I’m talking about games that you still like but you had no idea were criticized so much.
The perfect example for me is Sonic Unleashed.
I admit that the game has its bad things, but I would have never imagined that it was so hated at the time… Although, that could be extended to the entire Sonic franchise, since for many years I was not aware at all of that “Sonic was never good”, “Sonic had a rough transition to 3D” nonsense.
Dead Space is one of those series where the first 2 games set the expectations UNBELIEVABLY high. So high, in fact, that the developers were actually terrified they couldn’t live up to the legend, and were terrified they were gonna make a bad game that ruined the series. But they were gonna try their damndest.
And then EA executives came along, and they saw that “”“all the rage”“” those days was in Co-Op action shooters a-la Resident Evil 5/6 and Army Of 2, or Gears of War, and they DEMANDED that Dead Space 3 be “”“more like that”“”, or else. So they did it, and were also forced to shove microtransactions into the game with crafting materials.
The end result? Dead Space 3 was an… alright 3rd-person action-horror co-op shooter. Not great, not terrible, but… alright. An above-average shade of mediocre, certainly worth playing on its own merits, both mechanically and plot-wise, but not much more than that. A perfectly OK game.
And an absolutely TERRIBLE Dead Space game. Previous installments sold millions on multiple platforms. DS3… didn’t, and it ended up killing the studio.
dead space 3 took Isaac and Ellie from the previous games, made them kinda stupid bimbos, and put them into a high school slasher with a love triangle. they also had to sell 5 million copies to be considered profitable by EA, which was more than the previous two games’ sales combined