From recent memory: Starfield.
I didn't think it was terrible in and of itself, but it also wasn't very good. It was just missing that certain something Bethesda RPGs had before it. Just a meh experience the whole way through.
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From recent memory: Starfield.
I didn't think it was terrible in and of itself, but it also wasn't very good. It was just missing that certain something Bethesda RPGs had before it. Just a meh experience the whole way through.
Starfield faked me out for a bit when I took the character creation perk that gave my character living parents that I could go visit and would show up from time to time. They were funny and adorably charming, and I thought it was an inspired touch. Little did I know that was the absolute best part of that game...
I think it was the way that exploration felt like a grind that made it so “meh”. A whole universe to explore, and you’re either going to come to a barren rock planet, or find the same enemy base/outpost 5 times in a row.
For a game where space exploration was one of the main selling points, it felt remarkably unlike exploring at times.
As a big fan of space sims and action RPGs, I wrote that game off when looking at reviews and how the spaceship building system and space travel were.
It's like they choose the worst of Elite Dangerous and mixed it with the worst parts of previous Bethesda RPGs.
It always felt to me they wanted to create what star citizen is supposed to be someday (press x to doubt) and the. Looked at no mans sky and were like, we should add that too! And then realized the scope of that was ridiculous and half assed both of those parts.
Star field was just mediocre enough that it pissed me off, the loading screens and menues are egregious enough to make me go ballistic. It's hilarious because instead of criticizing the game for actuall gameplay, at launch it was lambasted for "pronouns". Then normal people got to playing it and actually explained the issues.
Any assassin's creed from the last 10 years, probs gonna get hate for that but they are just so average to me.
The outer worlds . it was just meh in my opinion. Not to be confused with the outer wilds game that I've yet to play
I was going to say outer worlds as well (outer WILDS is a fantastic game IMO) the game was entirely competent, just unimpressive in every way. Except Pavarti, she is a precocious sugar dumpling and must be protected at all costs.
Actual conversation had with my wife, who was watching me play near the end:
"That chick is cute. I bet her romance is adorable!"
"She's aromantic and asexual, you can't romance her."
"I bet her quest line is fun"
"Nope. It's a really boring fetch quest where you set her up on a date with some bland woman old enough to be her mother. She is also very obviously sexually and romantically attracted to this woman."
"...huh."
I love Parvati but Drinking Sapphire Wine is a terrible quest.
I thought The Outer Worlds was violently mediocre, and yeah, its really long uninteresting fetch quest, but:
Parvati says she's not interested in physical affection, but I don't recall her ever saying she was aromantic. The closest thing I remember is that she feels like she's better at dealing with machines than people, which definitely doesn't mean the same thing.
I also don't recall her ever saying anything sexual about Junlei?
how old does this woman look to you that you think she could have a 28 year old daughter?
Well, I can sort of be impressed with what outer wilds did. I didn't actually find it all that much fun to play, whereas I completed the outer worlds.
Outer Wilds is absolutely superb if/when you get it try to get the DLC too its a good value. Steam summer sale coming up soon if you’re in the states
Loll, people will never stop getting these confused
Starfield. It's the definition of a "mixed" rating on Steam. It's not bad, but it's not good either. You play it for an hour and your reward is that an hour has passed.
Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning
Had all the individual makings of an exceptional game (with input from Todd Macfarlane, R A Salvatore and Grant Kirkhope), and while it was definitely enjoyable enough - it lacked any wow-factor whatsoever, winding up an otherwise forgettable 7/10.
At the time of its release, it's wow factor for me was simply some fucking color, compared to PS3 Skyrim which had released mere months earlier.
I love both games, but there's something about Amalur that I think I love more that I can only think of as it being just medium, average, mediocre but not bad. It's just something kinda fun. Comfortable.
The main thing I remember about this game is that it was financed by the fortune of a former MLB baseball player, independent of any game studio.
This is probably more subjective than best/worst. So...
Vanilla Skyrim.
A hell of a lot of Ubisoft open-world slop released around and in the 2010s.
Pretty much every modern AAA game. Theres an exception here and there but really smaller studios have been making bangers that AAA studios just cant seem to touch
This is a tough question because it's like asking "What's the most forgettable game you've ever played?" I can remember some of the best and worst games I've ever played, but mediocre games are explicitly not interesting.
That said, the first one that came to mind for me was Starshot: Space Circus Fever for N64. It's just a very generic late-'90s collectathon platformer. It's hard to be mad at it, because it's not terrible or anything, there's just no reason to play it. If you've got an N64, there's Mario, Banjo, Rayman, even B- and C-tier stuff like Gex and Chameleon Twist. There's hidden gems like Space Station Silicon Valley or Rocket: Robot on Wheels.
That last one is the only reason I played Starshot, I saw it clearanced at a used game store and was like "Oh yeah, I remember hearing this game was good," but it turned out I was thinking of Rocket. That game actually is good, while Starshot is just fine.
I think Halo Infinite qualifies, I played the multiplayer waaay back when it released so things may have drastically changed (haven't heard of it being the case);
it didn't / doesn't do anything that no other game does, nor did / does it do anything particularly well nor better than its competitors (including every Halo from Bungie).
I did watch a walkthrough of the campaign, and it doesn't look particularly engaging either.
From a gameplay perspective GTA has been mid for ages.
Ghost Wire: Tokyo.
It sells itself on cool aesthetics, but the moment you get past that you realise it's just a very, very generic open world shooter with incredibly bland and boring shooting layered over an impressively faithful recreation of Shinjuku. And even the aesthetics wear thin very quickly, being largely just a whole lot of "Hey I know that anime" level stuff cribbed from Japanese culture. The game is mostly just running around a map collecting stuff.
Hogwarts Legacy
The Halo series.
I like shooters, so I got the full bundle and I tried hard to like it.
None of the games gave me a lasting impression. The plot didn't stick with me, the enemies were weird, the guns felt weak and flimsy, the rooms kept repeating in some sections and it got very boring. There were some fun bits with the vehicles, etc., but overall the experience was... pretty much average.
I was expecting something like the Half-Life series, but this wasn't it.
Halo was best when it was Halo:CE played 4v4 on two linked systems, with the teams on two screens in an undersized dorm room in 2002. Alternatively, two people playing through the entire game in co-op mode and finishing at 3 in the morning.
Everything since then has been mid at best
Anything ubisoft makes. Or generally most things big companies make to cater biggest possible amount of people.
Square Enix games (FInal Fantasy, Neir Automata, Sleeping Dogs. Tomb Raiders)
They are all... good - certainly not bad games But nothing makes them... great
Nier Automata
How dare you feel this way, you scruffy-looking Nerf-herder!
I am unhappy with your comment! But I respect it, so I hope you have a great day ahead.
Dual nominations for Paper Mario: Sticker Star & Paper Mario: Color Splash. The only thing I really remember about them is that I played them and they left me without any feelings about them whatsoever.
Every Halloween, I play this Xbox 360 (I think it's also on PC now) game called Bullet Witch.
Basically a third-person shooter with postapocalyptic supernatural horror theme. You play as a witch who shoots zombies and weird creatures with a magic machine gun broom thing. Also you get spells. Some are bloody awesome.
This game is peak Xbox 360 to the core. The distinct memorable thing about it is that I can actually list good and bad things about it. Level design varies between meh and decent. Some of the particular setpieces are pretty awesome though. (You get to fight at an airport, and you get to do a boss fight at the top of the plane mid-flight!) Spells are fun. The mega-spells are hella fun. (Just call up lightning and watch stuff explode.) Shooting is kinda jank but it works. Jank is explained by lore. (Why is friendly fire not a thing? Well, you see, this is a magic machine gun broom thing, so bullets dodge the civilians and allies by ~*~magic~*~.) Enemy designs are nothing to write home about at first glance, but are actually kinda memorable. (You first meet up the zombies and hey, they're talking zombies. With military helmets and guns. Like, what? You don't see this every day.) There are some things that seem just not very well designed, like there's these gigantic enemies that serve as minibosses and they're a lot less scary when you note the AI is probably bugged and they often just decide to stand at place for a while and eat a lot of bullets.
I got this thing in the bargain bin. It's a zombie shooty game that's perfect for Halloween so that's what I use it for. That's all it does. That's all I could ask it for. And it's fine at it.
Probably everytbing put out by Nintendo in a long time. Yes, even that one. That one, too.
Excuse you, but Breath of the Wild was amazing.
Breath of the Wild was basically a Ubisoft game with a Zelda coat of paint.
Don't censor yourself, who are you afraid of??
Mario Kart World
Just say it
Unreal 2, at launch, was the most absolutely 7/10 game I've ever played. Just a very generic singleplayer FPS, and not the sequel to Unreal that everyone was hoping for.
I say "at launch," though, because almost a year after the game's release, they added multiplayer, and that is still my favorite multiplayer game.
I said any Call of Duty from the past decade as answer to the original comment, and I still think that is a solid candidate. However, another game I played recently that qualifies I think is Sleeping Dogs. Perfectly cromulent 7/10 GTA clone but ultimately not pulling up any trees.
Mighty no 9.
Neverwinter Nights
The multiplayer is supposedly incredible. But I remember being extremely whelmed by the main game.
But it's hard to remember the mid games. Because it is very likely that they didn't leave any lasting impression.
And especially if previous titles in a series or from a studio were great a mid game would feel disappointingly bad. Although compared to other games they might actually still be considered great.
The original single player is so bad I'm certain it was just cobbled together as a demo of the engine and for inspiration for user content. Then the team had time to develope proper story with the expansions
Elex 1 and Elex 2