Following up on this comment since I haven’t seen a thread about it: https://lemmy.blahaj.zone/comment/14639216
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.
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.
Don’t censor yourself, who are you afraid of??
Mario Kart World
Just say it
The Technomancer
The incredible adventures of Van Helsing. Decent rpg with loot but was fairly imbalanced among character classes. The real winner was the mini tower defense games in it and the spinoff tower defense game, imo.
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
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
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.
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.
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
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.
I love Bullet Witch and I’m still looking for a physical copy of this and Ninja Blade on Xbox 360.
Anything from Ubisoft
Was gonna say it. This perfectly descripes the last few Assassins Creed titles. Not bad enough to put them away, but also not good enough to leave any kind of lasting impact.
Team Fortress 2:
I’d say its gameplay is more “robust” than special. Like you can have any and every kind of fight in TF2 but none of it is more special than an FPS that specializes in any game mode.
Warhammer 40,000: Space Marine.
Anything ubisoft makes. Or generally most things big companies make to cater biggest possible amount of people.
I disagree. Some of them are actually bad.
yes, but medium is the absolute best they can manage
A hell of a lot of Ubisoft open-world slop released around and in the 2010s.
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…
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.
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.
The first space exploration game without space or exploration
I personally judge that game as plain bad with decent shooting and ok loot. The main story, and the game universe in general, are memorable for how stupidly thought out they are, even for the low standards of Bethesda post Oblivion. The citizens and assorted non-hostile npcs feel less alive than the people you run over in GTA games. They also managed to take the fun basebuilding of Fallout 4 and make it bad AND pointless - very little customization and freedom of certain objects’ placements, plus you’re better off just buying resources from vendors.
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.
Elex 1 and Elex 2
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.
7/10 to me is a good game. I hate how people rate games. I’ve always hated it. A 6/10 game is enjoyable. A 5/10 game is absolutely mid. A 4/10 game is okay. 3/10 has huge flaws but is worth playing if you’re into that.
Subnautica is an 8/10 game for me. I thought it was amazing. I loved it. Below Zero was a 6/10 game. I thought it was good. I enjoyed it, and I would not call it “absolute mid.”
In a world where games are scored across a full spectrum 0-or-1 to 10, then yes - anything 4-6 would be considered middle of the road.
However, due to a number of factors - that’s unfortunately not the reality we find ourselves in.
Firstly, “mid” is hard to define as it can mean anything from ‘mediocre’ to ‘fine, but forgettable’.
Secondly, ratings/scores tend to skew upward as people tend to reserve 1s for outright scams, broken games and review bombs. With 2 & 3 often used for ‘asset flips’ and similar non-games - so we end up grading on a curve from 4-10.
This also works well for mainstream outlets as it keeps advertisers happy, due to arbitrarily inflated scores.
Lastly, in a world of cumulative media (new releases don’t cause older ones to stop existing) - even ostensibly good games will fall by the wayside as players have access to 10/10 titles from previous years.
So all things considered, a 7/10 is well and truly “mid” in this topsy-turvey IGN-eque world
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.
Yes, it was developed by Curt Shilling’s 38 Studios - but it was actually largely financed by the state of Rhode Island, and the studio ended up defaulting on payments!
Honestly, the story of the game’s development was more interesting than the story within the game itself!
Sort of. Their funding was also tied up in the state of Rhode Island. Reckoning was purchased by 38 Studios, who were making a Kingdoms of Amalur MMORPG, and then the game was made to be in the same universe. The MMO burned through cash and never released, and the sunken studio brought Reckoning’s developer down with it.
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.
Oh no doubt, my (vague) memories of it are definitely in vivid bright colours.
I originally got it as I was looking for a single player World of Warcraft-like experience, and I did play through a significant portion of the main story - but eventually went back to WoW as it didn’t quite scratch that itch enough.
I probably should revisit it sometime in the near future - hopefully on the Steam Deck (haven’t checked compatibility).
