Following up on this comment since I haven’t seen a thread about it: https://lemmy.blahaj.zone/comment/14639216
Starfield. It’s the definition of a “mixed” rating on Steam. It’s not bad, but it’s not good either. You play it for an hour and your reward is that an hour has passed.
After running through the main story once, I modded it to where you cannot buy any natural resources - they must be harvested in person and/or setup a base and and ship all natural resources to a central storage planet. This essentially turned it into a spreadsheet-logistics game which gave me a a second, much more enjoyable playthrough. But I agree - absolutely medium-tier game.
Hogwarts Legacy
The term you’re looking for is “Extra Medium”.
Mechwarrior online.
Free, online “shooter”, good community, runs on linux, gameplay is dated and doesnt get tons of dev support anymore but its still how I kill an evening once or twice a week.
If you like space dogfighter sims, try Chorus. You can score it super cheap on sales and I think it’s a solid 6/10. Combat is fun and it’s nice to look at. Unfortunately the story has terrible pacing and kinda doesn’t make sense at times. Also, the missions get kinda repetitive. These two things really held it back for me, otherwise it’s a fairly good game.
Another, if you like top down shooters, is Subterrain. Doesn’t always go on sale, but when it does it’s dirt cheap because it’s like 10 years old at this point. It’s got some weird survival mechanics that I think are kinda pointless, but the gameplay and story were enough to keep me mildly entertained. I’d call this a “potato chip” type game. Not particularly good, but somehow kind of satisfying if you don’t think too much about it. Definitely a 6/10.
On another note, what’s y’all’s stance on the association that 5/10 = bad? I feel like it’s because people equate it to being 50% and associate that with bad due to school grades. I see it as an average score and when I give something a 5 or 6, that means I’m neutral to slightly positive feeling about it.
I don’t think a 5/10 game is necessarily bad, but it needs to have some kind of - I dont know, character? Niche appeal? - to shine for the players who are going to like it.
I’ll throw out Krater as an example. It’s not great, but it has a unique setting, great atmosphere, and some interesting ideas driving it. I kinda love it for its eccentricities in spite of the overall experience being a bit meh.
I remember Krater! I played it for a while and I liked the atmosphere, but I only got so far before I saw how… 1-dimensional it was?
I don’t know how exactly to put it into words, but some games that aren’t so good I have a “see behind the curtain” moment. Once that happens I tend to quickly get turned off to a game because I feel like it’s not fun anymore. In Krater that happened when I realized that all the fights were essentially the same and equipment was all stat sticks with no unique qualities.
Pretty much what your characters did at the beginning of the game was what they did at mid game with no noteworthy changes. There were other characters you could sub in and that changed things up a little but the repetitiveness of it all really ruined it for me.
I agree that’s a really good example of a “meh” game and I think 5/10 is a very fair assessment.
From the 360 Era — Too Human
The control scheme is bizarre at first (right stick is melee) but it works once you’re used to it. It’s Sci-Fi Norse mythology, I recall it having a pretty solid art style. I picked it up used from either Blockbuster or EB because I wanted to see just how bad it was, ended up enjoying it far more than I expected, I’ll give it a “Yeah, it’s ok”, disc images are readily available if you want to emulate it, can find a physical copy cheap online too if that’s your thing.This is the game that ended up taking down its studio (Silicon Knights, they developed Eternal Darkness: Sanity’s Requiem and Blood Omen: Legacy of Kain, they tried to sue Epic, who countersued and won, probably added to my initial interested tbh.
It’s interesting that Too Human began development as a PSX game, back in the late 90s. Quite a bit of development hell to go through
First thing that came to my mind was Crysis 2. Absolute mid-tier FPS, which was unfortunately pretty disappointing coming off of the first game.
Definitely worth a look if you just want to run around and shoot shit.
Sacred 2.
Ratopia
It’s like Oxygen not Included but worse
The Technomancer
2 that make fans go bananas.
Torchlight 2; Grim Dawn
Right in the middle of the middle part of the middle part of the middle pack.
Torchlight 2 is fun when you start out, but gets really repetitive quite fast. Good fit for a right in the middle
The incredible adventures of Van Helsing. Decent rpg with loot but was fairly imbalanced among character classes. The real winner was the mini tower defense games in it and the spinoff tower defense game, imo.
avowed and ACS were actually less than mid
From recent memory: Starfield.
I didn’t think it was terrible in and of itself, but it also wasn’t very good. It was just missing that certain something Bethesda RPGs had before it. Just a meh experience the whole way through.
Starfield faked me out for a bit when I took the character creation perk that gave my character living parents that I could go visit and would show up from time to time. They were funny and adorably charming, and I thought it was an inspired touch. Little did I know that was the absolute best part of that game…
I think it was the way that exploration felt like a grind that made it so “meh”. A whole universe to explore, and you’re either going to come to a barren rock planet, or find the same enemy base/outpost 5 times in a row.
For a game where space exploration was one of the main selling points, it felt remarkably unlike exploring at times.
The first space exploration game without space or exploration
seriously - how fuckin lazy it was to just copy/paste the same enemy outpost 500 times.
As a big fan of space sims and action RPGs, I wrote that game off when looking at reviews and how the spaceship building system and space travel were.
It’s like they choose the worst of Elite Dangerous and mixed it with the worst parts of previous Bethesda RPGs.
It always felt to me they wanted to create what star citizen is supposed to be someday (press x to doubt) and the. Looked at no mans sky and were like, we should add that too! And then realized the scope of that was ridiculous and half assed both of those parts.
Star field was just mediocre enough that it pissed me off, the loading screens and menues are egregious enough to make me go ballistic. It’s hilarious because instead of criticizing the game for actuall gameplay, at launch it was lambasted for “pronouns”. Then normal people got to playing it and actually explained the issues.
I personally judge that game as plain bad with decent shooting and ok loot. The main story, and the game universe in general, are memorable for how stupidly thought out they are, even for the low standards of Bethesda post Oblivion. The citizens and assorted non-hostile npcs feel less alive than the people you run over in GTA games. They also managed to take the fun basebuilding of Fallout 4 and make it bad AND pointless - very little customization and freedom of certain objects’ placements, plus you’re better off just buying resources from vendors.
I modded it with the ‘no purchasable resources’ and it became a totally different game; It was all spreadsheet/logistics and organizing galaxy wide shipping to central hubs where I had to fabricate all my own materials to be able to upgrade equipment. I found that far more enjoyable, but the game is still meh. Not worth the replays like skyrim was.
While I enjoy some logistics management, I’d never punish myself with that in Starfield. Most gear upgrades aren’t worth it and you can’t even craft your own weapons or suits. This isn’t Fallout where advanced machinery can be considered “lost tech” ffs
