Good but flawed games

[Benji]

Simple enough question - what games did you thoroughly enjoy but find to be very flawed? Be it gameplay, graphics, story or whatever.

For me "Everybody's Gone To The Rapture" is the biggest. It's a game with a terrific atmosphere, beautiful scenery, perfect soundtrack and a wonderfully woven series of stories, but for a "walking simulator" it falls flat at... Walking. It's incredibly slow, and travelling from A to B can be very arduous, especially if you are a completionist. There is a running option, but it's so minimal you may as well not mention it. Wonderful game that I would highly recommend, just make sure you are really ready to enjoy aforementioned scenery and setting, because it takes a long while to get through it.

[OctoberRaven]

Vampire: The Masquerade: Bloodlines. An objectively unfinished game that requires fanpatches to get the full experience, melee combat is repetitive, gunplay is only worth it with certain clans, and goes from a 'multiple ways to accomplish your objective' game to straight up all combat in the final stretch... but it's still an amazing story-driven adventure with lots of amazingly written characters (and also Ming-Xiao).

[Bobfoc]

I can think of a fair few of these. Psychonauts was the first that came to mind. It's a wonderfully imaginative game with a great variety of levels, but there are also sections where the loose controls make things horribly frustrating. The last level in particular is one of the most infuriating parts of a game you'll ever play.

I'll also give special mention to one of my unpopular favourites, XIII. The AI was not great and there were times when the game was finicky about where you needed to stand to trigger the next part of a level, and the checkpoint system wasn't particularly generous either. Even so, at its best, it was a fun, stylish romp with an interesting story and plenty of no-nonsense gunplay that many subsequent shooters lacked. I'm still sad that they didn't make a sequel.

[Ruki]

Kingdom Come Deliverance. An interesting enough story/world, the combat was cool... but so many flaws. So, so, so many flaws.

[ChrisSteeleAteMyHamster]

All my favourite games tend to try something different. Some really succeed in my opinion (Heavy Rain, Detroit, Life is Strange, Kingdom Come Deliverance, Catherine, Mirror's Edge, Alien Isolation etc etc) but some certainly fall just a little short due to their flaws - although I still rate the as good games and love that they tried new ideas.

 

Remember Me (PS3): Some combat sequences frustrating and not in a good way.

Wet (PS3): Camera, some sections are annoying.

Mirror's Edge 2 (PS4): Loved the first one. Was enjoying the second one too until a mission where you have to take on loads of enemy coming in waves of increasing difficulty - lumping around in combat is not a Mirror's Edge strength - it's all about the flow and quick bursts of action.

Everybody's Gone To The Rapture (PS4): Agreed. Walking is too slow.

We Happy Few (PS4): Great story and feel. Horribly repetitive getting from mission to mission.

Adr1ft (PS4): A really stressful but cool concept of being in a spacesuit in a wrecked space station, desperately finding oxygen canisters and somehow trying to get to safety before you suffocate. Controls are a bit janky though and it's too hard to tell where you need to go sometimes.

 

5 minutes ago, Ruki said:

Kingdom Come Deliverance. An interesting enough story/world, the combat was cool... but so many flaws. So, so, so many flaws.

Hah! I really like it, although has to be with the updates. Sometimes the "real"-ness of it was its weakness somewhat.

[Meacon Keaton]

6 minutes ago, Ruki said:

Kingdom Come Deliverance. An interesting enough story/world, the combat was cool... but so many flaws. So, so, so many flaws.

How so? This is a game that I really want, but I’m just waiting for a price drop due to my obscene backlog of games to play. But now you have me curious.

[Stevie B]

Trivial Pursuit, eh @9 to 5

It's a good game, but the developers don't care about it enough to add basic features like you know, invite a friend. 

[FLiam]

2 hours ago, Meacon said:

How so? This is a game that I really want, but I’m just waiting for a price drop due to my obscene backlog of games to play. But now you have me curious.

It’s generally just very, very buggy. Lots of graphical mishaps as well as combat sometimes being a bit all over the shop.

It also requires quite a bit of dedication. Not really a pick up and play sort of game, even saving progress can be a pain. 

I enjoyed it for the most part, I think it was overly ambitious though. Concept is fantastic, but execution was never going to match.

[Mick]

Chess. Every piece except the damn knight moves in some form of straight line. WTF?

[OctoberRaven]

17 minutes ago, Mick said:

Chess. Every piece except the damn knight moves in some form of straight line. WTF?

It's been like that since the open beta. They kept promising a fix but they never did.

Though I havent played since I was banned from my home server because someone thought en passant was an exploit.

[Ruki]

2 hours ago, Meacon said:

How so? This is a game that I really want, but I’m just waiting for a price drop due to my obscene backlog of games to play. But now you have me curious.

Very, VERY buggy. And if you do any kind of thieving, money becomes trivial in a matter of hours.

[Mick]

The Sims 3. 

Playing it with one or two expansions is find, but any more than that (not to mention stuff packs) will just seemingly bog your computer down due to shoddy coding that only utilizes so much of your systems available memory. On top of that, there's the limited crap in said expansion packs, just a taste of things to come with EA trying to squeeze your tits for every last penny, and gameplay that can become rather boring compared to stuff in the Sims 2. 

While a world always going on is neat, one of my biggest issues is that, say you go to the library, people fucking show up like a swarm. At least in Sims 2 one person would come and go etc, but it just creeps me the hell out the way half the town comes out of the fucking woodwork if you decide to go shopping 😕 . 

[Roster Depth Sicko No. 2]

Red Dead is flawed by a shit control scheme.

[Baddar]

Both the FIFA and PES series'.

Definitely fun in their own right, but while FIFA has all the modes you could ever want, the gameplay is severely lacking. 

On the flipside, PES has great gameplay (not without its own issues this year), but a lack of modes that they care enough about to add or address existing ones. 

Ultimate Team and to a lesser extent, My Club, have rightly or wrongly become a gold mine for EA and Konami, but they are absolutely harming both titles each year. 

[JasonM]

10 hours ago, Liam Mk2 said:

It’s generally just very, very buggy. Lots of graphical mishaps as well as combat sometimes being a bit all over the shop.

It also requires quite a bit of dedication. Not really a pick up and play sort of game, even saving progress can be a pain. 

I enjoyed it for the most part, I think it was overly ambitious though. Concept is fantastic, but execution was never going to match.

The save anywhere mod is a must get that everyone but the most hardcore purists will appreciate

[Nerf]

3 hours ago, Baddar said:

Both the FIFA and PES series'.

Definitely fun in their own right, but while FIFA has all the modes you could ever want, the gameplay is severely lacking. 

On the flipside, PES has great gameplay (not without its own issues this year), but a lack of modes that they care enough about to add or address existing ones. 

Ultimate Team and to a lesser extent, My Club, have rightly or wrongly become a gold mine for EA and Konami, but they are absolutely harming both titles each year. 

FIFA is basically unplayable offline without sliders now. The gameplay has somehow got worse over time.

[Benji]

Hellblade is another game to add to this list. Again, wonderful visuals and atmosphere (one of the best atmospheric games of the generation IMO), but the gameplay... I thought it was a hack and slash game but it's a lot of puzzles. They are good puzzles, but that wasn't what I wanted, so that's on me for not researching more. It does have some hack and slash elements, but they are super basic (I'm talking classic arcade style three buttons level of combat), and basically just there to break up the puzzles. Very good game, but feels like they put the focus on the wrong places for the game it felt advertised as.

[MDK]

All of the WWE2K games, to me, are flawed. I've played two of them and they both look nice and very WWE-y but it just feels like random block/counter button smashes and set pieces. There is no flow to the matches at all.

[Mick]

Dragon Ball Xenoverse 2

So...I'm not good at fighting games. I've excepted that. More often than not I can't pull off a Shoryuken or a Flash Kick, and combos? Unless it's something simple, forget it. Xenoverse 2 took a lot of that away and made it pretty simple, and I love that about the game. No complicated combos, no charging, you want to pull of a move it's like L1+a button. 

And as a Dragon Ball fan, I like that I can make a character, customize their looks etc, and load them up with clothing options from the series to complete said look. THAT BEING SAID...what I don't care for is that the vast majority of clothes, you cannot customize the coloring. Thankfully, there are mods to fix that, but my point is that the fans shouldn't be the ones implementing fixes like that. 

On top of that, as your character progresses through the story, you can unlock other characters from the Dragon Ball franchise to either fight against, play as, or assist you in various missions. BUUUT....it's only for that specific character. Meaning if I start a new character, I have to go through the whole grind process again, and on top of that, there is no New Game+ or anything like that. THANKFULLY moves and gear you unlock can be used by any character you make, but still, it's annoying. 

[Ruki]

1 hour ago, Benji said:

Hellblade is another game to add to this list. Again, wonderful visuals and atmosphere (one of the best atmospheric games of the generation IMO), but the gameplay... I thought it was a hack and slash game but it's a lot of puzzles. They are good puzzles, but that wasn't what I wanted, so that's on me for not researching more. It does have some hack and slash elements, but they are super basic (I'm talking classic arcade style three buttons level of combat), and basically just there to break up the puzzles. Very good game, but feels like they put the focus on the wrong places for the game it felt advertised as.

So much this!

Hellblade probably has some of the best sound design of any game I've played in recent years. The story and lore are pretty damn good too (I think I just really like Norse lore after God Of War)! And the threat of the corruption taking over Senua and deleting your save aids in making you feel tense and uneasy. But the combat is pretty simplistic (although some of the running + attack animations are super pretty), and the puzzles are slow (some of them are pretty darn creative).