Worst games with good mechanics

Key recommendations

• NeverDead has a unique immortality mechanic, but suffers from clunky combat.
• Fracture allows players to warp the terrain, creating new tactics in the game.
• Dead Island offers analog combat for dynamic zombie encounters.

Not every bad game ever made is devoid of good qualities or features. Sometimes there's a mechanic or idea present that, if the rest of the game had been able to live up to the same quality, could have made for a much better game. The word “might” does a lot of heavy lifting in that sentence, but still.

In search of those generally hidden diamond ideas, let's look at ten bad video games in gaming history with a great idea.

10 NeverDead – “Immortality”

Heads will roll

You'd think being immortal would make life easier for a guy like Bryce, but the guy's been hunting demons for 500 years and he's kind of sick of it at this point. Fast forward to modern times and it's up to Bryce to save the city from destruction thanks to a demonic invasion. So far so standard.

What makes NeverDead a much more interesting proposition is how the game implements Bryce's immortality. Instead of a health bar, Bryce's body disintegrates like a Ken doll ravaged by a naughty child. Your limbs and torso fly, and you then control Bryce's head, weaving through his body like a macabre version of Super Monkey Ball.

It's a unique gameplay mechanic with its own charm, let down by the clunky gunplay and general combat.

If you're curious about NeverDead, the prices of physical copies these days might convince you otherwise.

9 Fracture – Deformation of the ground

Revolutionary

By the time the Xbox 360 was released, there were a number of games that attempted to experiment with environmental destruction, with Red Faction allowing players to punch holes through walls to create new angles of attack. Fracture tried something similar, only instead of carving through walls, it allowed players to shape the ground beneath their feet.

Taking place on an unstable Earth ravaged by climate change, Fractura gives players the ability to use weapons to warp the terrain itself, using it to create cover, sweep the rug from under your enemies, or form turrets to reach a higher point of view. Giving players the tools to change the battlefield is a fair concept, but ultimately it's a gimmick that can't save a generic third-person shooter.

8 Inversion – Gravity Manipulation

Reverse flip

Anyone who played in the Xbox 360 era will no doubt remember the wave of cover-based third-person shooters that came out of the success of Gears of War, leading to waist-deep walls in almost every shooter you've ever played could think. . On the surface, Inversion did little to distinguish itself from these imitators, though it boasted a key mechanic in the form of gravity manipulation.

Playing as officers of the city of Vanguard as it is attacked by seemingly subterranean mutants (contributing to the Gears of War comparisons), players are given control of the Gravlink, which allows you to defy the laws of gravity. The concept of messing with gravity is a great addition to the tried and true cover shooter formula, but it was an innovation in a sea of ​​borrowed ideas.

7 Juiced – Career Mode

Living Life A Quarter Mile At A Time

As soon as the Need For Speed ​​series channeled its inner Jamiroquai, heading (deeper) into the Underground, several games tried to transform the idea of ​​urban street racing to varying degrees of success. Juiced was arguably one of the better attempts, spawning a sequel with a wildly different tone, but the original Juiced had some of its own unique ideas.

While Need For Speed ​​​​and other racing games liked to sell the fantasy of street racing, Juiced tried to add a dose of reality with its Career mode. There is a calendar of events in the game, while players can form their own teams, host their own events and even just watch events to place bets.

It was a novel concept for a street racing game, but it was too easy to lose everything through pink racing or exorbitant car repair costs.

6 Superman Returns – City Health Bar

Metropolis will not save itself

Many people love to argue that Superman is a difficult character to write, but the reality is that he is a difficult character to translate into video games. Either you have to give everyone around him a power boost (Injustice) or you put him in a weird scenario like Superman N64 and the floating rings. Superman Returns at least tried to do something different that was true to the character.

Instead of giving Man of Steel its own health bar, Superman Returns gave the city a health bar, with players tasked with protecting Metropolis from the various hecklers, villains, and other up-and-comers that are common in the DC Universe . Letting the crime unfold for too long is game over, making Superman Returns something of a crisis management action game. A bad one, of course, but the idea is still cool.

If you want to see the premise of Superman Returns executed much better, check out Undefeated.

5 Alone In The Dark (2008) – Inventory

How many pockets can a jacket have?

The 2008 reboot of Alone In The Dark doesn't so much deliver a good idea as it delivers several smaller, weird and interesting ideas that somehow don't coalesce into anything fun. Ambitious is an understatement here, with Alone In The Dark including mechanics like realistic fire physics, a DVD menu for the game's levels, allowing you to skip scenes if you want, and the ability to blink when in first-person view. Why? Well, why not?

However, the most interesting idea implemented in Alone In The Dark was the inventory system. While Leon had his invisible attachment box during Resident Evil 4, Edward in AITD was limited to everything he could fit on his jacket and belt. Having a proper visual representation of the items you carry was a stroke of brilliance, so it's a shame that the rest of AITD was kind of crappy.

4 I'm Alive – Threats

Social climbing

That I Am Alive even managed to launch when it spent the better part of seven years in development hell is amazing, but it's no surprise that the end result isn't that great. Overall, there are some solid things in this post-apocalyptic action-adventure game, including some involved climbing mechanics that were the style at the time.

I Am Alive's real strength is its confrontational approach, as players can either take out the leader of a group in hopes of forcing the others to surrender, or try to intimidate them with a gun even if you're out of ammo . Intimidation and cheating were used to nullify combat in games before I Am Alive, but the combination of them made I Am Alive unique, so it's a shame that the rest of the game didn't live up to the potential of this idea.

3 Remember Me – Rewriting memories

Don't forget me.

No, Remember Me is not a release related to the Robert Pattinson film of the same name. Instead, it's a cyberpunk action-adventure game set in a futuristic version of Paris and developed by a pre-Life Is Strange Don't Nod. You control Nilin, who had her memories erased by the Memorize corporation, and now teams up with some freedom fighters to take them down.

Remember Me has some decent ideas, including the Combo Lab, which allows players to create their own moveset, but the Memory Remix sections are the real highlight.

Similar in concept to what would become Cyberpunk 2077's Brain Dances, players took key memories and changed them in key ways, resulting in the person's heart changing. There are great moments, but there's only a handful in this action game, for that matter.

2 Kane and Lynch: Dead Men – Fragile Alliance

Bank Robber #3 is looking Up.

Modern games have proven that people love social deception, so perhaps IO Interactive was ahead of the curve with the Fragile Alliance multiplayer mode in Kane And Lynch: Dead Men. Multiplayer starts out like Payday, with up to eight players gathered to steal a pile of cash from one of several locations.

Whoever makes it to the escape van at the end splits the loot, but the twist is that you can turn traitor and kill your comrades, keeping all the cash collected for yourself if you survive, with dead players even respawning as vengeful cops looking to kill you stop It's a more interesting approach to multiplayer than your standard matches, so it's unfortunate that the rest of this co-op shooter couldn't match up.

Considering GTA Online is all about heists and criminal activity, it's shocking that they didn't try to implement a Fragile Alliance-style mod at some point. Then again, free roaming in GTA Online is a fragile alliance anyway. Walk two meters and immediately get bombed from orbit.

1 Dead Island – Analog Combat

Stick it to the zombies.

Deep Silver really bet the farm on the original Dead Island, especially after the reaction to that emotional reveal trailer, but the final game had none of the weight or tone of that original reveal. Opening the game with fictional rapper Sam B's “Who Do You Voodoo” is a far cry from throwing a zombie baby out the window, which might have turned a lot of people off the game.

An action RPG at its best, Dead Island's game structure, level design, and enemies provided a test of patience rather than enjoyment for much of the game. But the analog control scheme, which mapped attacks to the right analog stick instead of the right trigger, added some dynamism to combat.

Being able to control the angle of your swings allowed for better limb targeting and better strategy in battle, but it came at a huge cost when you were surrounded by enemies, and you were often surrounded by enemies.