do the guns even really serve to the game other than to try and appeal to fans of Halo and other FPSs at the time? And of course, that's not done well either. I didn't get to the races but from what I've seen and heard, they're no better than anything else this thing has to offer.
The checkpoints are awful and almost non existent. Had this thing had checkpoints, it wouldn't have been this tedious. It's downright obnoxious getting close to completing your objective and then you either get hit by an enemy too many times or fall into the lava and have to start all over. That's NES stuff. Also, I'm not trying to hate on the NES. I'm just saying that for a game from Gen 6, this is ridiculous. NES games at least had a reason for why they didn't normally offer checkpoints. Many of the games were ports of arcade games or would have only been an hour or two if not for making the games hard. This thing however takes at most seventeen to twenty hours to beat. This has no reason being so hard.
And for me, the most damning part of the game. The thing that, I'm actually surprised many people don't bring up: this game doesn't have an identity of its own. It tries to be a Jak (pun intended) of all trades but it's a master of none. The shooting is terrible, the driving is terrible, the "skateboard" is terrible, the platforming is only a bit better than these other parts. It has nothing it can truly call its own. Everything feels like it was done in other games and done better. Even though Jak and Daxter did feel reminiscent of games like Banjo-Kazooie or Super Mario 64, it still took elements that made those games great and tried to incorporate them into itself and for the most part, it worked. This just tried to be for everyone and just didn't do a good job at it.
I knew going in, this game's infamous difficulty but this was still asinine. With how bad this game was, I don't know if I ever want to give Jak 3 a try. I wanted to play all three of the original Playstation platformers. I enjoyed the Sly Cooper games for the most part (two got repetitive after awhile and three I didn't care for) and Ratchet and Clank is so far just okay. I'm still on the first one and am only on the first planet so it may more than likely get better. This series, however, I might be done with. I've heard that Jak 3 is supposed to be better and fix the second one's problems but I don't know if I can bring myself to try stepping into the Jak world again.
EDIT: I forgot to say, I did actually enjoy the story somewhat (maybe if this thing wasn't so punishing I could have really enjoyed it) and the graphics were pretty nice for a 2003 thing. Those were really the only things I could bring myself to like.