I've been revisiting anno 2205, infamously the ugly duckling of the Anno series of RTS games. I don't mind so much the fact that it's different, lacks customisation and random map generation - I'm bothered because the game is so slow to progress through on challenge settings, and it feels like a game designed just to artificially waste your time; in other anno games, you can always pull tricks to dig yourself out of economic crisis - selling off assets and surplus goods, completing quests for other parties, or taking loans. 2205 is very very confined in terms of what you can do to financially recover in the early game and forces you into a lot of military events.
I am a huge fan of the Blackbox era of Need For Speed games and when I tried Undercover, I knew it had a reputation but I was willing to give it the benefit of the doubt as Carbon is often overlooked because of Most Wanted but it's actually my favourite in the series (and its short af campaign is a famous sticking point for Carbon's detractors)
When I launched the game, I couldn't stop noticing how... off everything looked. The graphics were ugly. I knew from playing ProStreet that this engine could look absolutely stunning and going to this was just... baffling. Then I did some of the races and I was constantly experiencing issues. The handling was very poor, the camera angles were really bad and most of the races just felt meh.
I wanted to drop it then but I decided to power through a week with it, playing on and off. I actually really liked the ambient police chatter and the arrest cutscenes (Some of them are shockingly brutal, police brutality much?) but the racing felt bland, the police chases felt even blander and the world overall just didn't interest me. The story didn't pull me in but then again, who really plays NFS For the story anyways.
This was one of the first instances of me disliking a game so it left me really confused and puzzled. This was a series I loved and then I came across this entry that just felt like it was completely alien to the series it belonged to. It was so, so, so weird.
Did you play it in it’s current time or much later?