Sykar
Arcane
Name some (a)rpgs, or in abscense of those take games from another genre, that despite not being particularly good you still got a surprising amount of enjoyment out of.
A few guilty pleasures of mine:
Restricted Area: Not gonna lie the game is pretty bad. Yet I enjoyed it enough on Jessica to make through it once which was surprising to me considering that negatives vs positives is heavily slanted toward negatives.
Blood Omen: Legacy of Khain. As a story the game is nice and the atmosphere is great. It is mostly an action game though with only light RPG elements if you are generous. Gameplay is also not the greatest. While finding secrets and exploration can be fun, combat is simplistic and janky. Not a bad game, not even average but just a notch away from good imo.
Soulreaver: Same franchise with a new protagonist. Similar to Blood Omen, nice story, great atmosphere and some cool ideas for exploration with the second dimension opening up paths unavailable in the "real" world but god damn the controls are imprecise as hell leading to quite a few enraged outburst from me when missing a platform several times in a row because of the bad precision. Combat is also clunky and the camera is at times working against you.
Mass Effect: I have defended Mass Effect before and I will continue to do so but this game has a lot of typical Bioturd flaws especially when it comes to story structure which they have rehashed over and over. Gameplay is interesting but raw and lacks refinement. Inventory and items though are basically garbage tier. Yet I managed to finish it and had some fun with some incomplete repeats.
Warframe(MMO): Somewhat the other way around from the earlier games, combat is fun, fluid and has some depth as does the customization of your warsuits. Everything else? Eh.... story is very uneven with some decent but also some pretty bad parts. The most aggrevating parts are the myriad of systems which need external sources or helpful players online to explain to you because the developers failed utterly to explain most of them. The YTuber Josh Strife Hayes has a great video about it.
Just to give you an idea what a hot mess of garbage the systems are, a lot of mission types have so called "rotations" which happen after a set amount of time or waves of enemies. The drops from these rotations are always random and usually low chances 5-10% sometimes even less. Worse though that certain rewards, especially weapon and new combat suit parts are tied to specific rotations and the system usually goes "A/A/B/C" or some such. Now often these weapn and new suit, or character, parts drop only in certain rotations, meaning if you ar playing too few or too little you are not getting the part you want and of course those parts also have very low drop chances, sometimes sub 5%. I can be quite aggravating. The worst part though that the tutorial does NOT teach you anything about it. Neither do you learn anything during the story missions.
Speaking of story missions, they are not cohesive. You get a sort of "story block" that you solve and then have to do missions of your own choosing to unlock sectors on planets inside the solar system until a certain point when the story finally resumes again.
All in all the systems of the game are a hot mess that are barely if at all explained during actual gameplay and confuse many newer players. Hell when I come back after a few months of a much needed break I have to look up stuff again.
A few guilty pleasures of mine:
Restricted Area: Not gonna lie the game is pretty bad. Yet I enjoyed it enough on Jessica to make through it once which was surprising to me considering that negatives vs positives is heavily slanted toward negatives.
Blood Omen: Legacy of Khain. As a story the game is nice and the atmosphere is great. It is mostly an action game though with only light RPG elements if you are generous. Gameplay is also not the greatest. While finding secrets and exploration can be fun, combat is simplistic and janky. Not a bad game, not even average but just a notch away from good imo.
Soulreaver: Same franchise with a new protagonist. Similar to Blood Omen, nice story, great atmosphere and some cool ideas for exploration with the second dimension opening up paths unavailable in the "real" world but god damn the controls are imprecise as hell leading to quite a few enraged outburst from me when missing a platform several times in a row because of the bad precision. Combat is also clunky and the camera is at times working against you.
Mass Effect: I have defended Mass Effect before and I will continue to do so but this game has a lot of typical Bioturd flaws especially when it comes to story structure which they have rehashed over and over. Gameplay is interesting but raw and lacks refinement. Inventory and items though are basically garbage tier. Yet I managed to finish it and had some fun with some incomplete repeats.
Warframe(MMO): Somewhat the other way around from the earlier games, combat is fun, fluid and has some depth as does the customization of your warsuits. Everything else? Eh.... story is very uneven with some decent but also some pretty bad parts. The most aggrevating parts are the myriad of systems which need external sources or helpful players online to explain to you because the developers failed utterly to explain most of them. The YTuber Josh Strife Hayes has a great video about it.
Just to give you an idea what a hot mess of garbage the systems are, a lot of mission types have so called "rotations" which happen after a set amount of time or waves of enemies. The drops from these rotations are always random and usually low chances 5-10% sometimes even less. Worse though that certain rewards, especially weapon and new combat suit parts are tied to specific rotations and the system usually goes "A/A/B/C" or some such. Now often these weapn and new suit, or character, parts drop only in certain rotations, meaning if you ar playing too few or too little you are not getting the part you want and of course those parts also have very low drop chances, sometimes sub 5%. I can be quite aggravating. The worst part though that the tutorial does NOT teach you anything about it. Neither do you learn anything during the story missions.
Speaking of story missions, they are not cohesive. You get a sort of "story block" that you solve and then have to do missions of your own choosing to unlock sectors on planets inside the solar system until a certain point when the story finally resumes again.
All in all the systems of the game are a hot mess that are barely if at all explained during actual gameplay and confuse many newer players. Hell when I come back after a few months of a much needed break I have to look up stuff again.
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