Games you consider overrated

[Trippy Turtle]

Zelda and Mario. The first ones were bearable when they were new. The newer ones are boring and I would get the exact same experience going with the originals. Zelda is a bit better in that regard but still not original.

 

[veloper]

Oblivion wins this contest easily.
Both overrated by professional reviewers at the time of release and overrated by gamers in user reviews.

The damning thing here is that ever since Skyrim is out, everyone is saying how bad Oblivion was and all suddenly able to point out all the bad features: level scaling, poor combat, worst voice-acting, wooden animation, etc.
This is a game that got perfect scores. I reckon roleplayers just get blinded by the fancy scenery. The graphics eventually get outdated, even for lowly RPG-standards, then replaced by something prettier and the blind love is over.

 

[Samus Aran but a man]

I agree with Jim Sterling, in that I don't like the term overrated. It's knocking a game because other people had higher opinions of it than you do.

 

[Astro]

There's a lot of overrated games, but the two most relevant right now would be every Mass Effect game and Skyrim. I wasn't exactly taken with Mass Effect and plainly disliked Mass Effect 2, the writing is aggressively juvenile and bland, most of the mechanics are just bad (especially the dialog wheel and renegade/paragon system), the combat is below average (and boring) cover based shooting, there's issues with connectivity, the UI is a mess in Mass Effect 2 and the combat environments are too linear making navigating them feel sticky. Overall the Mass Effect series just isn't that good.

On the other hand, I don't feel like Skyrim needs any explanation. I guess it could be summed as as shallow and less than cohesive.

 

[SextusMaximus]

Well I haven't
-seen [http://www.escapistmagazine.com/forums/read/9.164012-Most-Overrated-Game?page=8]
-this thread [http://www.escapistmagazine.com/forums/read/9.254288-Your-most-overrated-game-s-of-last-decade?page=1]
-before [http://www.escapistmagazine.com/forums/read/9.292927-most-overrated-games?page=4]

I wouldn't mention it if the thread itself wasn't such obvious flame bait.

 

[Treblaine]

Red Dead... I hated that killing your horse was a crime (this is my biggest complaint).

Wouldn't have been such a problem but for the parallax aiming problems from the first Third-person perspective, you could clearly aim past the horses head but the actual path of the "bullet" (actually a hitscan line) is to the left or right and down. They could have fixed this, made the bullets clip through your horse head as who ever wants to shoot their horse in the head WHILE RIDING IT!

Red Dead is a very imperfect game. It did so much good stuff but ultimately it has too many flaws. As bad as Mexico was I found it's a major letdown to go from there to a forested American region, it just can't have the same potential as revolutionary Mexico and then for the game to revert to doing tutorial missions again as a rancher, unable to change out of that rancher outfit, then being swapped out for

In the end the game punished me for succeeding, for giving John what he wanted.

See John may care about his family BUT I DON'T! And I have no reason to particularly want to give up being a badass bounty hunter to be with my illiterate wife who I can never actually have a marital relationship with. Sex scenes are cut out, all I am left with is the nagging. And no sense can I share in John's paternal satisfaction as I never saw Jack grow up, he's just some young punk.

As long as Red Dead Redemption took to make, I'd say it needed another year to work on the ending, or even more radically a year earlier the entire premise should have been scrapped and started again (a la Half Life 2's development). Family reunion is NOT a personal motivation when it is not your family, but the protagonist's family.

It should have been a motivation the player can share, like vengeance for or whoever you meet up with your final reward is to continue being a badass bounty-hunter just now you are training your son to follow in your footsteps. The Marstons are not ranchers, they're fighters.

Crazy Idea: John Marston tries to go straight as a rancher but has bad luck, is screwed over by the bank, the government and even his own character weakness and is left destitute. He resorts to criminality again a out of desperation and raises his son as an outlaw, but John pays for it in the end. I think it's far more poetic than the actual ending of "Ross is Pontius Pilate, John is cowboy jesus".

 

[svenjl]

Deus Ex HR, Dark Souls and Bioshock. I finished Deus Ex, but by fucking George it was a chore. I loved the gameplay of Dark Souls but the whole thing just became way too repetitive. And Bioshock was the same, only more of a rat maze. I didn't hate these games, just the process by which progress was made.


I just finished the main two story lines of Skyrim and was underwhelmed by one of them in particular. Five years after Oblivion and we still cant't ever have more than 15-20 combatants on screen?! I love the game as a whole, but next time Bethesda cut the redundant content and give us EPIC battles.

 

[Scarim Coral]

Halo 1 (the sequel were fine). I disagree that the British magazine EDGE giving it a 10/10 (they rarely hand out that rating) since while it was a good game but I felt the choice of weapons and vehicles were rather limited. The story was so and so but overall I wouldn't have given it a 10/10.

 

[Astro]

Shadow of the Fucking Colossus. Oh the story, the strategy required during combat, the style, the innovation, it's perfect.

Strategy amounted to flicking arrows at the damn thing till it got annoyed enough to pay attention to you then fighting the camera and controls to find the one exact way to get to the big glowing weak spot and poking it till the colossus threw you off and then starting over again.

On top of that a grey and brown world that people ***** about when it CoD or BF but here it "fits the artistic mood". What part of this game is innovative anyway? Cause it's not the combat, the story, or the world.

But I bring up any of these points with someone and they say "you just don't get it". I get that it was a mediocre game with a save the princess plot, a brown and grey world, horrible camera and combat controls, and a total of what maybe twenty characters most of which were giant rock monster with no personality or real identity.

The thing that made Shadow of the Colossus special is that it was a completely unique mix of multiple gameplay elements rarely seen together to do something visually and mechanically spectacular while still being functional and entertaining. I can't really say anything other than "no, you're not right" in response to your assertion of the strategy amounting to shooting the collosi with arrows, it just isn't the case. Additionally, the environments weren't all grey and brown, and there's nothing wrong with that color and shade in the first place. The grey and brown complaint arises from games that could have varied and interesting environments but instead opt for a boring "realistic" grey and brown fortress. However, Shadow of the Colossus has beautiful, interesting, atmospheric and varied environments; even if a lot of them do consist of dirt, mountainside and rock. The camera is bad and the controls are only slightly better, you're right about those two, but the princess is pretty much irrelevant to what's great about the game and your twenty characters point was just strange. Part of the appeal was a sense of mystery and loneliness as you gallop solemnly between each magnificent encounter, I can assure you that having a weapon vendor or whatever wouldn't have improved the game. There's a reason, after-all, why it's in a pseudo language and you very rarely interact with characters that have a face.

 

[Courier_87]

Where to begin, firstly by saying I'm a single-player campaign gamer not an online gamer
GTA IV I agree with, fun for a while but didn't hold my attention, and I have even less time for the DLC

Call of Duty franchise, while I've played the last 5 iterations they are far too hyped for the quality (and length) of the single player. I am fully prepared for the onslaught of COD players telling me I should play online. I have, and just got bored very fast

Oblivion is another one for me, loved Fallout 3 so thought I'd try Oblivion for the similar mechanics, but it just bored the hell out of me

Borderlands. I know many people who rave about it but I thought it was bland, boring and repetitive with no goal other than the opening cutscene for motivation to reach the end. Conversely, Rage plays almost the same as Borderlands with a bit of Bioshock thrown in (now Bioshock 2 also makes my list, why bother with it)but the execution and smaller stepping stone motivations in Rage just make it wholly more enjoyable

 

[rob_simple]

Dead Island - Worst game I've ever played, yet people seemed to love it. The combat was broken, (why does a zombie's arm have greater reach than my arm holding a machete?) the story was retarded, (so we just get in the helicopter and abandon all the people we spent the entire game helping?) and the missions were painfully dull (run to one end of the city, pick one thing up, run all the way back.)

The absolute worst thing about it, though, was that whenever you did an escort mission (which was quite a frequent occurrence) they wouldn't get in a vehicle with you; they'd just run alongside it. I can't believe that an entire development team looked at this and said, 'sure, that makes sense.'

 

[MightyRabbit]

Oblivion. I've been flamed for saying it wasn't great on this site before. But it's visually dull as listening to a forgetful elderly priest drone on about his vegetable garden, the class system has way too many options that'll easily overwhelm a new player, the skill advancement is perhaps intuitive to real life, but not to videogames and leaves you having a wooden dummy for hours so you can actually attack a damn monster worth a damn, it trades any kind of narrative focus or depth for giant wide openness, fine if you like that kind of thing, a death knell if you don't, levelling up your character is acyually counter productive and to get anything out of the game as a new player to the Elder Scrolls you need to invest hours of learning all this obtuse, head-up-its-own-arse bullshit.

Also, Final Fantasy XII. Now, I love Final Fantasy. Great design, mostly crappy characters, but hey, Balthier and Fran, interesting lore, decent voice acting, pretty decent story, but my GOD is every aspect of the gameplay terrible. The License Board is way too bureaucratic, the Gambits might be alright if there were also general behaviour scripts you could assign with the Gambits as addons, but instead you have to program precise reactions to about 6 different specific situations unless you want to fucking micromanage the entire party, which is too fiddly because ATB systems don't work with full party control when you have to control movement too. Also, Vaan, the completely superfluous and most annoying FF character ever. He's only not the most useless to plot because Penelo joins the party as a hanger-on of Vaan, the fucking hanger-on, for no adequate reason, just so he has someone to talk to in cut scenes!

Also, I feel the Compilation of FFVII gets a lot of love because people came to it through the Compilation rather than a deep seated love of the original game. Which is fine, I guess, the Compilation average out to pretty decent overall, but it annoys me that peole who came to it through that judge Tifa, Aerith, Cloud & Sephiroth on their personalities in the spinoffs, which are quite different to how they are in the games e.g. Sephiroth being obsessed with hurting Cloud and calling Tifa a whiny *****.

Y;know what else I hate? PUPPIES!

 

[George Francis Gaspar]

Dead Rising: Seriously, I don't know how people gave it a 9/10. It was boring and the shooting mechanic sucks.

Gears of War: Gameplay is cool...but story is boring to me.

 

[RuralGamer]

Half Life; above average, perhaps good, but nowhere near as great as everyone seems to make out; I've played a lot of HL2 and watched my friend play through the others and thought "Meh, okay, but nothing stellar".

Call of Duty series after CoD4; I enjoyed 3, I enjoyed 4 and haven't really played much of the previous games. The series is like Facebook, completely overvalued, and I genuinely can't understand why you'd want to get a slightly updated game with different maps and guns every year which costs the same as a full game. The formula isn't being changed at all for the better; each game invents new and exciting ways of unbalancing the multiplayer and increasingly transforming the singleplayer into an interactive move with its ever the more excessive scripting and rail sequences.

 

[Foxpack1]

Arkham City was absolute rubbish imo. Other than the combat, the sandbox felt dead, Batman's voice actor sucks and the Joker is well-voiced but I still don't like him. Uninteresting story and literally the same threat as the last game which I quite liked.

 

[zumbledum]

all retro games the escapist community makes them out to be amazing and better than todays games and perfect in every way and they are shit as a younger gamer used to higher standard games (my first console was a PS2) retro games are terrible and many times worse than games of today

Yea, I think its called like The Golden Age Syndrome or something. Could prolly find it on tv tropes. Basically people like the pure innocent bullshit memories from when they were a stupid kid and couldn't remember any of it anyways. Some games were good FOR THEIR GENERATION, but saying Orcarina of Time is better than.....well just about any award winning game nowadays is a hilarious joke.

Nostalgia does tint stuff for sure and believe it or not you will do it to, but there is also a lot of truth in it, the game industry has changed and changed a lot.
Peter Molyneux used to make games like Populous not churn out crap like fable, we had turn based strategy games like SMAC (Sid Meirs Alpha Centauri) which you just dont see anymore, we get shallow crap like civ 5.
There hasnt been an MMO released in 10 years that has actually been a game i mean now the entire genre is interactive entertainment when was the last time you saw anyone fail to level in an MMO? thers no game aspect to them anymore no matter how bad you are you will still get everything in time. you walked into a raid in EQ without the chops for it you lost levels and went home naked in tears.
The modern method of financing and publishing has provided a lot of impressive trip A titles but its also squeezed a lot of diversity and range out of the industry.

 

[putowtin]

Modern Warfare

all they do is release the same game every 18 months, and everyone rushes out and buys it

 

[Skin]

Portal - Ehh. It was average, for one time and one time only. I am not the biggest fan of puzzles either.

Half Life 2 - the original will always be a gem in my eyes, because it was different enough to the hordes of FPSers that were out at that time. But the second one had an uninteresting story, uninteresting characters, painfully linear, and the "cutscenes" or whatever they were called (the parts where you weren't doing anything) were unskippable. You know something is very wrong with the reviewing systems when the reviewer spends a paragraph praising the Grav gun...

TES games - Yep, all of them. They are all terrible, with the only barely passable one being Morrowind. Arena and Daggerfall are fucking awful if you have not played them. The only thing they did better than Morrowind was give you more freedoms, like the super-duper god spells that kill everyone and everything in a town. But thats it. Skyrim takes a special place because of the filthy attitude the RimTards have towards every other game.

Halo 2 - Hailed as many as the pinnacle of the Halo games, and regarded by me as the biggest piece of shit to ever be made. I played through it twice, some games of multiplayer, and then did not play any other Halo game except CE for 6 years or so. Everything about this is bad. The story trying to be smart when it's shit (HL2), the painfully linear levels (HL2), the FUCKING copy-paste design (Halo:CE) - oh god... what a terrible fucking game.

Dota - Being a long time player, I can tell you all that it is a steaming pile of wank. There were more balanced and fun Dota version before Allstars took the monopoly, and we have not recovered since.