The Tension Thread - Post your Overrated/Underrated games!

Exactly what it says on the tin, it's time to confess what games you consider overrated/underrated, be it a game you belief is unjustly criticisied to anything you just can't understand the fervor for! All to promote polite discussion, of course

Of course, I'll start -

Overrated

Skyrim - Tried to get back into this game again, as I only have 200 hours (including afk time) for such a widely regard open world game. Downloaded all the mods again, got the game just perfect only for my playthrough to last five hours simply due to the horrible realisation that there's really nothing much to do. Now, I want to make a distinction here between the base game quests and dlc/mods, as in the vanilla experience there really isn't much to do. You have your basic guild quests, Dark Brotherhood, Mages Guild and The Companions (the quest lines ranging for decent, DB, to downright dull and tedious, everything else), which barely improve on Oblivion; You do the questline and then practically nothing. There's some token randomized threads for after the Dark Brotherhood but that's really it. Like Oblivion, you'll become the Archmage or head of the guild only to discover there's nothing to really make you feel that achievement.

Now, Skyrim's a beautiful game and an atmospheric experience, but in hindsight I can't help but think that Skyrim suffers the ultimate failure that an open world game can have; a general feeling of emptiness. While town based quests in Oblivion suffered a strange degree of quality, from the great "de-exorcise your own haunted house" to "go to shack, kill some bandits", Skyrim ultimately leaves you with very little to do once you've completed the few number of big solo quests and the storylines. The radiant system of course tries to hide the empty, frozen vastness that is Skyrim, but ultimately ends up as just a series of randomly given "pls get my family's ancestral sword from this random generic cave pls mister". Let's say you want to play a necromancer character, only to realize there's very little there for you to actually do in that regard, despite necromancers being one of the most common enemy types.

Ultimately, the proof of Bethesda's horrific development strategy - "We'll make the canvas, modders can paint it and fill it"

No matter how you play it, you'll always end the game running a small business of retrieving ill-placed family heirlooms from damp caves/tombs.

The Walking Dead - Not that I don't think the story/characters of this game were pretty good, but in my opinion the game itself is one big lie; everytime you're asked to choose your dialogue or make a choice, the game is basically lying to you that it'll make any difference at the end of things.

The only real effect of your choices is how many hands Lee will end the game with.

 

Bungie made Skyrim?

 

oops

 

It's the appeal of many rogue-lites, it's different every time, each run is completely different than the others, only thing that carries over from other runs is the unlocks, so you can get more items with more unlocks you had.
Now, in that in mind, the game has a crazy amount of different synergies, 2 items together can make a run amazingly fun, I have played 140~ hours, and I maybe got 60% of all the cool synergies, still missing things like moms knife and brimstone, which will make me shoot a giant blood laser beam, then spray out a 10 knives.

The game is also filled with awesome mechanics, smart level design, cool bosses, and a lot of enjoyable stuff thats purely because of the amazing game design.
I do agree, the start kinda pisses you off, you die very early, you don't get a lot of cool things, you can get fucked over because of an item that you didn't know, but after you get over it, it can be very fun.

Sometimes it's a swing and miss for some people, I know youtuber TotalBiscuit dreads the game, but appreciates it.

(also i'm talking about the rebirth version, and not the original)

 

Come on guys post your own

 

Let us right away go ahead and lay down at least one rule.

You have to actually have played the game to say it's overrated

 

I never got the huge appeal of fallout

I played like 12 hours of fallout: New Vegas, it's mildly fun, but i just don't enjoy it that much, the most fun I had is when I blasted all the town's people with plasma rifles, but that's about it, maybe it's just me, because I quicksave every five seconds incase I die from something.

I wouldn't say it's overrated, I understand what can be fun in it, but really, i just feel like a lot of time theres not a lot of things to do, I wasted like atleast an hour walking around and talking and selling things.

 

Overrated: Cube World so much hype, then the dev...dies?.. although id say i got enough hours out of it
https://picroma.com/

Underrated: The Ship, oh how i wish valve will make a sequel

 

See that's me with every survival game with a crafting system, they just seem like mechanics in an empty game

 

Overrated:
Left 4 Dead 2. The first game was vastly more fun to play and the release timing of the second game was just so awkward.
TTT.
DayZ. The amount of time spent not having fun (Scavenging) greatly outweighs the time having fun imo.

 

Overrated games... Skyrim was my favourite game in 2011 to mid 2012. It was so new and amazing. I am just an amazing Bethesda fanboy and the mods make it much better. But I have the same problem as you, after that first initial 200 hours you get bored. 200 hours is not something to be sniffed at though well worth the money and an amazing game.

Most overrated game? Portal, I know it's going to upset some people and I really loved that game to bits (Though I never completed it, it was still an awesome game I am just way too dumb) But it wasn't as good as everyone said it was, some of the puzzles were just too similar to everything else.

Also Minecraft, fun when I was younger but now just seems a bit dumb. It's even gotten to the point with lots of people here that to enjoy the game they must play the game fully pimped out with mods like tekkit or the newest one.

 

On the topic of DayZ, I agree with you. I also think that the game has just got worse as they add more patches to it. When I first purchased DayZ back in like April 2014 - it was fun to play for hours on end - but now I can't get any fun out of it because it is buggy as hell.

 

Overrated:

Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time. Like, I used to have a chronic case of Nintenditis and I do truly love this game. But it's not worthy of all the praise it was thrown at it, at the time it was incredibly groundbreaking but it really could've been so much more, more sidequests to make such a big world feel deeper would've been nice. Areas seem to serve their specific purpose and then have a few hidden goodies for you to find. After that there aren't really any big sidequests or anything of interest to do. It just feels so baron when you step back and take a look at the big picture.


Underrated:

In terms of the casual scene, Dark Souls. For everything the game does right, I felt Dark Souls deserved more praise from the mainstream audience. Whilst annoying as hell to get into as Dark said, Dark Souls has engaging lore and a lot of the people around you have a backstory you can enjoy if you keep talking to them when they're in certain areas (which can be considered either annoying to find or a reward for exploration, depending on which light you view DS in). Dark Souls also presents fun gameplay when given guidance on the levelling system which can be accessed in-game but really should have been made more clear for those getting into the series.

Finished the game with a lot of love for the characters in it, a lot of love for the scenary and lore which was marred a little by the bad PC port but ultimately Dark Souls has me coming back time and time again on console which is why I felt it was worthy of more praise from more casual gamers than it recieved.

 

Overrated: Payday 2.

The guns in that game sound and feel extremely satisfying, and the customisation is amazing. Sadly the devs feel the need to not only force you to earn each and every individual attachment by random drop at the end of every heist, but also force you to pay huge amounts of cash to actually USE these attachments. (Some attachments cost more than a heist's entire worth of profit, and this is ONE out of TWELVE possible attachments on ONE weapon). Additionally, if you want to try a different attachment you not only have to pay to switch attachments, but if you want to use the old attachment you need to pay another 800 grand to put the same scope on your gun again.

You're also only allowed to own two attachments of the same type. This means that if you buy all variants of the M4, and want to use the extended mag, you are ONLY allowed to have it on two, and if you want to switch weapons you need to pay the massive fee again to transfer the mag from one gun to another.

Another sad thing about it is that they removed the "hide all weapon attachments" option from Payday 1. This means that if you want to build an M4 to be optimal for higher difficulties, you may find yourself having to use an extended mag that's neon green, with an over-sized yellow scope and a big white barrel extension to top it all off, completely ruining the black, sleek look of the gun. Some guns end up looking like fucking water pistols, it's hilarious (-ly bad).

The community manager of Payday is also well-known as a huge asshole, and condescends to/sometimes straight up bans people who give constructive criticism about the game. For example, they completely reworked how stealth worked in the game after almost a year after the release date, changing it from a scenario where you work together to take out the guards without triggering alarms and working together (eg. two people break into the camera room and kill the guard, the other two kill the patrols) to an RNG-based shitfest with respawning guards. 90% of the stealth lobbies you join nowadays involve one super experienced guy solo-ing it while the other 3 wait at the spawn for a half-hour. There was a massive community outcry over this, but as usual all it resulted in was the community manager acting like a dickhead and ignoring all criticism.

Next, the DLCs. The weapon-packs started as fun-side grades and just convenient guns that you could use at level 1, but they very very very quickly became a way for the devs to hide content behind a paywall. For example, the 50 cal sniper is pretty much a 100% requirement for dealing with juggernauts on the highest difficulty, but it's behind a paywall, so you either need to find an queue with a guy who owns it, play a lower difficulty or severely gimp yourself.

This next point is pretty minor. The dev team love making promises and then just outright not delivering. It's gotten to the point where it's a meme amongst the Payday 2 community - the most common example being the "customisable safehouses" promised before the game was even fucking released.

Finally: the cheaters. The absolutely retarded requirements for unlocking modifications for purchase led to a MASSIVE amount of people using trainers to unlock mods and the DLC weapons. This wasn't a problem by itself (I myself unlocked all mods for purchase instead of grinding the 30-second heist 200 times). However, pretty soon trainer devs started incorporating extremely malicious abilities into the code, for example being able to spawn in a fuckton of cash for people who wanted to play legit, or even worse, manipulating the values on in-game loot bags to extremely negative values to make it so the other 3 people actually lose ALL their money on heist completion.

The devs, noticing these cheaters, went through extreme lengths to combat the people unlocking DLC weapons, but did nothing to the people modding in 1000 clip miniguns with infinite ammo, because $$$.

Some of these issues are fixed by playing solely with friends, however I would highly not recommend the game unless you're willing to put a lot of grinding into it or willing to make (smart) use of a trainer.

 

I don't know if it really is underrated, but I think not enough people have heard about or tried Europa Universalis 4. That game is love and that game is life.

 

Over-rated:

Bioshock Infinite
Half-Life (perhaps this could be due to the fact that I "played" [got bored after 1 hour] both games in 2013/2014).

Games that I believe are fun, even though they get lots of shit:
CoD - yeah sure, they milk cash and most of the games are identical but if someone bought me any of the call of duties I would play the shit out of them.
Runescape - RS3 is fucking easy, but is still a huge grind. Graphics aren't great, however it's a browser game (I believe Jagex are making a C++ client or something).

I enjoy the game quite a lot because it's a very easy to get into 20 minute game that you can play over 1000 times. Sort of reminds me of an arcade game now that I think of it.

 

Agreed about TF2 being overrated, can't remember having remotely any fun since it went F2P, and every team since being populated entirely by Snipers. The Spy and Medic are pretty cool classes design wise, but the rest of the game is just dull, IMO.