HL2 was just like HL1 just OK looking at the time of its release, not bad but not the best looking.

I have tried to play HL2 three separate times, never finished it.  I find it quite boring and I also do not get the love affair.  

I personally think Goldeneye and Perfect Dark are both far superior.

Radiant Dawn is by far and wide my favourite Fire Emblem game due to its story, which really hammers in how bad war is and the aftermath of it. No other Fire Emblem game had anywhere near such a deep story.

What probably cost them so many points was that the lord was very unusual with Micaiah and the fact that many heroes were just available for a couple missions and then gone again for a long while, making levelling more tedious. Plus the issue with the difficulty level names, which implied that the hard difficulty was the normal one in the west.

For my part, I actually appreciated them more than SOTN (blasphemy, I know). I wanted to see a lot of my favorite series from the NES and SNES transition into 3-D. They weren't perfect.

But neither were the NES Castlevanias.

People at the time were critical of Nemesis and praised C:V to the moon. Nowadays it seems like that's reversed somewhat.

Dragon Age: The Veilguard. One of the most irredeemably worthless AAA games ever made, and somehow it scored in the mid-80s on Metacritic? Yeah, I totally believe EA was up to some shady stuff with review copies, even if that supposed “review guide” was written by AI.

The Outer Worlds getting a review score of 85 is where I officially moved on from game critics and review scores in general.  That game was the definition of "mid".  The gameplay is essentially lifted straight from Borderlands but with the fun weapons, originality, and over the top humor ripped out.  The exploration made Ubisoft open world games feel exciting.  The dialogue was bloated and badly needed a professional editor to show them that more is not always better.  It wasn't a terrible game but in no world is it an 85.  Also, I'm starting to think character creation is made ugly on purpose because modders mastered that aspect of gaming a decade ago.

That confirmed to me that associated factors like the name of the studio or publisher have a lot to do with that final score.  

In critics defense, there’s no way they could have predicted how fans would react to the game. I agree with you about the story, it’s absolute dog shit in Last of Us 2. But gameplay wise it’s better than the original in every way. I can’t think of one thing the original did better, just from a gameplay perspective. Story and world building, 1 was better. Gameplay, 2 is way better. It’s weird, I wouldn’t want to replay either of them. The first because the gameplay mostly sucks, the second because the story is atrocious. Amazing that ND hasn’t come out with a single game since.

Anyway my addition to the thread for overrated is God of War for PS4. Absolute bore of a game, tried to play through it three or four times, zzzzzzz. Never bothered with Ragnarok. 

Way underrated, Mad Max from last gen. I think it’s in the 60’s on PS4. Extremely good open world game with lots of content and a satisfying game loop.

I tried to think of examples for this, but for a game to qualify its average critic score should be at least 15 points higher or lower than what I would give it, because 8/10 really isn't that different from a 9 or 7 out of 10, and that really doesn't happen very often. I couldn't come up with a single game that I consider overrated by that much. One underrated game I finally thought of was Koudelka on the PS1, which has an average score of 60, while I would give it an 8/10.

Obviously there are a lot of games I consider slightly overrated, but it's with games like Breath of the Wild that has a 97 metascore, while I would give it "only" 91, or Bioshock, which has a metascore of 96, while I would give it something closer to 85. That doesn't really count as critics "really" missing the mark to me.

Whitr knights chronicles on ps3. Freaking loved that game!!!