Bad/mediocre games with something amazing in them

[NiGHTSJOD]

Driver 3 (Or Driv3r, if you like):

The movie director feature was an alright mini-feature. But that's what it should have been - a fun little extra. Sadly, seems the devs spent so much time making it cool and forgot to focus on the actual game itself.

 

[Dalisclock]

Hellblade: Senuas Sacrifice

This is a qualified entry because I don't think the game is bad or mediocre as a whole. The gameplay is fairly meh, where neither the puzzles or the combat are really anything to write home about and pretty much everything else is senua walking and listening to the voices in her head. It shines quite nicely in the atmosphere/character/plot department(since they're all tied up in each other). The fact there's really no hud to speak of and the voices in her head are used to convey a lot of useful information is kinda cool. Using the fact she's clearly mentally ill as a framework for this story is pretty interesting, especially when mixed with norse mythology.

 

[Trunkage]

ME:Andromeda. I think the suicide mission in ME2 was pretty cool. But it made no sense to me that your buds would not fight hard becuase you didn't make friends enough. Along comes ME:A, all the groups that you helped along the way show up to take down the big bad. All your companions swoop during the last boss battle. Probably ended up like F:NV Hoover battle really. Fun final mission for a pretty average game.

 

[Kyrian007]

I'd have to go with the concept, gameplay, and frankly genre from the Tecmo's Deception series. If you are someone like me it is impossible to have more fun with a video game. Setting up elaborate death traps designed to specifically prolong and torture an enemies' death to be as drawn-out, painful, and horrifically flamboyant and spectacular as possible using a variety of Looney Toons pendulums, rolling boulders, spring floors, and objects dropped on the head (and the classic banana peel) is perfect gameplay. Its attached to terrible games with horrific translation issues, bad sound design, awful and unintuitive controls, and a laughably ridiculous storyline. I'd like someone else to make this game. Someone who's made games without those many flaws. Nobody makes a game that plays like Tecmo's Deception, it would be seen as "revolutionary" and "ground breaking" even though it wouldn't actually be. Few have ever heard of Deception and fewer still have ever played it, its a perfect game for some developer to toss a few dollars into ripping off.

 

[Specter Von Baren]

Major/Minor is awful. It's a visual novel, and I absolutely refuse to call it a game, because there is even less player agency than the most basic Newgrounds dating sim. YET, the premise is rock-solid, with a few teases of it being halfway-decent throughout.
For context: Early on in this novel, the PC is told they were given some measure of godly power to help you in your quest to save a world which is parallel to Earth; the character who says that then states, "I know you have many questions, but we only have time for an answer to one.
Immediately after that little speech, the game shouts out "IT WOULD BE GREAT TO SAVE NOW, AND MAKE USE OF THE MULTIPLE SAVE SLOTS."
At this point, you might draw the same conclusion that I did. This game is going to have a meta aspect to it, whereby the information gleaned from the PLAYER'S perspective is greater than the PC's perspective, turning the overarching story into a complex web of narrative threads which have a be carefully maneuvered; after all, if the PC accidentally reveals information too soon, it could end up being either useless or utterly disastrous in that moment.

And you and I would be wrong. All of that comes to nothing.

YET

The kernel of a phenomenal idea is there, waiting for someone far more ingenious to come along, scoop it up, and carry that whit of information into an actually good game.

So it's basically like all of Telltale's games.