VIDEO Great games with bad reviews

The other day I decided to get Onechanbara: Bikini Samurai Squad as it was less than £2 in a sale on the xbox. I jump in and I find myself having fun with it. It's not amazing and the graphics are nothing special, but I'm enjoying it. Someone mentioned review scores so I went and had a look. Most of the scores with 1 out of 5 or 1 out of 10, so it got pretty bad reviews. I'm not sure why it was rated badly as I really like it. Another game that I really enjoyed was Bodycount, which got about 50-ish in aggregate. The only thing I didn't like about Bodycount was that I couldn't get any online achievements.

Does anyone else have any games they really like that got bad or low reviews? How about the other way, disliking games that got a great or high review?

 

I've loved plenty of games with average reviews (60%-70%), but I can't recall ever loving something with terrible reviews. Or even buying anything fitting that description. Did find Elder Scrolls (Oblivion, Skyrim) and Fallout (3, New Vegas) to be extremely overrated, though.

 

God Hand. Possibly in my personal top ten, infamously given a 3/10 by IGN.

 

Rampage: World Tour and Universal Tour for the N64 both got bad-to-average reviews when they came out, but they're two of my favorite games of all time. They prompt the same kind of catharsis one gets from playing Katamari Damacy games. I still go back to both of them every once in awhile.

As for games I think are somewhat overrated... well, I wouldn't call Marvel vs. Capcom 2 a bad game at all, but I've never really liked it much. I think it's mostly because I'm not very good at making combos in fighting games and in the Capcom ones that's a big handicap. It's all just a bit too fast for me. I do still play it occasionally with friends, but I much prefer the slower fighting games like Soul Calibur and Virtua Fighter.

 

I've been googling all the games I enjoyed when I was younger but they all got pretty good reviews...

I can't contribute anything positive to this thread!

 

I enjoyed Advent Rising on the original Xbox and Mortal Kombat vs DCU on the 360.

 

I remember seeing some 'so-so' reviews for SW Bounty Hunter when it came out. I enjoyed it though.

 

I love that game myself. That was one of the ones I checked when I was looking for examples. It seemed to do pretty well overall.

 

Legend of Dragoon

 

Oh Oh Oh!

There was a Dragonball Z RPG on the Snes, it followed the events of DBZ up to the end of the Frieza saga. Dragonball Z - Super Saiya Densetsu I think was the name...

I found it online, I think it was originally French translated into English. It all went well until Goku arrived on Namek. I admit it, I cheated, possibly to the point where Goku turned SSJ when he got there.

The thing is I can't be sure, as all the text characters and punctuation got replaced with ?????'s after that point. I literally had no idea what was going on and I gave up!

Oh... yes...

You can also count the DBZ RPG game Legacy of Goku on the GBA, I loved that at the time.

Another - A C64 game called 'Killed until dead'. I didn't know what I was doing, but I loved it. There was a venus fly trap that would, funnily enough, eat a fly that was buzzing around the room. It was more aggressive than actual fly traps though, I don't think I got out the first room of that game...

I think the game was ok though, I was about 6 or 7, that was the problem!

 

I played the hell out of Force Commander back in the day, it was bloody amazing. Reviewers almost all didn't bother to learn to use the camera and expected an Age of Empires type experience. And they sadly got their wish with the boring AOE reskin that was Galactic Battlegrounds.

 

Oh, gods, that game... not a great experience. I remember silly quests, and lots of grinding. But that was okay. The worst part was the combat. You could never level up well enough to take on any of the major bosses by their stages, so you had to just run and spam energy blasts from afar. At least I did. Took all of the fun out of it. Imagine defeating Frieza by running away from him and turning around every few seconds to fire some basic energy blasts. Horribly anticlimactic.

 

Star Wars: Shadows of the Empire was lambasted for clunky controls, but it was a lot of fun and had incredible atmosphere, thanks in no small part to the great soundtrack.

Zelda: Majora's Mask, while not receiving any bad reviews, was nevertheless met with near universal disappointment for not reaching up to the level of its predecessor, but I find it to be a much more interesting experience.

Star Wars Racer was received fairly well or as mediocre at worst by reviewers, but I remember that it was mostly the fans who had fierce disdain for it, as an example of shameless Episode 1 opportunistic shovelware. I, however, played the hell out of that game and loved it.

Automobili Lamborghini (a.k.a. Lamborghini 64) received good reviews at the time, lauded for pretty graphics and gameplay. I can understand the praise for graphics as the natural scenery of the tracks were nice looking, and the foggy tracks were more the fault of the N64's low memory, which reduced draw distances to the point of developers frequently having to conceal it with fog effects. But the game was so boring! Boring and annoying cheap techno soundtrack, few cars to choose from (though, not all only Lamborghinis, thankfully), few tracks and an infuriatingly unforgiving checkpoint timer in the arcade mode. The menus were lazily made; unintuitive and with no descriptions or explanations, not to mention grey and dreary. The scenery in the game also, although realistic and nice looking, seemed to have had its colours washed out. A great disappointment for me. Just a boring game altogether.

 

Mass Effect 3

 

The Mummy for the PS1. The game was lambasted for low res. polygon character models, clumsy controls, and according to one review it was "a plague upon your house", but in my opinion, it was a blast to play. Fighting your way through a horde of mummies was a refreshing twist to an, at times, otherwise more zombie oriented gaming console. I truly liked the Egyptian style renderings that served as the backdrop to your character's adventure. All-in-all, it was one of the most fun movie to game adaptations I've played to date, and it did justice to a highly underrated film franchise, that at the time, also received poor reviews.

 

I think the second one covering the cell games saga was ace though! Wasn't aware of and never played the third one though...

 

fester's quest back on the NES would be one. umm... alpha protocol got some pretty bad reviews, but i really enjoyed it. one of the better storytelling games i've played before.

as for games with good reviews i don't like? GTA IV was so mind numbingly boring i never want to touch another GTA as long as i live. final fantasy x is another highly touted game that i just gave up on because i didn't like anyone in it.

i'm sure there are other examples of both, but they aren't coming to me right now.

 

Bionic Commando 2009 comes to mind. Sure it had it's flaws but damn it if it wasn't fun swinging through ascension city and preforming epic moves with your bionic arm, aside from the decent over-the-shoulder shooting and excellent soundtrack composed mainly of remixes, both metal or orchestral, but even so.

 

Jedi Power Battles.





Just kidding.

 

It has become a tradition among reviewers to slaughter three-dimensional Sonic games, but I thought the Sonic Adventure titles and Sonic Heroes were fun games and even well-made. One criticism I always see from reviewers that I find to be unfair is that they complain about the speed being broken up by bad level design. But look back at the classic Sonic games. Could you ever maintain running speed from the beginning of the level to end? Even if you could, if you did that you would miss most of the rings and power-ups which required exploration of the level and consequently get a low score. For all the emphasis on speed in the character's presentation, the original Sonic games were not about getting as fast as possible from beginning to end. He just had that ability if you wanted to use it. While in the newer games they feel compelled to make the levels like a race from start to finish.

 

i'd argue that you could do that fairly well in a lot of sonic 2, which is why it's probably the best sonic game that will ever be made.

 

There should be a discussion about bad games that have great reviews. I have learned to be extremely skeptical about reviews ever since The Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword. That game had 5/5, 10/10, A+, 100% ratings from every critic review I read. So I got it and was severely disappointed. The game play mechanics were sloppy (a huge turn-off considering that by this time Nintendo had years to polish gaming mechanics on the Wii), characters and story were uninspiring, and the concept of flying across the world paled in comparison to the freedom enjoyed by Wind Waker's sailing feature. The overall look of the game was also pretty bland, imo.

That said, I just could no longer motivate myself to finish it. I gave up on the Temple of Time, IIRC. The irritatingly poor gaming mechanics were just pissing me off by that point.

 

I loved Sonic Adventure 2 Battle on the 'cube. I think I got an awesome Chao at one point, but I had to start work then, lol.