Games that you enjoyed despite thinking they will suck before purchase

[Grey Acumen]

disolitude said:
@Grey Acumen

Soul Reaver totally rocked nad is very underrated. Its one of those games that as soon as you push start, you know you are playing a quality game... Much like Tomb Raider Legend. Both were done by the same company actually...

It had very smooth controls, incredible mood and a very solid design in general, plus this irritatingly vaguestoryline that left you constantly wanting to keep going until the end, but there was a lot of little things that really dragged it down:

Lost content - There was supposed to be one last area that had the last of the 5 brothers before fighting Kain the last time, as well as possibly a priestess of some sort and a 3rd battle with Kain as well as 2 more soul reaver forms. The game was great, but with only 5 boss battles, it came out feeling very short. The extra content could have gone a long way towards addressing those issues. I think a lot of the cut content got used in Soul Reaver 2 though.

Difficulty(or lack thereof) - I never used the dodge button through the entire game, I never used magic except to test it out a few times. I just threw things at enemies and hacked away at them, occasionally bounced back into the shadow realm to recharge. Once you got the soul reaver the only point to picking up weapons was to spear unprepared enemies in the distance, and once you got the kinetic beam thing, even that became surperfluous. The closest I ever came to being destroyed was a single time in the battle with Dumah, and that was the only time I even came CLOSE.

Repetitive puzzles - the block puzzles were neat the first couple times, but once you got the hang of it, it became VERY old hat. They weren't even terribly tricky, just tedious. I think this, combined with the lack of difficulty is what kills any reply value the game might have had for me.

Lack of direction - I only had to use a strategy guide ONCE for this game, and that was to figure out how to get to the tombs. i seriously had no clue how to get there and the only hints the game gave me were "past the pillars." I'm like "wut? past how, which way past?"

 

None of this stops the game from being good, but it does keep me from ranking it up there in the "greats"