Okay let me start with two heavy hitters right from the get go and don't forget these are only personal oppinions and I absolute understand if you like those games. Good for you!
Zelda: Breath of the Wild -
Not a bad game per se, but I don't get the hype behind it. Sure the dungeons are fun but the world is so lifeless, the story non existent, the combat pretty shallow, the tower climbing is very much like FarCry but for some reasons it's okay here while Ubisoft gets the blame...like I said I dont get why the game is so beloved. Never finished it after the 20 hour mark and probably never will.
Red Dead Redemption 2 -
Just like Zelda not a bad game, but imho highly overrated. Graphics and and atmosphere are amazing but the controls are clunky and overloaded, nearly everybody is an unlikable douchebag who I would love to shoot myself at the first opportunity (maybe except Jack and Abigail) but I have to root and care for them. The game is just so long and feels very stretched, you already know that you won't get Dutch because it's a prequel and for an open world game you often get handholded in your weapon selection or things you can do because you have to wait for them to be unlocked by the game. I'm now nearly done with the game, playing the epilogue at the moment and I would say the last chapters are more entertaining than the rest of the game, but I still can't understand why this game was on so many game of the year lists and I really wanted to put the controller down a dozen times.
So there they are, two highly controversial oppinions by me and now I'm really curios what your takes are and how highly I get downvoted into oblivion ๐
Most of the fads and AAA big sellers, really.
TLOU - Great story, don't get me wrong; probably some of the best writing in games for it's time. But the gameplay got super boring once every concept was introduced. The loop is just not satisfying, and exploration is more or less go check out the dead end before moving on, because the level design is so linear. This is more or less the same problem I have with most big AAA titles; they look great, have a good story, but are just so incredibly boring to play. You can tell the budget went entirely into graphics and voice acting, because the game itself feels more like an afterthought to those; it's just there because otherwise it would be a movie.
Lethal Company - The game itself is pretty shit and tedious. What makes it fun is not the game, but how voice chat sounds when someone is being chased or getting eaten. 100% a game made for Twitch streamers where more people will be entertained by watching others play than playing themselves.
Palworld - I was interested by "Pokemon with Guns" and then I found out it's more like Rust with Pokemon. I hate Rust and Ark all those kinds of survival PvP games. The genre itself has all the same weird jank, like everyone who has been copying the idea from DayZ or the like also copied every bug and bad idea, too; even the AAA made ones! They usually run like shit, are balanced like shit, and get so stale alone and are super frustrating in multiplayer unless you're playing with a large group of friends so you're not just being singled out for being all alone.
GTA:O - Specifically the online portion of GTA5 has made me never want to buy another GTA or rockstar game period. Not because the game play itself sucks, but rather because it's extremely fun but the game doesn't want you to have fun if you're also making money. I can spend hours and hours doing all the activities that don't earn you cash and have not one single issue other than maybe some other players trying to blow me up (especially if they are modding). But once that Mission Rep meter starts going up, hoo boy... The game starts breaking in all sorts of interesting but frustrating ways. Headshots stop killing in one hit, traffic starts behaving erratically and non-sensically (like straight sliding sideways at light speed to force a collision), triggers start breaking, the server decides to go down or get super laggy, etc. Since none of this happens in single player or while not doing activities that reward cash, and there is no other obvious function of the Mission Rep stat, I can't help but think these are actually features put into the game on purpose specifically to slow down grinding so people will buy Shark Cards. The same kinda shit happens in RDR2:O, too.
Iโm not far enough into paltopialand to really say, but at the beginning and five hours in, it runs at 142FPS and never drops *at max settings. Its performance is really remarkable for an early game.
Iโve never played Rust or Ark.
To clarify here: It's not really the game specifically; I just know it's the latest example of the type of game and super popular atm. It might be the best game of that genre; I still don't like the genre itself, which is why I'm not getting Palworld.