Back when Spore came out, I was too young to know about most of the hype around it. It was short, yeah, and the end game was odd, but otherwise I remember really enjoying it.

I’ve enjoyed No Man’s Sky since day 1. I didn’t really follow the game or any of the major hype behind it, I just saw a cool space game on ps4 and played the hell out of it. Fell in love with the music, the setting, and just walking around weird landscapes, flying to different atlas stations, and just enjoying being alone.

I still play it, and am so happy HG continues to give the game constant love and attention, but there are days I turn networking off on my ps4 and play the 1.0 version again, just to go back to that part of my life for a little bit.

Cyberpunk. Played it on Stadia and the only problem I encountered was a freezing phone call and that the main story was so short I beat it in like 3 afternoons

Beyond: Two Souls. I think the biggest issue was the marketing. They tried to pretend that it could appeal to a wider audience, but I knew what I was actually signing up for based on who made it. If you didn’t like Heavy Rain or Indigo Prophecy (aka Fahrenheit) then you also weren’t gonna like that one. It’s more of an interactive supernatural movie than a game. The gameplay is little more than QTE and wandering, but the story, acting, cinematography, and mocap are all really good or at least uniquely interesting for the medium, especially at the time. I still need to play Detroit too.

I really like the first Watchdogs, it’s by no means the game that was promised but it’s still great.

Mass Effect Andromeda. I’d never played any of the previous ones so went in with fresh eyes. Enjoyed the combat and world design. And the ship you live on is incredible. I was sad to see it being dragged so much.

Later on I got around to playing the earlier games and enjoyed them too. I can see why people didn’t like a lot of the changes but I got my money’s worth.

call of duty warzone. I was a professional hater until recently, those steam reviews being mostly negative really put me off from trying it. now me and my friends play it every day.

There’s another thread just like this one posted 2 hours earlier in this same community, fyi.

Just gonna copy my comment from there:

The Isle is honestly pretty bad in many respects. In fact, it’s such a mess that I need to clarify which version I’m even talking about, because there is an OG version and an on-going complete rewrite, prompted by them having fired their only coder and no longer being able to understand their own codebase.

The OG version was special. It was very simple, quite buggy and in a constant, obvious state of plans-and-hopes (being EA), but it had a unique atmosphere - the only true survival-horror to date, as far as I’m concerned/aware (only rivalled by some of my experiences playing DayZ, back when it was still an Arma 2 mod).

Playing a herbivore, resting/hiding in a bush in the pitch-black darkness of night with only limited night-vision letting me see my immediate surroundings and footprints on the ground, the sound of a massive, rumbling carnivore sniffing for traces of food was quite a thrill. Not to mention the moments after when a pair of jaws around my size suddenly emerge out of the darkness.

That kept me playing.

Then they stopped working on that and began their rework from the ground up. The rework (which they call EVRIMA) has (or had) no day-night cycle (always daytime), went from being set in an arboreal environment to tropical jungle, and had two playable dinosaurs (one herb- and one carnivore) of about equal size. No creepy nights, no asymmetric gameplay, no horror elements, different feeling in both how it feels to play and how it looks, and it also ran like crap on any device.

They’re slowly working on it; it has some more dinosaurs now etc, but last I played, it still didn’t feel the same and it was still buggy and severely incomplete. What emergent horror elements one might get out of the reworked version I feel are but shadows of what could have been.

And yet there’s none other like it.

Edit: I believe the current version does have night-time, but it doesn’t (or didn’t until recently) have night-vision and IIRC the nights are not as horrifying.

Too Human.

I enjoyed the Diablo esque gameplay and the scifi with Norse mythology setting a lot.

Silent Hill Origin and Downpour.

Starfield, which I don’t get the sheer magnitude of rancor it gets… It’s not perfect, but it’s still a good game, and none of its issues are “unfixable”, no matter how much its haters want to believe they are

Genuinely had a lot of fun with it and looking forward to content updates, as well as yes bug fixes and gameplay improvements (I did say it’s not perfect, but none of Bethesda’s games were really better at launch and most of them got slammed initially too)

Victoria 3 was just boring - I say this as a huge fan of Victoria 2.

I played a few weeks after launch, and - for every one of the 4 countries I tried (Russia, Japan, Denmark, Spain), simply building all the things everywhere and ignoring money made everything trivial.

The economic simulation was super barebones, the entire thing could be bootstrapped just by building. An entire population of illiterate farmers would become master architects overnight and send GDP to the double digit billions in a few decades.

I liked Mass Effect Andromeda enough to play it 3 times. And I’m still enjoying Starfield very much.

I played city skylines 2 at launch and I thought it was good. After 100 hours though I realized it was complete trash and was a scam.