Video games are an ever-increasing medium of entertainment. While the entire world won’t be playing them anytime soon, it’s hard to go anywhere without encountering the mention of a game series or console. Even if you don’t like them, you still know what they are.
However, because of how the gaming community functions, there are times when a game becomes so popular and is so widely praised that everyone knows what it is. The game becomes so popular that it then dominates every aspect of the Internet. From YouTube to Twitter, there isn’t any escaping some of these massive games.
That said, many of these games have earned the recognition and praise that they’ve received. Developers put a lot of hard work and hours into their products, and that can lead to some truly astounding results. Breath of the Wild, Fallout 4, and more are titles that got a lot of publicity, but deserved every minute.
However, that’s not always the case. There are many games that have received the attention of practically everyone on the Internet that don’t deserve it. Yet they are widely played by practically anyone with access to the appropriate device and are talked about nonstop on every corner of social media. To put it simply - there are many games that are too overrated for their own good.
That brings us to 15 overrated video games that took the Internet by storm.
15 Five Nights At Freddy’s
Scott Cawthon developed Five Nights at Freddy’s on an interesting foundation. He developed a bright and colorful game with animals that were criticized for being too creepy. From that point, he challenged himself, stating, “I bet I could make something a lot scarier.”
This led him to create the phenomenon known as Five Nights at Freddy’s. As far as horror games go, this one reinvented the wheel and was of a decent quality. However, the series has spawned five sequels, a novel, numerous merchandise, and so much more. For a series of games that cost around $4.99 a piece, that seems like overkill. What makes this a bit more confusing is that the games function on the same principles and ideas. Once you get over the jumpscares, the entire series becomes tedious over anything else. Then you’re left with a game that doesn’t feel as big as it once did.
14 Angry Birds
When smartphones first came out, with them came a slew of games that you could play on a device that you always had with you. That premise alone was enough to switch many people over to this new piece of technology. However, what we didn’t realize is how popular some of these games would turn out to be. One of the first was Angry Birds.
The game sees players flinging different birds with different powers into fragile structures to kill a certain number of pigs. It prides itself in a “pick up and play” format, which made it even more popular with the general public. Since then, there have been countless new entries in the Angry Birds series, including Angry Birds Star Wars, Angry Birds Transformers, and even the Angry Birds Movie. The game is definitely solid, but is not good enough to garner such a gigantic franchise.
13 Minecraft
Minecraft is another one of those games that began with a simple idea. Creator Notch just wanted to create a game where you could build whatever you wanted. From then on, the journey of the player was dependent on what they felt the desire to do. While originally being released on PC, Minecraft has since moved to about every other platform in existence and has even got a “Story Mode” created by Telltale Games.
While the game is solid and inspires a lot of creativity, there are numerous other games that do the same thing. Minecraft is also a title that loses many of its players once they run out of things to do. You can do an infinite amount of things in the game, but our brains alone are limited. It’s a similar problem to many open world games today. The combat of Minecraft is also choppy at best.
12 Halo 4
After Master Chief’s story seemingly ended in Halo 3, Bungie announced that they would not be continuing that saga. For years, we thought that we had seen the last of our favorite Spartan too. However, 343 Industries picked up the franchise and came out of the gate with Halo 4, which was set to continue the saga of the Master Chief.
You can imagine the kind of buzz this game received. When it came out, there were people lining up on all fronts just to play it and see what happened to the Xbox mascot. While 343 Industries did a lot of things right with the game, there were a few missteps that they made along the way. The Forge mode wasn’t nearly as fun or immersive as previous games in the series and the multiplayer maps could’ve been better structured. It’s still a great game, but not something that deserved to be plastered on every YouTube channel.
11 Slender: The Eight Pages
A small story told by just one picture spawned one of the biggest horror games of this generation. We all know the legend of the SlenderMan by this point and how the character rocketed into popularity when Slender: The Eight Pages came out as a free download on PC.
The game made its mark by using ambiance and atmosphere to haunt its players. The moment you find that first page, the drums start beating and you get the sense that something is watching you. You turn a corner to see the pale man with no face staring you down. While this sight was definitely creepy at first, it lost its punch after a while. People began learning how the character behaved and the game became increasingly easy as a result. Perhaps the best part about Slender was seeing all of the rip-offs that people came up with (my personal favorite is Swamp Sim).
10 No Man’s Sky
This was a game that didn’t take the Internet by storm when it released, but rather when it was announced and being worked on. Hello Games had an interesting and unique premise on their hands. Travel across a galaxy sized to scale and traverse various planets that are also sized to scale with the inevitable goal of getting to the center of it all.
The freedom that a game like that provides is very enticing, but, at the end of the day, No Man’s Sky was always going to be just another open-world game, albeit with a space skin over it. A game like this could’ve turned out excellently, but the amount of praise and hype people were feeding into it was a little ridiculous. Many touted it as the greatest game of all time. Even if it did turn out well, that title wouldn’t go to No Man’s Sky.
9 Final Fantasy XV
Final Fantasy XV is one of those games that got stuck in development hell. The reason that people were so excited when it was finally unveiled is that we all desperately want to believe that games stuck like this can eventually come out (there’s still a sliver of hope for Half-Life 3).
Because of this, there was unprecedented excitement for Final Fantasy XV and a lot of hype after it released. Square had crafted an open-world game in their series that used an active combat system and a gripping narrative. That said, while the game is astounding throughout its first half, it loses a lot of its momentum in the second. Gone are all your freedoms in favor of something a bit more linear. While linearity in and of itself isn’t a problem, it doesn’t serve a massive game like Final Fantasy XV very well.
8 Super Smash Bros. Melee
If you ask the majority of people what the best Super Smash Bros. game is, I guarantee you that they would probably say Super Smash Bros. Melee. This game was a vast improvement over Smash 64 and introduced a lot of mechanics and characters that would come to define the series.
However, many nuances of the game, such as its speed and special mechanics, would not return to the series after it. Because of this, many people simply like Melee because it had wave-dashing and was faster-paced than the rest. To make matters worse, those same individuals despise Brawl and Smash 4 simply because they aren’t adaptations of Melee. While I won’t deny that the game is good, using glitches and unbalanced fighters isn’t something that I (and a lot of other gamers) appreciate. It is far from the be all end all of Super Smash Bros.
7 The Division
Tom Clancy’s The Division was a game that many people were excited for. Many times during the Battlefield 1 versus Infinite Warfare debate, there were those who just shrugged and pointed to The Division for all of their hype. In a world of shooter games, this one promised to be different and unique, boasting a new kind of world to traverse and new weapons to use.
While the game is decent and well-polished, it isn’t something that was deserving of the attention that it got. It’s a third-person shooter with online multiplayer elements incorporated in. Apart from that, there isn’t anything to differentiate it from games like Gears of War. Because of this, many people became disillusioned with the game after it released. Considering that there isn’t much reason to go back to the game once you’ve played for a few hours, it’s a fair response.
6 Flappy Bird
Of all of the smartphone games ever released, there are three that have gained unwarranted amounts of popularity: Angry Birds, something I’ll get to in a bit, and Flappy Bird. Of all of them, this game is easily the least deserving of all of its attention.
This game was plastered all over social media and the internet. Those who were interested with all of the fuss were quickly disappointed to figure out that it was a game where you tapped your screen to make a bird go up. The goal was to fly through pipes to get the highest score. That’s literally all the game was. The popularity and attention that it got motivated the developer to take the game off of the App Store for all devices. From that point, there were phones being sold for ridiculous amounts of money because they still had Flappy Bird on them. If that’s not crazy, I don’t know what is.
5 Firewatch
A fairly recent game that hit PC, Firewatch is a title that puts you in the shoes of a park ranger. You traverse the park you work at to solve all kinds of problems and get answers to many questions you have about the environment. All the while you have a partner talking to you with witty dialogue through a walkie talkie.
If this all sounds kind of generic, you’d be quite right. Firewatch can be an incredibly boring game at times. There are moments where it will build up to something big, but only leave you in the dust with some anticlimactic resolution. The only thing that prevented many from getting tired of the game was the partner who kept talking to you. If she didn’t exist, then Firewatch would’ve been boring from start to finish.
4 The Witness
Braid was one of the biggest indie games to ever be released. It showed just what the genre could be while reinventing the wheel for established titles. There was a lot of buzz, then, when the developer of Braid announced that they were working heavily on a new puzzle title known as The Witness.
This colorful puzzle game has a lot of interesting problems for players to solve, but it suffers from a lot of problems too. The game leaves you completely directionless and not in a charming way. You’ll often be waving your arms in frustration because you don’t know what to do. Furthermore, despite its colorful setting, The Witness is a lonely game that makes you feel more isolated the more time you spend with it. Somehow, though, this game received a lot of glowing reviews - IGN even gave it a 10/10! Is it good? Absolutely. Does it deserve a perfect score? Not a chance.
3 Overwatch
The latest big game to come from Blizzard, Team Fortress 3 Overwatch was so hyped that it was already popular before it came out. As many people expected, the game soared in popularity after its release and currently has one of the biggest install bases of any title.
While there’s no denying that the game is quite good, it’s not as excellent as some say it is. For starters, many of the mechanics and structures were practically ripped off from the Team Fortress series. The title does pride itself in having more characters to select from and allowing players to switch between matches, but that alone doesn’t make a game great. Overwatch is a great game, but because it is essentially a reskinned version of a title that’s been out for years, it doesn’t deserve a lot of the praise that it gets.
2 Undertale
It seems that each year in recent memory has had that one special indie game that people flocked to. 2014 had Shovel Knight (which I highly recommend), while 2015 had Undertale. This game turned the classic RPG formula on its head by morally punishing you for killing monsters and providing a story that changed depending on how you chose to play.
People raved about the game for a very long time and the buzz has just now died down a bit. That said, everyone knows what Undertale is and we don’t believe that it should’ve been that way. The game is, first of all, really ugly in terms of art style. There are ways of making pixel art look really good and Undertale is not an example of that. Then there’s the fact that it’s extremely tedious to get all of the endings possible. To top things off, many of the bosses aren’t hard because it takes skill to beat them; they’re hard because they’re unfair.
1 Pokémon GO
Of all of the games listed here, perhaps there were none bigger than the phenomenon otherwise known as Pokémon GO. When the game came out in the summer of 2016, everybody was playing it, searching for new Pokémon, walking outside of their homes, and taking on gyms.
It’s hard to argue the appeal of searching for Pokémon in real life, but that doesn’t hide the many problems of Pokémon GO. First of all, the servers were terrible to start (they’ve since improved). This caused many people to lose items, Pokémon, and just about anything else. Then there’s the fact that there are many features missing from the game that Niantic promised with the announcement trailer: including trading and battling with other players. The game also horribly punishes newbies. Don’t expect to take any gyms unless you’re at least level 20. Yet, it still managed to be one of the biggest games of all time. Crazy how these things work.
