I’m going to piss off a lot of people now by talking about how I think some of the best-loved games in the past few years weren’t actually that good. Much of this might have to do with my personal opinion of Bioware’s game engines, since two of my three example games here are from Bioware, but I can’t help but feel that they were overhyped and overrated.

Over the years, Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic has developed a near-legendary reputation as an excellent game. But while I found the story interesting and the twist at the end was very nice, it was the gameplay that I found to be lacking. The combat boiled down to selecting an attack and running up to your enemy, then watching while the attacks were carried out, with the combatants standing there and waiting in between attacks. This certainly isn’t a mechanic exclusive to KotOr – even World of Warcraft (if I speculate correctly) uses this type of combat mechanic. I don’t like it. And while perhaps the same thing could be said about games I do love such as Baldur’s Gate and Final Fantasy XII, I find it much easier to view those two games as pseudo-turn-based games. KotOR feels like more of an action game, and as such the engine and the gameplay seemed very off-putting to me.

Jade Empire, as a game, had a lot in common with Knights of the Old Republic. But I enjoyed Jade Empire more because the combat engaged the player more by requiring a keypress for each attack and block. In that way, Jade Empire was more action game than RPG, whereas KotOR was more RPG than action game. I loves me some RPG, but not when it’s done with an engine like KotOR’s. I had the same complaint about Neverwinter Nights, which in my mind succeeded despite the poor engine and gameplay. But the main reason I liked Neverwinter Nights was the bundled Aurora creaton tool, with which I spent an ungodly amount of time. I’m not saying that Knights of the Old Republic was a bad game – I certainly did enjoy it – I just didn’t enjoy it as much as everyone else seemed to.

The second game on my “overrated” list is Bioshock. Bioshock had a lot of promise. When I saw the hallways beginning to flood at the beginning of the game, it was exciting. Here I am in an underwater city – maybe gunfire breaking these underwater tunnels will be a common mechanic! Maybe I’ll occasionally have to escape from tunnels before they flood! Alas – the danger is only imagined, and the flooding only happens that once.

Bioshock’s story was good, and the game was very atmospheric, largely due to the much-vaunted graphics. But on my machine, the game absolutely chugged, even at medium settings. I found myself comparing it to Half-Life 2, which was the best-looking game I’d seen at the time. On my machine, Half-Life 2 actually looked better, and ran far more smoothly.

Graphics aside, Bioshock didn’t have as good a story exposition as Half-Life 2 and didn’t have characters that I fell in love with in the way that I fell in love with Alyx Vance, Dog, and Dr. Kleiner. The camera and pipeworks hacking mechanics were cool, but what fell short was the je ne sais quoi – that certain charm that some games have and others don’t. Bioshock didn’t charm me. It received a solid meh.

The final game in my triumvirate of overration is Mass Effect. (*Greg ducks*)

I’ve got a lot of the same complaints about Mass Effect as I did about Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic. It felt more like the game engine you’d see in a point-and-click adventure and less like the engine you’d see in a shooter. In The Totally Rad Show‘s PAX episode, they mentioned that Mass Effect 2 feels “more shootery”, which is very promising, but the whole thing makes me slightly nervous about my much-looked-forward-to Dragon Age: Origins.

Mass Effect had a really interesting story. I loved the notion of an ancient über-powerful race of alien robots who destroy civilization periodically. But they didn’t end up feeling as badass as I’d have liked. They should have felt more like the Borg did in “Q Who?”

All in all, I did enjoy each of these three games. But they weren’t amazing, they were just okay.