Which games that were reviewed poorly did you actually like?

Played Cyberpunk at launch, had no major issues with it and really liked the game.
- On PC if you had an nvidia card and downloaded the drivers, the game was fantastic since day 1.
  CD Projekt Red's delivers the best plots IMO.

I really like the first Watchdogs, it's by no means the game that was promised but it's still great.
- Watchdogs didn’t stand a chance trying to be a GTA competitor. That said being able to “hack” NPC’s and get a little blurb about their secrets was hilarious.
- I agree, people focus too much on the gfx downgrade controversy.
- Agreed I really loved that game as well

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.
- Man I loved Spore!! Some of the later parts are not as detailed as I'd hope for, but the space segment nearly makes up for it!! Never fully finished space though as a kid.... Need to go back and finally do it haha.
  
  Hah, I remember the space end game seeming like an endless slog of fighting the intergalactic evil race that occupied all the systems surrounding the center of the galaxy. Rather than spend forever slowly taking each and every system over, I just made a mad dash for the center to see what was there. I think the strategy was to take my ship into a system as I'm being chased by enemies, down to a planet, lay down a respawn point without dying, then leave the system and race closer to the center, and repeat. I eventually made it there with this strategy. I won't spoil what's at the center in case you don't want it spoiled but...I found it underwhelming lol.
  
  Sidetrack: I loved it so much I bought a preorder for Spore: Galactic Adventures, yet my attention span hadn't grown enough and I forgot to ever redeem it 😔
- Maxis games were revolutionary :(
- The problem with that one was that they overhyped it so much. It was supposed to be an everything simulator, and it just wasn't (although I never actually played it).
  
  Yeah that would have been a huge letdown if I had been aware of all that hype.
  But man, if only the huge letdowns of today were as good as spore...

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.

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 absolutely love games like this. Heavy Rain, Beyond Two Souls, and Detroit Become Human are all fantastic games that really push the boundaries of human emotions through story telling. The choices you make reflect back onto the character.
  The telltale games are like this as well, the walking dead game is a master piece in itself even if you don't like zombies. The batman games are great if you love the comics and really lets you feel like batman. The borderlands ones are OK, the first one is the only one I played, and ties into BL4. the second comes from a different studio and has so so reviews. Avoid the expanse... the most boring and out of touch game of them all and was really disappointed with the lack of actual story, it's all very streamlined with the choices more black and white vs shades of Grey.
  This leads me into the Dark Pictures anthology. I don't tend to like horror based games but the way these games tell stories are top notch and I believe the only ones you can play with another person, all of these games are phenomenal.
  Then theres the wolf among us, that game is amazing at turning a graphic novel based on fairytales into a emotion filled adventure.( The second should be coming out soon but I'm hoping they don't ruin it with MTX).
  Last but not least, the guardians of the galaxy game, while not exactly like these has a very similar conversation tool that some of your choices impact the story of the game, but the game play is more focused on fighting and solving puzzles versus just the story itself.
  If anyone else knows more games that I'm missing let me know
  
  I tried Guardians of the Galaxy on a whim because it was included with ps+ and I fucking loved it. I wasn't sure what to expect after the Avengers game turned out to be dogshit, but I was pleasantly surprised to find that GotG was basically a more approachable God of War but with 4 big Atreus partners, Gears of War's active reload mechanic, and the dialogue thing you mentioned. It was the game I didn't know I wanted.
- I wrote enjoyed that game! Didn't know the reviews were not good.
  Detroit Become Human is awesome

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
- Yeah I feel like most of the negativity came from people playing the poor console versions. If you didn’t try too hard to break it the day 1 PC release was okay. The story is amazing and made more than up for any of the bugs. I had a ton of fun with this game.
  
  it got the, a bunch of people hated it that havent played it situation. I pointed out that the game between launch and up to the anime release was fundamentally the same game, just with bugfixes. it broke Witcher 3's player count record.
  so people are basically insinuating it was never about the game at launch that was bad, at least at a fundamental design level.
- Apart from the disastrous launch, I feel Cyberpunk has reached the legendary status no?
- I had some bugs in Cyberpunk but it didn’t really bother me either. Played on Xbox One. I had a good time.

Postal 2. I mean, it's not a great game by most metrics, but it's stupid fun. Also the fact that it was basically made as a middle finger to Congress for being blamed for the Columbine shooting because their obscure PC game Postal (that would have otherwise died in obscurity because it was legit pretty lame) happened to feature a gunman in a trench coat. So at the same time everyone was clutching their pearls over the ability to pick up prostitutes in GTA, I was peeing gonorrhea pee on cops and then shooting them in the face with a shotgun on which a live cat acted as a silencer, and getting into machine gun fights with Gary Coleman.
- Man, Postal 2 is such a great time. I always start out with the best intentions of being "good", but by the Wednesday level I'm robbing the bank and breaking into every house that I can.
- Games are bad, they make you mad!
- Do you wanna sign my petition?
- I read this as Portal 2 and was really confused

Elite dangerous. When you look past a lot of flaws, is just a very beautiful game

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.

Currently playing Redfall coop on Gamepass and am enjoying it. Level design is beautiful and fighting mercs and vampires is good fun. It's set in a cozy New England seaside town that was taken over by vampires.
- Did they ever change or fix anything or is it still in launch condition?
  
  We've seen weird glitches a few times but not that often. The game isn't deep at all, it's just atmosphere and mild to mid fighting action. Some of the special powers are neat, like the teleporter or the shock trident.
  
  Also wondering this. It looked really cool in concept, was bummed when it didn't work out.

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.

Fallout 76. Granted, I played it almost a year after release.
I found it to be a very good game overall. Not as good as New Vegas or FO3, but I thought it was better than FO4.

I was 13 and still had a childlike sense of wonder when Spore came out so I have tons of nostalgia for it

I liked Mass Effect Andromeda enough to play it 3 times. And I'm still enjoying Starfield very much.
- I haven't finished my Andromeda playthrough, probably about halfway through, but I've enjoyed what I've played so far.
  
  Combat is pretty cool in this game

I'm still playing and enjoying City Skylines 2!

Just cause 4. I loved fooling around in JC3 and almost 100%ed it a couple of years back, barring some challenges I couldn't find. I've read so much about 4 being a downgrade that i didn't bother.
I had it on gamepass though and tried it a week ago. The cut scenes are atrocious but the story is compelling enough, and the villains actually seem more interesting. Other than the graphics, the actual art design is pretty good and it's a good change of pace through a South American setting.
Edit: pre-coffee words corrected

Remember Me
- I guess barely anyone did
  
  It's a very pretty game set in cyberpunk Paris. The story is a bit shaky but it's overall fun. Most of it is a combat based platformer, but it also has puzzle scenes where you have to go into people's memories and manipulate them to cause a butterfly effect

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.
- It's still amazing to me how they fucked that up so badly.
- IMO it's just unfinished and will probably shine with time. I got CS1 and played it for 2 years, then stopped in 2019 after reaching about 160 hours. It took me less than 2 months to reach 100 hours in CS2, and it's so much more fun.
  
  I do think that it will be good eventually if they can fix the simulation and simulation speed. But I'm disappointed with the price of the game compared to the lack of in-game content. The assets look so bad and most of the game simulation is smoke and mirrors which killed the game enjoyment for me.
- I'd love skylines 2 if I could just play it above 30fps on low graphics. I know I'd get a higher performance if I wasn't playing it in Proton, but still. I have an RX 5700xt, it shouldn't be this bad
  
  I get good fps but sim speed falls off a cliff over 150k pop. But even if it didn't the assets are ugly and boring to use

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.

Not a specific game, but Ive had this discussion before and been downvoted to shit for my stance. Ive bought plenty of not great games on extreme steam sale and I cant help but mentally review them on a dollars to enjoyment over time scale.
Was it a great game? Not really. Did I play it for 3 weekends? Yes. Did I get $10 of entertainment value out of it? Absolutely, it seems like I cant leave the house without spending $10. Thats significantly better value than how I feel about buying D4 at launch.

I enjoyed Starfield. It’s not perfect, but I like space battles.

Has Been Heroes. It's a rougelite where you have to control three heroes across three lanes of action. You have to juggle skills and lanes by rotating the heroes to time attacks and perks. It may be more that it went notices than reviewed poorly.
One that definitely was reviewed poorly that I loved though was Advent Rising. It's a scifi 3rd person shooter with the story by Orson Scott Card. It ended up in legal trouble due to a botched prize they did on release. Worst part is it ends on a cliff hanger and they never made the sequel or released the comics that were supposed to add to the story.

Too Human.
I enjoyed the Diablo esque gameplay and the scifi with Norse mythology setting a lot.
- I played the demo for this game so many times and was very hyped and then when it released reviews were so awful I ended up not buying it. I kept meaning to pick it up cheap but never got around to it.
  It really had a lot of potential. I kind of want to go pick it up now.

Star Wars Rebellion (or Star Wars Supremacy in Europe) had a GameRankings score of 50 but I had a blast with it. I must have had 200 hours in it over the years. As a 4X game, it's definitely below average, and there's zero challenge once you figure a few things out.
Where it succeded was by being a bit of a sandbox with a fun license. The soundtrack is phenomenal, there are recognizable names everywhere, and the moment when you get to go toe-to-toe with the Empire after scrapping together a fleet big enough is great. Problem is, it had a rough interface, obtuse mechanics, glacial pacing, and that epic fleet battle looked so bad it probably would have been better off being icons on a star field.
I also think Lightning Returns: Final Fantasy XIII (72) and Rune Factory 4 (79) were underrated, especially the latter. I think to this day, RF4 is the best game in its genre (and that includes Stardew Valley).

I started playing Immortals Of Aveum before watching any final review of the game. Finished it and then watched the reviews.
Honestly, loved the game, and the reviews seemed to be negative from the get-go with the main point of having "nothing particularly new". Yeah probably but that doesn't make the game bad lol. It was actually fun and engaging, at least to me.
I stopped trusting reviewers long time ago and just watching em for kicks and giggles. Everyone has a different taste and that's okay.

I liked Bullet Witch. It was almost like a proto bayoneta of it's day. A bit repetitive, but once you got a bunch of abilities, the game really became a blast

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.

Bracing for impact… The new Suicide Squad game.
I had a ton of fun with it. It probably isn’t worth $70 yet, but there’s a good foundation of a game there. The combat is a ton of fun, it just needs more content.

King's Bounty 2. It's not an amazingly well made game, and it lost a lot of the fun goofiness of the other games, but I do love the combat and think the story was underrated.

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)

I looked at the metacritic page and it was tbd, like no outlets even rated it... And it's a console and pc game with a physical release!
Anyway it's Bullet Girls Phantasia, an even lower budget EDF like game, but in a Isekai setting and the girls have their clothes ripped when they suffer enough damage, beat it multiple times.