Gentlemen, please. Let’s not argue. This list doesn’t contain any of my favorite games, so it’s perfectly fine.
Did Tom forget to add Agents of Mayhem to this list? :)
Sonic Mania, should be given a honorable mention.
Look I’m willing to let people have opinions, and they are inherently subjective. But the visionary Warhammer 2 makes the overrated list and presumably the utterly terrible Endless Space 2 is going to make the best of list. This is a little much for me to bear.
I was thinking “what? Overrated? I’ve never even heard of it. I don’t think we even have a thread for it”. But it looks like it was pretty well reviewed.
So maybe it was overrated.
That game should just be forgotten, unfortunately.
Yep, like all lists there will be choices that just feel like trolling, which is what this one feels like to me. Warhammer 2 was in my view not only quite a bit better than the 1st one, but it also changed some stuff up in the process, which puts the lie to dear ole Tom making the throw away remark it’s just a roman numeral 2 at the end.
I was getting a little worried about the Total War games to be honest. I thought they’d slowly rowed themselves into a corner from which they seemed unable to extricate themselves. Warhammer 2 opened up so many exciting new ways they can take the franchise. Hell, if they just do a historical strategy game with Warhammer 2’s campaign innovations, I’m sold.
This game got pretty good reviews, but I think it might actually be a little underrated.
It’s the nature of lists, and as the first response pointed out, this will certainly drive some traffic, haha.
I guess there are a couple of things that make me blind to whatever warts HZD has:
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This is a new IP from a AAA studio at big budget. I mean, were there any other AAA studios who released a game with a new IP? I guess Age of Mayhem comes closest, but…
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This new IP from a AAA studio features a female hero/protagonist who isn’t sexualized at all. She’s believably awesome, and beautifully characterized.
And then the gameplay/fighting/hunting/stealth/stalking stuff is outstanding and immensely satisfying. And they executed the whole thing very well.
Hated Mass Effect Andromeda.
My kid loved Mario Oddysey…so maybe that is just over rated for adults!
Horizon Zero Dawn has a lot going for it. I think Tom’s generally too harsh on it. But it’s not a great game and probably is currently overrated.
Yeah, it’s no Total Warhammer 2, he said, reaching for the blue font.
Oh crap HZD has unskippable cutscenes? That is uncool even if it is skippable on later play throughs.
I loved Cuphead. I consider its game mechanics and the progression difficulty to be far more impressive compared to the art style and soundtrack (both of which are also simply amazing)
There’s absolutely no filler in Cuphead, and the boss-fights and run-and-gun levels all have very short turnaround between the player’s attempt, failure and retrial. Part of what makes it all work is the ingenious progression meter that comes after you fail. Instead of giving you boss health meters during the levels, you get to fail and then see which stage you reached and how close you were to beating the boss. The slow progression from being completely overwhelmed on first experiencing a boss fight to the point where you can easily handle most of the attack patterns is almost like leveling a character in an RPG. Another interesting gameplay element is the randomness in some of the boss attacks - that is while many of the boss are multi-stage obstacles, many of the individual stages themselves have two or three different attacks selected from five or six possible ones. Because of that the retries remain a bit fresh even after dozens of deaths. Finally the different weapons, skills and super-power-ups are all varied enough that you can have many different playstyles.
For me, Cuphead is the game of 2017. It just plays unbelievably good and the controls are awesome. I did die 1038 times though :) but never got frustrated, and that for me is pure game design magic.
If I recall correctly from seeing it streamed. Someone correct me if I’m wrong. If it’s like a Bethesda game where I have to stand there and listen to NPCs talk to each other about appalling boring nonsense, I want no part of it.
I agree with Sonic Mania being over-rated, personally. I picked it up after seeing reviews, which said it was basically a latter day Mario type reinterpretation of Sonic mechanics. I didn’t really feel anything when playing it though. It was fine, just not anything special if you aren’t going to really engage Sonic on its core level, which requires replaying each level until you have the Golden path memorized in each one.
It’s fair to ding for bad story up to a point, but I’m pretty forgiving about that if the core gameplay mechanics work. Games are typically (not always, but typically) so far behind other mediums in terms of narrative quality that I’d be a sad panda if I cared too much about that dimension. And the low quality of storytelling is in many cases just a sign that limited development funds are being spent in the right places. When a game comes along that’s as well-written as an above-average movie (see: Vampire Bloodlines) it’s time to do cartwheels. When it’s as well written as a downright good movie (see: Portal), well, we all know how Portal was received. But I don’t even like to harp on that because I think the whole ‘we wanna be like movies’ complex that game designers often wrestle with is a gigantic red herring.
Anyhoo.
The formula is: the square of the Tom who didn’t cut short the cutscenes is equal to the sum of unskippable cutscenes.
You can skip cut scenes in HZD. X followed by Square.