| Title | Most overrated games of 2015 |
| Author | Tom Chick |
| Posted in | Features |
| When | December 19, 2015 |
Overrated is a loaded term. It looks good in a headline. It's often used for no purpose other than to goad a reaction. But that doesn't mean it isn't useful..
Read the full articleAnd my ego is tickled.
I got stuck on the main Fallout 4 quest when a bug kept a door locked that I needed to go through. I shrugged my shoulders and decided to start over and try a different faction....
Until I realized that my experience would be more or less the same.
The leveling is so simplified that it kills any sort of specialization, the quests are a major step back in complexity, and the dialogue wheel murdered any sense of role playing. I'm the same dude, doing the same things, with the same people, every single time.
There's so much to do in Fallout 4! Once!
I absolutely agree with you on Cities: Skylines. Good basics and some fun traffic problems, but that's about it. Waterflow model - don't care. Wish it had a more complex economy and consequences for workers don't getting to their jobs.
The only other one I played was Pillars of Eternity, which I thought was pretty good. My main concern was balance problems and combat becoming too easy (in general). Some encounters were still pretty tough.
8. Rocket League: Lots of fun co-op splitscreen, but I'll admit my first reaction was, "Oh, so they made that Top Gear recurring segment a whole game? Cool."
I thought I'd read the funniest line of the best-of lists when I saw "A one-woman Rashomon FMV adventure which consists mostly of figuring out which are the deleted scenes." (which is 100% true!), until I read " I love me some Obsidian choice-and-consequence, but not enough to spend all this time herding cats.". We put up with a lot of fiddliness in the name of nostalgia sometimes.
Elite: Dangerous: I keep wondering to myself why I don't like it, and your Rebel Galaxy line crystallized it for me. RG freaking moves, man. It's a kick-in-the-pants guitar riff, a bunch of dots on your map, a cool-ass ship, and lets-get-to-the-goddamn-space-flyin'. E:D on the other hand, made me spend an hour crashing into a cargo bay until I learned how to dock. After that, I was free to... er... watch the stars, I guess? I tried going places, but my choices seemed to be either "wait bored in real time for half an hour" or "overshoot what-I-think-is-my-destination and loop around seven times like a 4th grader trying to drive a Ferrari". Maybe I just no longer have the patience for a deep space sim, or maybe this one just needs to be more fun.
Battlefront has been a ton of fun, and I'm well aware that it's because casual old noobs like myself like the Mario Kart-esque power ups and heroes and not worrying about hitboxes and the like. I just wish I didn't have to pay $100 to get the whole game. Frankly, they could have sold just the Fighter Squadron portion as a standalone for $10 and it would have been the biggest hit of the year.
Great list. I'd add Undertale to it.
Agree with everything except Rocket League. Best pure game design of the year.
"The leveling is so simplified that it kills any sort of specialization"
C'mon, are you kidding me? Fallout 4 has its flaws but that is not one of them.
The specialization in this game is miles ahead of previous entries. With high enough intelligence you could easily max out any skill in previous Fallouts by the time you were level 5. by the time you were level 20 in Fallout 3 you would have several specializations with other minor skills being fairly buffed.
Not so in Fallout 4. By the time I reached level 50 my character was pretty buff combat wise (playing on survival made me prioritize those skills over others), but I was unable to run a settlement, could only pick novice level locks, couldn't sneak, couldn't do many things. An equivalent level character (level cap notwithstanding) would be a deity that could do anything.
Tom, can we expect a Most Underrated Games of 2015 list as well? I'd like to know what you think was underrated (though not sure if the Most Surprising list covers this).
Tuesday is Most Overlooked Games day, so that should probably do it.
Actually, the critical buzz I've been hearing about Battlefront is mostly either negative or tepid. Various PC Gamer/RPS folks straight up disliked it, the Giant Bomb consensus was that it was great fun for maybe a few hours and then you'd pretty much seen everything, etc.
Also...New Vegas was great, but Fallout 4 was a different studio entirely. It was as much a follow up to New Vegas as Bioshock Infinite was to Bioshock 2, Far Cry 2 was to Far Cry 1, or Call of Duty: Ghosts was to Black Ops II: i.e., only technically related. I'd have preferred Obsidian to keep doing Fallout instead, but I guess I can't blame Bethesda for wanting to work with the franchise too, it being their property and all.
Indeed it's strange this was the only part of the game resembling RPG genre. I couldn't even gain access to some important locations like library cause I didn't get lockpicking skill.
I'm pretty sure all those example of follow-ups that you say are "only technically related" are, in fact, follow-ups to their predecessors. Q.E.D., Barac! :)
I like this idea, but I'm not sure how to articulate "underrated". Too harshly judged? Can you elaborate, Mr. Power?
But as Trudeau points out, the overlooked games list might fulfill this category. I think of it as a list of the most "underplayed" games. :)
I just don't get Undertale. I have no idea what to do with it. I've plinked away with it for a little, but truth be told, I can't tell whether it's ingenious or a sham! I feel like I have no idea what's going on here. As far as I can tell, it's just a trifling Zelda-like ditty, but I've been told there's a lot more going on. I'll have to dig a little deeper one day.
Have you spent much time with it? It's just a Zelda adventure, right?
Gah, I never really thought of the power-ups in Star Wars: Battlefront as Mario Kart equalizers, but that's kind of what's going on, isn't it? It's, like, "here, kid, have an X-Wing to make you feel better about yourself!"
And, yeah, you absolutely described my experience with Elite: Dangerous. I'm glad it exists, and maybe one day it will have a higher gameplay density, but until then, it seems very niche. And I niche that I have no time for and little interest in.
In name, not in design or heritage. The actual follow-up to Far Cry, for example, was Crysis.
I keep hearing this mentioned re: F4 being Bethesda vs. Obsidian, but I'm still not sure why it excuses F4 for being an arguably less interesting game, or being compared to the other post-apocalyptic open world RPG/shooter that shares the franchise name. Don't get me wrong, there are parts of F4 I like a lot - and it's certainly not a bad game - but I don't get why having come from a different studio should render comparisons to F:NV irrelevant. It's not like F4 was developed in a world where F:NV didn't exist, and the devs had never played it (or F3, for that matter).
EDIT: I'm not implying that you're making the above argument. I'm just legitimately curious about the reasoning behind those who do.
It's totally legitimate to make comparisons between the two games - in any of these cases - as games that are both being sold to a similar sector of the gaming audience. What doesn't make sense is treating one as a natural heir to the other's qualities, when they're not actually related in that way, or expecting a different development studio, with different skills, vision, and interests, to automatically incorporate the design of a game they didn't make.
I don't see how Halo 5 is overrated at all when it had underwhelming sales, won almost no awards and the fanbase has a very mixed opinion over its campaign. I see criticisms of the game on any Halo community I've seen. It should be no where near Fallout 4 that got millions of sales on every platform its on.
If anything it's pretty underrated as its multiplayer is among the best of Halo and some levels in the campaign has great level design with a great soundtrack.
This whole list is poorly made anyway when a few of the games here only have a single sentence that poorly explains how the game is overrated in any manner. The Rocket League explanation only has FOUR words in it.
