I recently picked up Plants vs. Zombies: Garden Warfare during a sale on a complete whim. I don’t usually like competitive shooters and I conceptually dislike multiplayer-only games. It sat on the “shelf” for a few weeks, but I finally opened it up last weekend to kill a little time. I’m kind of shocked how enjoyable this game is.
The cartoony-ness makes the premise more palatable to me but the graphics aren’t too “kiddy” and there’s a lot of visual polish and detail. The balance seems pretty solid, and all eight main characters types feel pretty distinct and interesting. It somehow feels more comfortable and fun to me than most online games. The “freemium” card packs are priced reasonably; you can earn new packs very easily without paying real money. It reminds me a bit of multiplayer from Mass Effect 3 but expanded and polished and goofier (and with both PvP or PvE modes).
The 2009 Bionic commando. Yes the story is ridiculous bordering on offensive to common sense. The game is buggy and the graphics are serviceable at best. It’s the swinging mechanic that saves it. Once you get into it, swinging through the levels like you’re spiderman is so fun. It’s also really satisfying killing enemies by throwing a subway car at them.
JK2 is one of those games that starts really badly. The first levels without the light sabre are just awful. Terrible gunplay. Once you get it though everything changes. First game in which the light sabre was fun and effective.
Portal surprised me in all sorts of ways, most of them good. I went in expecting a light puzzle game. But the puzzles turned out to be a lot richer than I expected, and also came with some great character acting and tantalizing hints of story.
Oh, this actually reminds me of another one for me: Bionic Commando Reloaded, the HD remake of the NES original that was released as a publicity boost for that 2009 AAA game.
I bought it because I had a lot of nostalgia for the original, but by tweaking the difficulty and improving the controls, they made it into an extremely fun modern game.
I don’t like third person action games as a rule, and I’ve never cared much about the GTA games in particular… but I got Saints Row 3 on a lark for some ridiculously low Steam Sale Price, and I loved it. Just blew through the same in 15-20 hours over two days. Something about the humor and over-the-top-ness just made it click and become enjoyable in a way those games usually aren’t for me.
The “pleasant surprise” games are some of my favorites - it’s like beating expectations makes it automatically more awesome than it would have been otherwise.
Dishonored pleasantly surprised me with its enjoyable gameplay. It was a bit of an effort, though, slogging through the very slow intro. I didn’t care at all about any of the characters, plot, setting, etc. But once I got the powers, the gameplay was quite fun.
The Legend of Zelda: A Link Between Worlds also pleasantly surprised me. Not that it was good, but that it was so much better than I expected a modern Zelda game to be. Like, nearly as good as Link to the Past. Like, the best Zelda game I’ve played in over twenty years. That was a very nice surprise.
I was unpleasantly surprised by how banal and tedious Uncharted was. People are always banging on about the series like it’s the PS3’s defining franchise, and it was just dull as toast to me. Nathan Drake was occasionally entertaining as a character, but there’s no way I’m slogging through hours of boring gameplay just for that.
Wolfenstein: The New Order was a lot more fun than I thought it’d be. I waited for it to get cheap (then someone bought it for me anyway) because I didn’t have great expectations for it but they did a bang-up job of making an interesting world with fun shoot 'em up gun play.
On the other end of the spectrum, Remember Me was a huge disappointment. The game play was so terrible that I couldn’t even enjoy the world they were making. It was just no fun to play.
I thought that Eldritch would be a forgettable indie shooter lamely trying to capitalize off “look, voxels! Like Minecraft!” but it was surprisingly atmospheric and fun.
I once played a shooter called Marine Sharpshooter 2: Jungle Warfare. My closing thoughts on it for a blog entry reflected how oddly disappointing it was:
I used to laugh at Terraria for being such an obvious Minecraft knock-off. But after watching other people’s videos, and playing the game myself, it turned out to be a surprisingly deep and engrossing game. In some ways it’s even a better game than Minecraft, esp. in terms of storyline and character development.
Darkest Dungeon has amazing atmosphere and does such an incredible job of keeping up the feeling of impending doom right around the corner throughout the whole game.
The creator of Eldritch is a friend of mine; I’d like to think maybe .00001% of that game was influenced by conversations I had with him about game design over the years. You’re the first person I’ve ever heard reference it outside our circle of friends or in press coverage.
I recommend it to everybody I talk about games to. It’s a weird little gem that feels like a modern version of an early 90s PC game.
Dishonored was a surprise for me, too – the gameplay (and specifically the level design) was much more nuanced and polished and varied than I expected. At the same time, I actually bought it anticipating a cool story and setting and was very disappointed in both. I liked it, but not for the reasons I expected.
Agreed on Uncharted; I thought it was a bad mish mash of Gears of War and Tomb Radar with all the charm of an overproduced, messy Hollywood popcorn flick. I’ve heard the sequels are better, but I found the first one aggressively unlikeable.
I’m Iike this, I really don’t like 3rd person games for some reason (the Batman: Arnhem games did nothing for me - maybe because I’m a mouse/keyboard player and the controls just don’t map across very well. I’ve got a controller though I hate using it), but I picked up Shadow of Mordor on sale and loved it. GTA V on pc is looking good to but I’m not sure how much longevity it has.
I got pretty bored with Far Cry 2 (why the hell is everyone shooting at me just for driving? And I could swear I just killed all those dudes five minutes ago… whoops, car’s completely totalled. Better fix it by tightening this engine bolt… there, good as new! Ah shit, here comes the malaria again…) so I was surprised how thoroughly I enjoyed Far Cry 3, even with the hideous screen tearing in some areas. And its expansion, Blood Dragon, is one of the few games I’ve gotten 100% completion on.
“Disappointment” is far too anodyne a term for the psychic trauma Pac-Man for the Atari 2600 put me through.
999 and its sequel Virtue’s Last Reward really surprised me with the way their stories are structured. Most game stories would work well as movies or books, but these games do some interesting things that are only possible in the context of a game.
The elevator pitch is pretty much: it looks like Minecraft with a bit of Apple //e, and it plays like a combination of Spelunky (but easier) and Bioshock. If that sounds good, you’ll love it. If it doesn’t, then you…probably won’t.
I also highly recommend checking out Super Win the Game from the same company; basically a love-letter to the 8-bit console era.
The creator of Eldritch is a friend of mine; I’d like to think maybe .00001% of that game was influenced by conversations I had with him about game design over the years. You’re the first person I’ve ever heard reference it outside our circle of friends or in press coverage.