Vindictus, pre-2015

Anthem is a goddamn masterpiece, and I will die on this hill. The graphics, the combat, and the traversal were all AAA quality. There just wasn't enough fodder for the internet hate machine that month, so Anthem got tossed into it for some reason.

Sleeping Dogs

Donkey Kong 64 is a game I see constantly criticised but it was always one of my top N64 games.

Deep cut: World of Warcraft: Warlords of Draenor

This expansion represented a huge shift in playstyle and made questing much more cinematic. Everyone was pumped after the huge success of Mists of Pandaria.

But Blizzard bit off more than they could chew and this expansion has the biggest laundry list of cut content ever. Particularly, the endgame content was far less than what was expected. Blizzard promised to re-add stuff as they had time… they never found the time. Raiders and competitive players were furious. A lot of people quit WoW because of this expansion.

I was not a raider, nor a competitive player, I was a solo quester. So I had a blast in what is still called one of the worst expansions in the game’s history.

The Garrison missions did get old after a while, but I still fondly remember logging in to the sound of Rescue the Warchief.

I absolutely loved Star Wars: Outlaws and Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora. Two of the most gorgeous games ever made along with being fun and not too long. They nailed the feeling of being a Na'vi, you really feel very tall and nimble. And I love not having super powers and a light saber in a star wars game, you're just an average human and need to be real sneaky and creative to succeed.

Mass Effect Andromeda. It's a lot better than people give it credit for. Sure it has its issues, but no more than the original trilogy which is so revered. And the game is gorgeous, definitely the best looking ME to date - even with the trilogy legendary edition. The story was good too, it could've been the start of a great new trilogy. It doesn't have Shepard, but female Ryker was a lot of fun.

While not hated, most fans of the series prefer Darksiders to Darksiders 2. I personally prefer 2, I love the loot system.

Evolve. Even just against bots without any DLC characters is still a ton of fun. I recently replayed it on PlayStation and had a blast getting all the base game hunters and monsters.

Salt & Sanctuary

It's far from my favorite game, but I really really enjoyed the new saint's row. My only real issue with it was it was so buggy that when my SO and I played together, every session had at least two points where it either crashed outright, or broke in such a way we had to both relaunch the game.

And this is coming from someone who loves saints row 2.

Lawbreakers.

I swear, people wanted that game to fail because everyone thought Cliff Blezinski was too full of himself when he was advertising it. The main gripe people seemed to have with it was that it was “too much like Overwatch.” That game had less in common with Overwatch than Titanfall has in common with Apex Legends. The other most-repeated gripe was that people were fatigued with the “hero shooter” genre. Well here we are 9 years later and every “new” FPS is some new remix of a hero shooter, so obviously that wasn’t the case.

This game single-handedly convinced me that I grew up too late to experience what would have been my favorite era of multiplayer video games - the golden era of arena shooters. This game was balls-to-the-wall fast with a ridiculously high TTK in the best way possible. To win a gunfight you had to be dead-on precise with your aim while your target was slingshotting, kicksliding, or literally jetting through the sky, and the zero-G zones of the maps meant you could never predict the path they were going to follow.

The only other game that I thought ever came close to being similarly fun was Titanfall 2, but that game suffered a little from the CoD-inspired blink-and-you’ll-miss-it TTK for the pilots.

Lawbreakers never got its chance thanks to all the misguided hate. The devs and designers were incredibly talented and deserved better than for their studio to go out with the whimper that was Radical Heights

mmos are not especially popular and I just returned to sto and champions online. I would play them all the time if I could. I like hanging out in virtual worlds with a little gameplay to make it interestin.

Unreal 2, which is a very boring singleplayer game. But then, a year after its launch, they released a multiplayer addon for it, and it's still the best multiplayer FPS I've ever played. Most people remember it as "that disappointing, singleplayer-only sequel to Unreal."

Also, VR Troopers, a fighting game for the Sega Genesis. OK, in hindsight, this game is actually terrible. But we played it all the time in elementary school. I mean, it had the VR Troopers in it! From TV!

X-Com: The Bureau Declassified

Its fatal flaw was simply that the A.I. squadmates would far to often make suicidal decisions unless you micro-managed then, which made winning far more about luck than skill.

But the setting, the writing, the story were all super interesting to me. And the graphics hold a special charm for me (I still say the facial animations were better than LA Noire)

Anthem and Babylon's fall.. sadly.

Forspoken has one of the best battle and movement gameplay systems in gaming, or at the very least in the "power fantasy sandbox" genre. Its story and dialogue are also a very cute, earnest take on Isekai that didn't deserve the backlash they got. It has its flaws but it's absolutely nowhere close to being the utter cringe-fest and terrible game that people like Asmongold successfully convinced the rest of the internet it was (because it has a female POC protagonist, basically). Personally, as someone who wanted to live the ultimate elemental wizard power-fantasy in a game since I was a child, Forspoken gave me everything I wanted and more (like cats! Lots of adorable cats).

Lost Planet 2 was the shit when I was a kid

I play a lot of Helldivers 2, whether people like it or not depends on what the devs just did on the latest patch lol

Ah, another game that comes to mind: Persona 3 FES

Dunno how not liked it is, but I always see people getting scared away because of the difficulty, and that trying to convince people to play that version for the good part of a decade now.

But just saying, learning the ins and outs of the game makes it far more manageable, and even gets mechanics of P4G and Persona 5 to make sense.

Also, pinning a god-like being to the ground for ~50 turns thanks to Thunder Reign and making another god-like being slap itself to death thanks to Marakarn and Tetrakarn, both due to exploiting mechanics to my benefit, were certainly high points of the game. =D

Even Mitsuru was useful for a single battle in my whole 170h save because of having to exploit the game's mechanics

🍞🔥
("burn by bread" reference)

The dot hack series on ps2

Timeshift: it has 71 on metacritic, so not that universally disliked, but I actually thought it was really great. An fps where you can stop or slow down time, with pretty simple time related puzzles and a lot of slow-motion gore.

It also had an interesting multiplayer mode where you could throw grenades that slow down time in a sphere around them, but unfortunately I never managed to find a match online

I still think about Battlerite from time to time. Very fair high skill arena fighting game that's faster and more to the point than MOBAs that were dominating the PvP scene at the time. It had a great launch then everyone stopped playing it.

Asura's Wrath, the button masher QTE on rail and DLC true end drew a lot of hate at the time, but I loved the storytelling and the visceral characterization.