Tell us about unpopular games you love, or even just appreciate some aspects of, contrary to the inteenet hivemind?
Tell us about unpopular games you love, or even just appreciate some aspects of, contrary to the inteenet hivemind?
And what specifically makes it special, appealing, or interesting to you?
Tacoma. Incredible game, barely has any gameplay, though, and is very short if you don't actively look for side-content, which is the main focus of the game. It's mostly storytelling through holographic logs of an abandoned station. Your goal is to salvage previous data in there and an abandoned AI, that your company needs to reclaim.
Although the entire game has kinda become a meme in recent years, I love The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion. Its a really charming game, and although people like to rag on it for being "generic lotr fantasy" I dont think thats a bad thing. Sometimes you just wanna play a run of the mill fantasy game and explore some dungeons. Plus it still had enough weird and bizarre things to keep it interesting, like the Shivering Isle dlc. I have fond memories of playing the game all the time back in school. One time I beat the entire Knights of the Nine dlc in a single sitting. It can be really clunky, weird, and downright broken but I still love it. Morrowind is still better tho
Master Of Orion. Both the original, it's sequel and the modern remake. It's nice to play something with different pacing from other games. And the random outcomes from AI throughout the game's progression keeps things spicy from playthrough to playthrough.
I loved Stuntman on the PS2. In it, you play a stunt driver across a series of movie sets. You drive the car while a director barks orders into your ear. If you complete all the set pieces in a scene, you move on to the next (more difficult) one and then onto other movies.
I love the process of refining the run over and over until you get it just right. The worst thing about the game is the load times. I don’t remember how long they were, but I remember they were very long. This is tough in a game that’s asking you to do something over and over until you get it right. Super Meat Boy handled this aspect much better years later, but I enjoy the premise of Stuntman more.
For all its flaws, I loved Mass Effect Andromeda. It was a fun one to play.
I really enjoy enter the matrix, it's a little janky but it's got some pretty cool for the time set pieces and I think the entire idea of the hacking mode is interesting, if very weird. For a licenced early 2000s video game I thought it was a step above most of the stuff in that field.
The driving sections are... Not very fun though.
Dear Esther is a beautiful piece of art that communicates its story and themes through visual, environmental and interactive symbolism, both random and scripted prose, and movingly composed music. At worst, I think anyone can at least appreciate the beauty in this world they created, the use of symbolism in the environment, and/or the music.
I think of it as the video game equivalent of a Terrance Malick film where you are basically driving the camera and triggering the narration. I totally get if you don't have preferences for that type of thing, but I think it's extremely healthy for the medium to have works like it. Few games scratch the kind of itch this one does.
Additionally, the act of moving and investigating a 3D, digitally-realized island constitutes interactivity and, thus, marks it as something inherently different from a movie or book. Modern "games" do not have to have deep or challenging mechanics to utilize interactivity artistically.
I've played and beaten plenty of difficult, mechanical or systems focused video games, including most the modern From Software games, Hollow Knight, and old NES games so my appreciation for it isn't some kind of aversion to challenge or mechanical depth.
I wouldn't call this unpopular because it's disliked, just unknown to a lot of people because I don't think it was marketed much in the US. One of my all time favorite games is Dragon Quest Builders 2. It's got just the right difficulty for me where it's mostly easy with a few challenging boss fights that might take a few tries to master. It's got a nice balance between questing, building, and farming. It's a bit silly, but it gets to be cute and endearing. I love the graphics. You're building in 3D with blocks like Minecraft but it's actually pretty, Minecraft was always too ugly for me to get into it.
I only know about this game because Dragon Warrior/Dragon Quest games were my boyfriend's favorite growing up and it's still his favorite series.
Giants: Citizen Kabuto
It was a kinda janky 3D Action Adventure from around 2000. Back then it had really beautiful and colorful graphics. I remember playing it on my first "real" PC and being amazed by how it looked.
It also stands out to me for being actually funny and comitting to being a comedy game.
Not necessarily unpopular in general, but unpopular within its own series are the DS Zelda games, Phantom Hourglass and Spirit Tracks. These games have some great dungeon design and I really liked most aspects of the touch screen controls (except blowing into the DS). These games used the DS to its fullest and will sadly be locked there as a result. I might have been one of the only people disappointed with Link Between Worlds for adandoning the touch screen for traditional controls.
People love to rag on it but there's nothing that quite compares to just fuckin around in the Mirror's Edge Catalyst open world
I've always believed that Banjo-Kazooie: Nuts & Bolts deserves way more love than it got. I can understand it may have been just a the wrong time (and not what fans were hoping for with a BK revival at the time) but the core vehicle building gameplay and physics are so much fun to play around with.
I've beaten the game a few times over now, and each time I try to challenge myself to make wilder vehicles than before. Or sometimes avoid making a vehicle entirely and attempting to make some sort of contraption machine. The music is some incredible work from Grant Kirkhope and Robin Beanland, bringing in a more modern but still very Banjo sound to the game.
I think now with the game being nearly 15 years behind us now, if you have GamePass please do yourself a favor and give it a try with an open mind! It may not be for everyone, but the building mechanics were pretty ahead of their time for 2008! You may just find a new favorite game :)
If we’re talking unpopular as in not very well known outside of its immediate community I gotta say Ultrakill. It’s a retro shooter distilled to its most essential parts with a style meter tied into it. It’s like ballet… with shotguns and exploding demons- so not a lot like ballet. But it’s good! Buy it!
Watch_Dogs was my first platinum on PS3. Everyone was shitting all over the game due to the PC port controversy, but I really enjoyed it. Huge city, different environment, actually good on-foot movement unlike in GTA games, and toooooooons of side stuff to do.
And oh dear, all the hacking stuff was such fun. Yes it was all just one button, but everything was well implemented. The amount of personal details you could pull from phones was amazing. I kept doing it all the time and it wasn't until near the end of the game that they started repeating.
And the trademark unique Ubisoft multiplayer. Shame it didn't have full-blown online mode, I can see myself getting lost in it.
Yea great game. Didn't deserve all the hate unrelated to its actual accomplishments.
The DLC... Bad Blood I think? Was even better.
I can't emphasize enough how cool some of those VR side-missions were. Some would qualify as fun standalone indie games on their own.
i don't know if this really counts, as they were super-popular in their day, but I like re-playing several PC games from the 90s that most people today wouldn't know of or, perhaps, remember.
- the Myst series
- The Ultima series, including Ultima Underworld I & II
- I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream
- The Journeyman Project
a few others
Imperator: Rome actually. I think I've been seeing a bit more appreciation for it recently (or maybe I'm just imagining it), but the launch was really rough and none of the updates, which changed quite a lot, really got the player counts up until Paradox just decided to abandon it. It's definitely flawed, but I have kind of a soft spot for it and still enjoy the occasional game. For me the army automation was really nice, since microing stacks has always been one of the most annoying things for me to do in these games, the pop migration and stuff helped it feel like my cities were really growing more organically, and where the basegame falls short there are still some pretty decent mods to improve things (one major mod is actually still being regularly updated years after the game was axed by the devs).
Niche. It's a genetics game, where you control a colony of critters that hop from island to island.
It has a thousand flaws, and it gets repetitive/boring over time but damn, the breeding mechanic feels so right. Not just because it's "realistic", but also because it feels sensible and intuitive.
AI War 2. It is a strategy, 4X, tower defense light game where the AI already won the war and conquered the galaxy. You have to fight your way to the AI home world to win. The game is very well optimized and designed for multithreaded CPUs. The more threads the better. The late game can have 10s of thousands of ships on the map or more.
The original Secret World is still my guilty pleasure. It was the only MMO I ever got to endgame on. It's shame what they did to it when they tore out all of it's uniqueness and went FtP.
I actually really enjoyed playing Crash Bandicoot: The Wrath of Cortex. Maybe I just first played it when I was too young to notice differences with it compared to the previous entries. Grew up loving it and didn't learn how generally hated it was until a few years ago.
I just loved the gameplay in Anthem. Not particularly the loop, the grinding, the enemy "variety" or mission design. But the base of it all, the flying and hovering and fighting. Especially the idea of turning the common formula around by making the combat ability focused with guns being more like support items, instead of focusing on shooting and using your abilities in between (like in Destiny 2 or The Division, for example).
The game really is the prime example of "wasted potential" when it comes to video games.
I just wish it would've been developed by a company with more experience in online multi-player games and released by a publisher that's less egregiously openly focused on maximizing profit above everything else like EA.
TimeShift never felt as bad to me as a lot of people said it is. Was pretty good actually and I had fun playing it.
Also Bionic Commando didn't score that high on metacritics but I liked it very much and played it like 3 or 4 times (completed it).
Back in the days of C64 I had those two games called "Ace of Aces" and "Wings of Fury" which most of my friends hated. I didn't understand the topic or why I had to shoot others, but I played those games over and over again.
I think Overwatch is the best game in it's genre. Right now it is the most balanced has the most composition variety the game has seen since before Brigitte was added. Other games like Paladins or Gundam Evolution don't even come close.
The scaling back of the planned PvE content was disheartening and incredibly frustrating, but it doesn't change the fact that the game we have right now is really fun.
Homeland 2: The Revolution is actually a super fun game.
It was buggy on release, and combined with the fact it was a sequel in a franchise nobody asked for meant that it's review scores are atrocious. If you buy it on steam today, all the bugs have long ago been ironed out and it is a fun ride. Imagine: A Far Cry style game, but in an urban setting and on the Crye engine. The gunplay is solid, especially the shotgun which is amazing. It's got some of that "take out enemy bases sector by sector" gameplay that you'd expect in a Far Cry game, but if you like the combat, it's no problem.
Even premise actually isn't that bad. The original game was "North Korean manages to invade the USA...somehow", but in The Revolution it's actually got an entire alternate history diverging back in the 1940s to explain why North Korea was successful. TLDR is after WW2, North Korea become a big time technology producing country (ala Japan IRL) and got really wealthy, while at the same time the USA got hit by multiple economic downturns. In the "invasion" the super high tech North Korean just kind of walked in without a fight to "reconstruct" the USA. Really when you're fighting the NK is so cyberpunk looking its like you're fighting a megacorp and you can forgot they are NK at times.
Seriously, if you can pick this game up for $20 and enjoy open world shooters, try it out.
It never really caught on, but I stumbled upon an indie game called Ctrl Alt Ego on PC and I had a really fun time with it. It's an RPG with some problem solving where your consciousness can jump to different robots and objects. You have a main body (an Ant) that you can jump into where you can add upgrades and powers to it. It's really fun and pretty unique. The only thing I didn't care for was the ending, it didn't make a lot of sense. But still it's worth trying out
Phantom Doctrine. It's essentially Cold War X-Com with spies. Bunch of problems with it, including a bug that stopped me from being able to progress after being dozens of hours in. But I love that era of spycraft, and sending in units in multiple different ways to cover each other in case one was about to get caught.
And I don't know why, but I loved having a unit or two decked out with heavy armaments outside the building (since they'd be caught immediately inside) ready to rock and roll if things go sideways so my agents could get out.
Metal Gear Survive, while I disagree with the usage of the MG brand for it; it could have been successful had they provided more content for it but more importantly if they just never used MG to advertise it. The classes were fun and the gameplay while repetitive with enough content could have been used creatively. It sucks it was marred with MTXs and just general Konami stupidity. Once again, fuck Konami.
Love loved loved Battleborn. Nothing like it to my knowledge other than Gigantic which also died. The combo FPS / Moba was super fun. RIP Battleborn you died before you even took off.
Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup is my favorite game:
- Best name.
- In development since the 90s, still looks like the 90s.
- Played hundreds of hours, still never finished it (cause I'm shit).
Salt and Sanctuary (more for it being unpopular vs bad hivemind).
I love Metroidvanias, but combined with Souls-like elements makes for a very fun concoction. This one in particular I have so much fun exploring. The story telling and world building adds to the mystery and the fun of unraveling the story. It has a very good variety of enemies/bosses/items. It also oozes so much atmosphere. One of the better Metroidvanias (I played a fair number of them).
Another one is Dark Souls 2. I get it being disliked; can't be helped as it had a lot of departures from the first. But out of all 3, this one I played x3 as much. I absolutely love the sheer variety of locations (it's ridiculous); exploration is super fun and rewarding.
The first Nier and Drakengard, games that showed Taro's genius despite the mechanical limitations. And any No More Heroes game. Mechanically uninteresting but full of style and heart and interesting concepts.
Kane & Lynch 2: Dog Days. The game was a commercial and critical bomb, but it's the only cover shooter I've ever enjoyed. It's just such an unrelentingly visceral, disorienting, harsh game, with one of the main aesthetic gimmicks being that it emulates the look and feel of a late 2000s amateur video. It's hard to describe without seeing it in action, but it was audacious as shit for what was meant to be a big budget, AAA title.
Die Hard: Vendetta on the GameCube. Never seen the Die Hard movies but I received this game as a kid and my brother and loved it. It’s bad in a goofy way but it was fun.
There was this platformed called box boy, it was fun. Idk how popular it was but monster hunter stories was a huge part of my life a few years ago idk why I liked it, it was just a fun rpg
Most of the Dark Pictures Anthology games have pretty mediocre ratings, but at this point my friends and I look forward to each release. It's like a 10 hour long horror movie night. They're just long enough to start right after lunch on a sat, and play late into the night, passing the controller around.
Their last release The Devil In Me is rated around 5/10, yet it might be my favorite one to date. It's not uncommon for them to have a rocky release with bugs, so sometimes we give them a few months to patch it up. But honestly, one of the best local coop experiences I've had. Definitely recommend if you have some friends over.
SCRAPS Modular Vehicle Combat. It's so much fun building epic guncars and battling with your friends LAN or over the internet. So sad to see the development abandoned though.