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15 Video Games That Are Better Than You Remember

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You were too harsh.

Nazarii Verbitskiy

Gaming - September 16th 2026, 12:40 GMT+2

Fable III — 15. Fable III (2010)
Fable III gets called the worst entry in the series, but that reputation comes mostly from comparing it to what came before rather than judging what it actually does. The game ditches traditional menus for a literal sanctuary where you walk between different rooms to manage inventory, spells, and character progression. It sounds gimmicky until you realize how much more immersive it feels to physically move through your own personal space instead of clicking through UI screens. The second half turns into a surprisingly harsh lesson about the gap between revolutionary promises and the ugly compromises of actually governing a kingdom. | © Microsoft Game Studios

Homefront The Revolution — 14. Homefront: The Revolution (2016)
Homefront: The Revolution launched as a broken mess with terrible AI, constant crashes, and gunplay that felt like shooting through molasses. The thing is, patches eventually fixed most of those problems, revealing a surprisingly solid open-world resistance game underneath all that technical disaster. Running guerrilla operations against occupying Korean forces through a devastated Philadelphia actually works when the game isn't falling apart every five minutes. What started as one of 2016's biggest disappointments quietly became a decent shooter that nobody bothered to revisit. | © Deep Silver

Lost Planet 2 — 13. Lost Planet 2 (2010)
Lost Planet 2 turns cooperative monster hunting into pure chaos, and somehow that messiness becomes the point. Four players can team up to take down building-sized alien bugs using mechs, grappling hooks, and an arsenal that includes everything from rocket launchers to giant railway cannons. The campaign throws you into scenarios that feel more like fever dreams than traditional shooter missions, like surfing on trains while fighting flying creatures or coordinating attacks on monsters so massive they require multiple phases just to reach their weak spots. Most games try to smooth out the rough edges, but Lost Planet 2 celebrates them. | © Capcom

Mafia III — 12. Mafia III (2016)
Mafia III had the guts to make a revenge story about racism in 1968 New Orleans, turning the usual gangster power fantasy into something angrier and more personal. Lincoln Clay works his way through the city's criminal hierarchy with a methodical brutality that feels different from other open-world crime games, even when the mission structure gets repetitive. The game's willingness to show how violence and prejudice shaped organized crime gives weight to moments that would feel routine in a different setting. Most Mafia games romanticize the mob, but this one treats it like a cancer worth cutting out. | © 2K Games

Darksiders II — 11. Darksiders II (2012)
Darksiders II took the first game's Zelda-meets-God of War formula and made it bigger in every possible direction, then watched audiences shrug because bigger does not always mean better. The problem was never the combat or the puzzles, which stayed sharp and satisfying. It was the endless side quests and bloated world that made players forget how good the core adventure actually was. Strip away the filler and you find one of the best action-adventure games of its generation hiding underneath. | © THQ

Castlevania Lords of Shadow — 10. Castlevania: Lords of Shadow (2010)
Castlevania: Lords of Shadow throws out decades of side-scrolling tradition and turns the vampire-hunting franchise into a full-blown God of War clone, complete with massive titans to climb and brutal combo chains. The shift felt jarring at first, but Gabriel Belmont's origin story actually works because it commits completely to being a different kind of game rather than trying to split the difference. Patrick Stewart's narration and some genuinely surprising plot twists give the whole thing a weight that most action games never bother with. The combat may feel borrowed, but the gothic atmosphere and family tragedy at its center make it something uniquely dark. | © Konami

Bulletstorm — 9. Bulletstorm (2011)
Bulletstorm turns mindless shooting into an art form by rewarding creativity over accuracy. The game scores your kills based on how ridiculous they are, pushing you to kick enemies into cacti, electrocute them mid-air, or launch them into giant wheels of spikes instead of just pulling the trigger. Most shooters punish you for wasting ammo, but this one hands you a leash that yanks enemies around like ragdolls and tells you to get weird with it. The result feels like someone finally understood that video game violence works best when it stops pretending to be serious. | © EA

Remember Me 2010 — 8. Remember Me (2013)
Remember Me drops you into a cyberpunk Paris where memories can be stolen, edited, and sold like commodities, then asks you to play as someone who has forgotten her own identity. The memory-remix sequences let you rewrite someone's past by changing small details until their entire perception shifts, creating some of the most unsettling moments in gaming. Most action games treat the mind as just another battlefield, but this one makes memory itself feel fragile and unreliable. The combat never quite matches the brilliance of watching someone's life unravel because you moved a coffee cup. | © Capcom

Cropped Days Gone — 7. Days Gone (2019)
Days Gone launched to mixed reviews that focused on technical issues and familiar zombie tropes, but the game's strengths emerged after patches and player word-of-mouth. The motorcycle mechanics feel genuinely weighty and dangerous, turning every ride across the Pacific Northwest into a tense resource management puzzle where one crash can leave you stranded in hostile territory. What really separates it from other zombie games is the horde system, where hundreds of infected move as a single terrifying organism that you can hear from miles away. The story takes its time building genuine emotional weight between Deacon and his missing wife, making the personal stakes feel real instead of tacked on. | © Sony Interactive Entertainment

Enslaved Odyssey To The West — 6. Enslaved: Odyssey to the West (2010)
Enslaved: Odyssey to the West turns a post-apocalyptic wasteland into something that actually feels alive, with overgrown cities where nature has reclaimed the ruins in brilliant greens and golds. The relationship between Monkey and Trip drives everything, built on a slavery headband that forces cooperation but slowly becomes genuine partnership through excellent motion capture performances. Most games about the end of the world feel oppressive and gray. This one finds beauty in destruction and makes you care about two people trying to survive it together. | © Bandai Namco

Mirrors Edge — 5. Mirror's Edge (2008)
Mirror's Edge dropped players into a world where running across rooftops felt more like dancing than platforming, and every leap carried real weight and momentum. The first-person parkour was unlike anything else in 2008, turning the simple act of movement into something that required rhythm and flow rather than just pressing jump at the right time. EA built an entire game around the idea that getting from point A to point B could be thrilling without a single gunfight, and somehow made sterile white architecture feel alive. Most action games teach you to stop and shoot, but Mirror's Edge taught you that sometimes the best move is to keep running. | © EA

Singularity — 4. Singularity (2010)
Singularity arrived in 2010 with a time manipulation gimmick that actually worked, letting players age enemies into dust or reverse destroyed bridges back into existence. The game came from Raven Software during their brief window of creative freedom, and it shows in the weird confidence of watching Soviet experiments tear apart reality itself. Most shooters that try to be clever about time travel end up confusing themselves, but this one commits to the chaos and builds increasingly unhinged scenarios around its core mechanic. The result feels like what happens when a studio gets to make exactly the game they want without worrying about focus groups. | © Activision

Prey — 3. Prey (2017)
Prey got buried under the weight of its own name, arriving as a spiritual successor that had nothing to do with the original 2006 game and everything to do with proving that immersive sims could still work in 2017. The space station setting feels alive in ways most games never attempt, with every coffee mug and computer terminal telling part of a larger story about what happened before you woke up. Arkane Studios built a playground where creative problem-solving matters more than shooting accuracy, letting you turn into a coffee cup to slip through tight spaces or use the physics engine to stack boxes in completely unintended ways. The alien mimics that can disguise themselves as any object in the environment make every room feel like a puzzle where the furniture might suddenly try to kill you. | © Bethesda Softworks

Titanfall 2 — 2. Titanfall 2 (2016)
Titanfall 2 launched between Battlefield 1 and Call of Duty: Infinite Warfare, which meant most people never saw one of the best single-player campaigns in years. The story mode throws you through time-shifting puzzles, wall-running gauntlets, and a buddy-cop dynamic with a giant robot that somehow works. Multiplayer felt just as smooth, but the timing killed it before word could spread. It's the rare shooter that made platforming feel natural instead of like a gimmick borrowed from another genre. | © EA

Spec Ops The Line — 1. Spec Ops: The Line (2012)
Spec Ops: The Line looks like another generic military shooter until it starts dismantling everything you think you know about being the hero. The game uses familiar mechanics to lead you into increasingly horrific choices, then forces you to confront what those choices actually mean. Most war games let you feel good about violence; this one makes you sick about it. By the end, you realize the real enemy was never the people you were shooting. | © 2K Games

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Memory has a funny way of flattening games that were actually doing something interesting, especially when the discourse around them soured early and stuck. These 15 deserve a second playthrough with fresh eyes, because there's more going on than the reputation suggests.

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Memory has a funny way of flattening games that were actually doing something interesting, especially when the discourse around them soured early and stuck. These 15 deserve a second playthrough with fresh eyes, because there's more going on than the reputation suggests.