The Shadow of War games.
The Nemesis system was amazing, but the game wasn't polished and had issues.
They somehow patented the mechanic and no one else can do it. And I steady of WB making a new game with it, they made fucking Smeagole
“Suffer me now!”
If any of you vaguely like LOTR and see either of the titles come up on sale, give them a shot (or watch 5 minutes of playing first to get the feel for it).
I wish they’d come back and produce a 3rd one but the patent definitely kills that idea.
Oh, man, no, if you like LOTR stay away.
If you don't mind LOTR, then give them a shot, they're fun. They're just a lore nightmare.
If anybody has ever dared to be mad about Rings of Power but is out there tolerating or enjoying the Shadow games they need a meeting with the consistency police.
I also loved the Mad Max game that came out around the same time with a really similar gameplay feel
The driving and driving combat in that game was 10/10 and the world really well done too. The only let down, at least for me, was the main story. I still hop on and blow up some vultures every once in a while.
I rarely get into single player games but I played the second one and loved it. It felt so satisfying building this giant army and wrecking whole castles.
Just Cause 3. Just a total blast to go swooping around in the wingsuit and blowing up bases.
JC3 and 4 were pretty great. JC4 was really just JC3 but more of the same which was fine with me.
JC2 was amazing, I really should go back and replay that.
"Perception is reality. In this mind-bending first-person puzzler, you escape a surreal dream world through solving impossible puzzles using the ambiguity of depth and perspective."
It's a fun first person puzzle game that has a surreal theme and game mechanic to it. Most of the puzzles and levels will make you really think. While there was a puzzle that really stumped me, I ended up having to look online to figure it out because I had been going at it for over 30 minutes and had tried numerous things to get it to work. But as a whole, I found the game puzzles to be worthwhile, to obtain the ending game. The storytelling and narration is similar to The Stanley Parable, which was an interesting game but too short for my liking. And unfortunately, so was Superliminal. I've clocked 3.4 hours in-game and at least 30 or so minutes of that was just trying to figure out one of the puzzles in a room. I honestly was hoping for the game to provide me with at least 4-5 hours of gameplay. So... a 7/10 is what I would end up giving it.
I ended up breaking the game when I kept going through the hallway that makes you smaller. Eventually the game couldn't handle everything being so large lol
Did you get the secret ending where
spoiler
You find a pawn in the control room?
I did on my first playthrough, thought the game ended far too early before I realized I had gone down an alternate route.
It's still pretty short though
I believe so.
spoiler
Though, this was a while ago. Back in May of 2023. But I do recall messing with a pawn near the end... but there were plenty of pawns throughout the game. Now you have me second guessing and it makes me want to play through the game again to make sure I didn't miss anything haha.
I also encountered a bug that broke a puzzle and my buddy and I wasted 2 hours being incredibly frustrated before we caved, looked it up, and realized we solved it immediately but the game was just taking a shit. That sole bug brought it down from 9/10 to 7/10 imho. Still very much enjoyed it, perfect example
Skyrim tbh. I'd even go as far as to call it a 6/10, but i can lose hours into that game like nothing else
TimeShift, an FPS from the Xbox360/PS3 era. It was my first PS3 game played on an HDTV. The time mechanics were fantastic, the graphics were amazing to me at the time, and it was a surprisingly fun time. I would be so happy with a remake/spiritual successor.
A Hat in Time. Is a phenomenal platformer collectathon. It flirts with many themes and is overall one of my favourite games.
Here's where it falls short. The online co-op is junk and doesn't work how you'd hope. The DLCs are kinda bad but it's nice to have more.
Planetside 2. That experience of actually fighting with thousands of players on the same map is something no other game can give. Otherwise it's not really a super good game and the graphics actually got worse at some point by largely removing PhysX. Sadly the company owning it doesn't want to put money into it and the playerbase is much smaller today than some years ago.
Hell yeah, Planetside 2 was outstanding when it was good. Huge scale, really good interactions (q to tag targets was so cool), really fun land and air vehicles
Fuck, I miss that game now. Shame it's declined!
Still available to play via backwards compatibility on modern xbox consoles in case anyone is wondering. I just picked this up on my series s.
I didn't even think it was for the Xbox at all
Fuckin love PlanetSide. But we're talking about 7/10's not masterpieces
Yeah those were the days. Also all those Medic effects. I can't remember another game having PhysX displayed so prominently.
Future Cop: LAPD
Though the game wasn't groundbreaking it was fun going around LA in a giant Mech blowing stuff up.
I really liked the ability to transform from a bipedal mech to a fast hover car which also helps with the pacing of the game.
It did introduce me to a tower defense PVP style multiplayer that my best friend and I were hooked on for a solid couple of months.
That and Fire Fight are in a breed of Desert Strike-alikes that people don't talk about much at all anymore and were way more fun than you'd expect.
Fire Fight is so obscure now that even searching for "Fire Fight gameplay" videos, as I did for that link doesn't spit it out as the first result. Such a travesty.
The First Tree
A beautiful personal little game about death and mourning. Got it for free because the developer gave out keys to an old forum dedicated to Dark Forces 2 editing, which basically started his career.
The Dark Pictures Anthology
Basically Until Dawn and The Quarry with lower budget. It shows but I can overlook that. They are nice little short stories that are very chill to play, considering the genre.
Biing!
A silly little sexy hospital management game. Never got far as a kid. When I managed to get further a little while ago I saw that there really wasn't that much more to the game. But it's silly and it's sexy and tickles my nostalgia.
I loved Until Dawn but couldn't finish House of Ashes and was very disappointed in Man of Medan. I thought The Quarry was also a part of The Dark Picture Anthology. Is it much different?
The Quarry isn't part of the anthology. It's its own thing. I love it. Personally I think it's better than Until Dawn. Much more variety in the outcomes you can have.
Dark Forces was a sweet game fo sho, I really liked the third and fourth ones
Hmmm that's difficult.
FEAR, probably. It was a 10/10 for my childhood for sure, but it's probably a 7/10 total ?
nah, I went back to it recently and FEAR still kicks ass. Honestly a little sad that in all the years since, there's no FPS quite like it. Still absolutely a 10/10, and I'd feel confident calling it one of the best shooters of all time.
I'd love to see a new game for that series. But more akin to the first two not the third lol
After looking Warhammer 40k Mechanicus is in the 7/10 range and I loved it. The setting, music and gameplay were all really enjoyable to me.
Alpha Protocol
Well designed spy game, replies on doing nothing revolutionary, just doing everything well.
Came out quite unique and underappreciated.
Devil Daggers
Devil Daggers has a well deserved 83 on Metacritic, so... too good for this thread.
Housemarque's old Zaxxon-like The Reap is a litarally life-changing 7/10 for me for multiple reasons. It won't be for you, but it's still a fun game to mess with if you can get it to run. Look it up.
Lots of PC games of that era are unjustly forgotten. Abuse is too good for this thread, but who is playing Abuse these days?
Also, honorable mention to the brand/franchise with the most 7/10s I will defend, Spider-Man. Spider-Man vs the Kingpin was so weirdly ambitious for an early Mega Drive game, Maximum Carnage was so weirdly ambitious for a late 16 bit beat-em up, Lethal Foes looked crazy for a SNES platformer and never left Japan for some reason, Spider-Man Web of Shadows was panned, but had some crazy visual, gameplay and narrative ideas... people were always doing a bit better than they should for the ability or budget they had with those until Insomniac made them big budget AAA.
The bad ones are BAD, though.
Try The Amazing Spider-man (1989) for DOS if you want some sweet webslinging action with tits full of puzzle milk
Oh, man, I bought that on launch. Spidey's poopy squat is hilarious, you will get murdered endlessly by R2D2...
...and there is a way to clip right to the end of the game from the helicopter on the first screen, at least on the floppy version I had.
Also, the DRM is just a quiz about Spider-Man, which I could beat without looking at the manual, so I did appreciate that they let you pirate the game if you're enough of a fan.
Battletech and the Shadowrun games from HBS.
Add to that 'The Lamplighters Leage' from HBS.
Most of them tbh. Two examples: Homefront: the Revolution (2016) and Maneater (2020)
Gunfire Reborn. It's a roguelite FPS that is fun to play with friends. It's very jumpy shooty. I really dig the handling in it, and there are lots of weapons and abilities and play styles and due to the rogue like nature of it, you get to experiment with lots of stuff. It's lots of fun, but not super deep.
Phasmaphobia. Been playing this one for years somehow. It's a ghost hunting game but you don't actually hunt ghosts, you collect evidence to identify the type of ghost that is haunting a place. The ghosts will kill you though. It no longer makes me scream like it used to, but I still get chills from it. If you're looking to soil your underwear, it's a good time.
Ghost recon wild lands is the definition of a 7/10 ign type slop and I love it
Honestly, I think playing it with a friend might even bump it to 8/10. I had a blast with it despite the lack of innovation and repetitiveness of the gameplay
Indiana Jones and the Great Circle.
The game reminds me of Dishonored and the first 3 Resident Evils. Good story, good acting, interesting puzzles. But the stealth parts are laughably poor. The game encourages you to hide bodies, but there's literally no point cause the AI is deaf, dumb, and blind. You can be as loud as you want, take down a guy who is literally a meter away from another guard, and they won't hear or see a thing. Still enjoying the game, though. The ray traced effects are really pretty.
It's almost as good as its prequel game, Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis
Tetris Attack and all of the other Panel de Pon-likes. They are exactly what I want from a versus puzzle game
I don't know that Panel de Pon is a 7/10. I mean, it's no Tetris, but it's easily the best Nintendo puzzler they came up with themselves. At least an 8 or a 9, wildly underrated.
Sled Storm. I picked it up again recently and it's still a lot of fun. The racing is competent but probably nothing exceptional, although apparently it was one of the first snowmobile racing games so maybe it doesn't belong on this list? The tracks aren't super open, they're more like Mario Kart tracks with shortcuts which my family always liked, you couldn't really get lost. I played so much couch co-op with my family in that game.
10/10 soundtrack though, it introduced me to Rob Zombie's music as a kid. (Funny story, the only Rob Zombie film I've ever seen was the Devil's Rejects in a Waffle House in rural Florida at 3am on an employees' shitty laptop.)
Duuuuuude. This is a blast from the past. I had a Pizza Hut PS1 cd with a bunch of demos on it and Sled Storm was one of them. It has such a great physics feel for back then. I loved that game.
P.N.0.3. is an objectively mid game for gamecube with repetitive gameplay and environments. However I love the style of it and playing it brings me a lot of nostalgia.
I suppose some people might consider Godhand and Killer7 to be 7/10 games - at least based on contemporary reviews - but they've always had a cult following and have had a re-assessment here as modern classics in recent years.
Aces Wild. - 2D action game with a dodge mechanic that felt kinda like Bayonetta's. Also laser dog pee.
