What game do you absolutely love that you know yourself is bad, but love it anyway?

For me, it’s Callisto Protocol. Loved that it was just more Dead Space. Not good by any metric but I liked it.

  • Essence_of_Meh@lemmy.worldEnglish
    71·
    22 hours ago

    Can’t say I feel guilty about liking these but if we’re talking about mediocre games I love that would be:

    • Drakengard 3 - simple, repetitive gameplay, huge amount of asset reuse and terrible performance if you’re crazy enough to play it on PS3. It also has a really engaging and tragic story, full of weirdness unique to the series (well, the first game anyway, haven’t played D2 yet).
    • Kane & Lynch (both games) - they’re rough, gritty and don’t pull any punches. Pretty divisive in terms of gameplay though I personally think it’s thematically consistent and adds a lot to the atmosphere. My favourite games from IOI despite not being as well designed or polished as the Hitman series.
    • Oni - 2001 action game by Bungie. Really cool hand-to-hand combat system, huge empty levels, simple story with wannabe Ghost in the Shell elements.
    • Starbound - lots of hype about Terraria in space, lots of wasted potential and cool features that didn’t make to the final release. I tend to prefer beta versions (mainly “Glad Giraffe” beta) but the final one also seemed alright based on what little I played of it. Definitely not as good as it had chance to be during development.
    • Scarface: The World is Yours - budget GTA clone based on the 1983 movie with Al Pacino (it’s actually a sequel). It looks bad even for the time but it plays well enough and has some neat mechanics which made it stand out, if only a little.
    • Tresspasser - the infamous Jurassic Park game with full control of your arm and focus on physical interactions with the environment. It’s a bit clunky and far from polished but it’s an interesting experience nonetheless.

    That’s all that comes to mind for now, I might update the post if I remember anything else.

    • cecilkorik@piefed.caEnglish
      6·
      20 hours ago

      Beta Starbound was the shit. Release was just shit, with no “the”. They took a great game of endless discovery and procedural generation with a gameplay loop that just worked out of beta and filled it with completely predictable set pieces and juvenile hard-coded nonsense. They literally added a poop emoji monster FFS.

      • zod000@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
        2·
        15 hours ago

        I don’t think the final release was “shit” per se, but I was super confused when I played it and expected cool features from the beta. The beta was also very beta and not all of the features were actually good, but I feel like they ran out of time/money/patience and just cut down a ton of stuff to ship it.

      • Essence_of_Meh@lemmy.worldEnglish
        1·
        19 hours ago

        The worst part is there’s no “full” version since each beta added new features and removed other ones. I’d give a lot for a build which combines all of the lost mechanics into a single package.

    • theprogressivist @lemmy.worldOPEnglish
      2·
      22 hours ago

      Dude, I loved Kane and Lynch! I co-op both of them with a buddy of mine. The jank was real but added charm to it. People complained about the violence but that shit was great. Also might be bias because IO Interactive made Hitman and that’s one of my all time favorite series.

      • Essence_of_Meh@lemmy.worldEnglish
        3·
        19 hours ago

        It was also an unfortunate victim of the time when IOI struggled with figuring out how to transition from “classic” way of making games to the modern, high budget approach. I’m glad they managed to get back into the rhythm with new Hitman games but it’s still a little disappointing K&L had to serve as a stepping stone towards better times.