“Beauty is in the eye of the gamer.” “One gamer’s trash is another gamer’s treasure.”
The main idea behind today’s gaming topic is somewhat related to the famously well-known (and reworked) phrases I used above. In all walks of life, including gaming, different people have different tastes. Some games that are considered “universally praised” still have some detractors, while other games that had very little positive feedback still managed to gain some fans here and there (though I question if literally anyone in the world actually liked MindsEye). Us fine folks here at Gaming Respawn have put a lot of thought into this topic, so now we bring you our personal choices for games that many others didn’t really care for but that we are big fans of, nonetheless. If you dislike the games we chose here, relax, it doesn’t invalidate your thoughts on said games or make your opinions “lesser” than ours. But we like them, and we’ll fight any of you in their defense.
(My editor is reminding me that I must make it clear how Gaming Respawn does not condone violence of any kind. Ironically, there’s a gun to my head as I write this)
We now give you “Gaming Respawn’s Games We Love That Other Gamers Don’t”. Kicking us off is Ian, from whose mind this brilliant idea was born.
Ian Cooper
Resident Evil 6
Beyond a series that invented the survival horror genre, Resident Evil paved the way for horror games as we know them today. Sparse weapons and ammunition, danger at every corner, a sense of dread and forbidding that lingers until the credits roll, Resident Evil perfected it, and it continues to thrive and reinvent the wheel.
As time went on, and we got more games, it leaned more into action than survival. With Resident Evil 5, the action was ramped up, and the series’ identity was in jeopardy. Then came Resident Evil 6, which eliminated survival horror almost completely in favour of set-pieces, cinematic spectacle and multiple storylines featuring multiple characters. Fans of the series hated it. It wasn’t the Resident Evil that we know and love. It was a ballsy, daring entry turning a well-known horror franchise into a generic action game….and I absolutely loved it!
Beginning the game as Leon Kennedy, who we were introduced to in the highly acclaimed second game, it’s the only glimpse of horror we see as he and his female companion, Helena, scramble to evade the zombie scourge. After his journey ends, we are given the option to play as other characters from the series, and each campaign plays differently. Chris Redfield and Piers use military weaponry to dispatch bio-organic weapons (or BOWs). It’s more about shooting the hell outta’ everything in sight, and it was a nice change of pace. Their campaign offers a battle with a giant creature at one point that is constantly hunting you as you attempt to take it down. I loved this part. The monster was massive!
Another cool campaign was Sherry Birkin (from Resident Evil 2) and Jake. Jake is a badass with awesome close-combat fighting skills, and Sherry is a frightened little girl. This campaign is more of a hunter becomes the hunted sort of deal as you evade a hulking monster called the Ustanak, who seeks you out at every opportunity. It offers a sense of dread from start to finish, which gives a different dimension of the military-style balls to the wall action of Chris and Piers and the spooky survival aspect of Leon and Helena.
Complete all main campaigns and you get access to Ada Wong. She appears at different sections of each campaign, but playing as her shows you how each moment came to be. It’s a great gap-filler, and she is a complete ass kicker.
With so much content, different playstyles, an intertwining story, and so many cool moments, I loved Resident Evil 6.
Peter Keen
The Callisto Protocol and Remember Me
The first game on my mind sprang out immediately: The Callisto Protocol. We all know that this game was billed as the “spiritual successor” to the incredible game Dead Space. The reason was the creative mind behind Dead Space was making what he said was going to be the version of the game he really wanted to make. Except it wasn’t.
The game reviewed poorly and wasn’t a commercial success. It later was revealed that time constraints affected the end product, and it was nowhere near what the developers had hoped it would have been.
As a huge Dead Space fan, all this negativity put me off, not only from buying the game upon release but also playing the game for nearly a whole year. Eventually, once the game was bargain basement cheap, I took the plunge.
I won’t review the game here, but what I will say is, yes, it’s not as great as Dead Space, but then, few are. The enemy types here are repetitive and boring, the melee weapon you need to rely on so much is as weak as hitting someone with a newspaper, and the weapon’s sound effects are pathetic.
Despite those things though, I started playing the game and enjoying it. I specifically remember saying to myself, okay then, when does this become crap? It never did! Yes, there were things that could have been done better, it isn’t perfect, but frankly, I thought it was a solid, fun, well-made game; so much so that I bought the expansion packs to play the DLC story part too. I even considered spending time to get the platinum trophy for it. Here I am having fun playing the game.
I think part of the issue the game had was the hype it built for itself, pitting itself against an all-time classic game like Dead Space. It was always going to fail if it wasn’t close. Also, I think there were performance issues that got ironed out by the time I played it.
It’s one of the bugbears I have with reviews where the nature of a game can change over time, to the extent that it is a much better experience a year down the line from updates and patches compared to what it was on release. Yes, that is a developer issue they should make right at launch, we all accept this, but if the core aspect of the game is good, people shouldn’t give up on the idea straightaway. It’s a shame this game will never get a sequel as it had huge potential.
The other game on my list that I really liked and that no one else did is the ironically titled Remember Me.
I ABSOLUTELY adored this game. I played it to death and got the platinum for it. I enjoyed it so much that I even bought the in-game music soundtracks for my Amazon music playlists. I EVEN wrote an email to the developer (Dontnod) thanking them for making such a fantastic game and then asking them if they could please make more games like this. No, they didn’t reply (note, Remember Me was their first game, and they have gotten into financial trouble recently, so maybe they should have taken my advice!).
There was so much to like about the game. Gorgeous neo futuristic, cyberpunk Paris. Interesting game mechanics that spawned the success of French Studio Dontnod’s further storytelling successes of the Life Is Strange series. The fantastic game design of you, the player, being able to craft the kind of combat combos you wanted. The story was engrossing, the visuals, the artwork, the audio….you get the idea.
I genuinely thought this game was the next Uncharted. So, I was staggered when I read reviews only give it a 6 or 7 out of 10. That’s admittedly not bad, but for me, it was easily a 9 or 10, and I couldn’t understand why it wasn’t raved about by my gaming friends or media at the time. I honestly still don’t.
What I find even more baffling is that, in an era of so many games getting HD remasters and remakes, this now 12-year-old PS3/360 era game never got either of those treatments or even a sequel. Please remember Remember Me!
Daniel Garcia-Montes
The Bourne Conspiracy
A game I really enjoy that didn’t come anywhere close to setting the world on fire is The Bourne Conspiracy on PS3. When I first heard about it, I assumed it was going to be another mediocre movie tie-in game, which were a dime a dozen at the time, so I ignored it. I don’t quite remember what got me to change my mind on it later. It’s possible I saw a short video review somewhere that said The Bourne Conspiracy was pretty fun overall, despite it being short and nothing particularly spectacular. I believe I read a few user reviews on Amazon after that, most of which shared the same sentiment: It was nothing out of this world, but it was worth a playthrough. I didn’t bother checking “professional” reviews, so I did something that cannot be done anymore nowadays: I rented The Bourne Conspiracy from Blockbuster. I was only able to get halfway through the game when it started freezing, my copy being apparently scratched or defective. After returning the rented copy, I bought the game for myself and got to finish it. No regrets.
The game is just so damn fun in an arcadey kind of way. You play through the events of The Bourne Identity movie, with extra flashback sequences thrown in where you play as Bourne during some missions he undertook before that fateful night where he got shot in the back and fell off the deck of a yacht (you also play through the events leading up to that mission). The Bourne Conspiracy is very straightforward and linear, and the story is really just a simplified summary of the movie it’s tied to, so it’s not one of the game’s strong points. Basically, you either beat up bad guys through melee combat or shoot them up with guns (and there’s some stealth). Also, there’s a driving mission in the middle where you have to escape from police in a high-speed car chase. The combat works similarly to that in a fighting game, with the camera zooming in on Bourne and whichever enemy he’s fighting, then you beat the hell out of each other with light, heavy, and charge attacks. Through QTEs, you can also counter enemies who try to hit you from behind (you can fight up to three enemies simultaneously) or use takedowns powered by adrenaline to instantly…uh, take down up to three enemies in one fell swoop with some impressive maneuvers like bashing enemies’ heads into walls, taking nightsticks or clubs from enemies and smacking them down, grabbing environmental items, like shovels and screwdrivers, and using them to wound or knock out enemies, etc. These takedowns are cinematically satisfying.
Gunplay is solid, if a little janky. Bourne is usually armed with a pistol in some missions, and he can pick up a secondary weapon from fallen enemies, normally sub-machine guns, assault rifles, and shotguns. He can also perform takedowns when using guns and instantly kill a few enemies with perfectly placed headshots and such. This game is an exciting thrill ride from start to finish, and its brevity makes it very replayable, and I have played through this game a good 7 to 8 times in the past, maybe more. It’s been a few years since I last played it, but I may just revisit it soon for a good change of pace from all the open-world epics and Souls-like games I’ve been playing lately. Even when it originally released, The Bourne Conspiracy felt like a callback to a simpler time in gaming, when games had few bells and whistles and just put solid action and fun ahead of all else. Even the music kicks ass and appropriately sets the tone for all the action-packed fistfights and shootouts. I miss games like this one.
Will Worrall
Silent Hill: Downpour
When it comes to games that I feel are unfairly maligned, the obvious answer has to be Silent Hill: Downpour. Being one of the western-developed Silent Hill titles, a lot of people dismiss it as a mediocre take on a fantastic horror franchise, much like the other non-Japanese games.
However, while weebs may have wept when Konami started farming out the game dev responsibilities to western studios, I think there are some redeeming qualities to all the games, and most of all, Silent Hill: Downpour.
The atmosphere in the game is top-notch. You play as Murphy Pendleton, a convict being transferred to a new prison on a bus that just so happens to be going past Silent Hill. Obviously, the bus crashes, and you and the other inmates have to attempt to escape through the town while being pursued by a correctional officer.
As you explore the town, you realise that you and the woman hunting you both have connections to the town, and how you choose to play through the game affects the outcome for both of you.
Back when the game was being developed and released, Konami was really rushing the developers to get the game out by a specific deadline. So, when the game released, it was put out in a buggy and broken state, and we’re not just talking minor issues here. At launch, if you worked really hard to unlock the “joke” ending that each game in the franchise is famous for, then you’d have been completely locked out of EVER GETTING A DIFFERENT ENDING.
That’s right, due to a huge oversight by the devs/publisher, if you unlocked the joke ending, you could never see any of the others. To make it worse, this error persisted for ages and ages, and if you look around online, it seems like it is still happening. Fortunately, that isn’t the case. Consider this a PSA for anyone who has been Googling around about the issue: Since an update, you can continue to unlock other endings in Silent Hill: Downpour after the joke ending.
That example above is pretty indicative of what the devs did to the game post launch. Despite mediocre sales and a lot of flack from pissed-off fans, they pushed out fixes that have ended up making the game infinitely playable, so if you only have bad, buggy memories with the game, now might be the time for a revisit.
Part of the reason that I will rant and rave about this game until the cows come home is its understanding of what made Silent Hill great. There are no, or at least, very few mentions of any cults, all of the enemies in the game are taken directly from the psyches of the two people trapped in it (we’ll get into this in a minute), and as I previously mentioned, the visual design and use of rain effects make for such a great atmosphere that I don’t think we’ve had since the first few games in the series.
Personally, when it comes to monsters, I was fed up with finding ‘sexy’ monsters in every Silent Hill title after 2. In that game, the protagonist, James Sunderland, is sexually repressed, which is why the town manifests “sexy” nurses (he’s also ashamed of his perceived lack of masculinity, hence Pyramid Head, but that’s a rant for another day). Every other game that has featured them has either no reason for it or at least has poorly explained them.
In Downpour, there are indeed sexy monsters around occasionally, but they exist as a manifestation of the correctional officer’s psyche. SPOILER WARNING: See, originally, she was supposed to be a duetoragonist of the game, but due to the time constraints, she was cut from gameplay and had her storyline shunted into a companion comic instead. In this comic, we learn that she thinks we killed her father, another correctional officer, and as part of her revenge plot, had to sleep with her boss to get the transfer that would bring her closer to Murphy. All of these actions had a huge impact on her since the affair ended her relationship with her partner and also resulted in the “sexy” monsters that we see. It’s the town manifesting her guilt over sleeping with her boss as monsters, in the same way that it manifests Murphy’s fear of the violent criminals he’s trapped himself with as monsters.
In both cases, these characters have found themselves destroyed by their quests for vengeance. It’s a classical plotline, one that has been featured in everything from Jacobean drama to modern kids’ shows, and in Silent Hill: Downpour, it is used to enormous effect.
If you haven’t played the game, and you can access a PS3 or Xbox 360 to do so, I highly recommend checking it out. Maybe if enough people do it, we can convince Konami that a PC release is a good idea. Not that they’d know a good idea if it jumped up and shouted, “I am a good idea, look at me, look at me!!”.
Tasha Quinn
Final Fantasy XV
I don’t think I have a game that I love and others actively dislike, but I do have an instance where my favorite entry in a series is generally considered one of the weaker installments.
That game is Final Fantasy XV.
It received pretty good reviews, both from critics and the general public, but if you ask a Final Fantasy fan about their least favorite game, XV comes up a lot. Not always at the very bottom but definitely in that ballpark. There are countless Reddit threads on the topic.
Final Fantasy XV was the first Final Fantasy game I played all the way through, so it probably holds some nostalgic value for me. I remember spending much of my college Christmas break playing it. It’s not just nostalgia though. I genuinely enjoy the game and think that a lot of its hate comes from what it could have been: Final Fantasy Versus XIII.
I’ll admit that Versus XIII looked awesome from what little we saw of it, and over the ten years between its announcement and XV’s release, nearly everything about the game, aside from the appearances of the main characters, changed. I often wonder what the completed game would have felt like if they’d stuck with the initial concept, but I’m happy with what we got, even if some argue the game felt unfinished.
Flaws aside, there’s a lot I love about XV. The biggest highlight for me was the cast. Instead of a larger party you recruit as you go or swap between in the menu, XV sticks to a smaller, more consistent group. Gladio, Ignis, and Prompto are with Noctis from the start and, aside from a few sections, remain with him throughout. This creates a real sense of camaraderie. As XV‘s grumpy iteration of Cid says, they’re not just Noctis’s bodyguards, they’re his brothers, and that bond really shines through. Each character gets their moment, though I’ll admit it’s cheeky of the developers to lock so much character-driven content behind paid DLC (and the Brotherhood anime). That’s one of the main criticisms I’ve seen: People feel the DLC should have been part of the base game. Still, XV is ultimately Noctis’s story. The DLC exists to deepen the side characters, but you don’t need it to follow the main narrative. Honestly, I was pretty pleased with the DLC episodes.
Another thing I really enjoyed was the combat, which I think is one of the most divisive aspects of XV. For people like me who never really enjoyed the turn-based, strategic combat of earlier games, the real-time hack-and-slash style was far more fun. For others, it felt too simple – less strategy, more button-mashing. Personally, that suited me just fine. Aside from the Persona series, which has nailed flashy turn-based mechanics, most turn-based systems just break immersion for me.
I’ll admit the story sometimes felt rushed in places and dragged in others, but it’s one that has stuck with me over the years. It had enough emotional highs and lows to make me genuinely care about the whole party. And that ending? It destroyed me.
Matthew Wojciow
Call of Juarez: The Cartel
Choosing games I love that everyone hates is tricky as I looked up the Metacritic scores for a few games that I thought of, like Need for Speed: The Run and the original Prototype, but they seemed to have above average Metacritic scores, so here goes with the only one I found that was in the red: Call of Juarez: The Cartel.
The third game in the Call of Juarez series took said series to the modern day, and boy, did this rub people the wrong way. As you can imagine what the story is about, you play as LAPD officers trying to take down the aforementioned cartel. This premise is very unique and part of the charm. Yes, the characters are quite unlikeable and are cheesy stereotypes of classic cop characters you see on TV, but that is what makes this so great. If you are really going into this game expecting some gritty, hard-hitting, and emotional story, then you are naive.
Go into this game thinking you are playing a cheesy C-movie with actors you’ve never heard of, and you will have a blast. There are three playable characters, and each one has unique perspectives on what goes on in the story and unique endings that provide some replay value.
The overall gameplay is pretty decent. You have a range of guns with which to take on the enemy, and I must say, each gun has weight to it and feels good to shoot. My personal favourites were the revolver and shotgun. The only thing that, even for me, is too poor to look past is the weak driving, which is a shame as it does make up a fair portion of each of the levels. There was multiplayer at the time, and I remember it being quite chaotic and fun, but nowadays, it’s a wasteland with just the odd person still floating around, maybe trying the game via backwards compatibility on the Xbox Series of consoles.
Overall, this game might not win any awards for its nuanced story, but for a cheesy four-hour or so campaign, it’s a well fun time.
Join us in a few weeks for the “other side of the coin” for this topic: “Gaming Respawn’s Games We Hate That Other Gamers Don’t”. It’s gonna’ be a hoot.
