As lot of people said, Dark Souls 2 is the weaker entry but still a very good game. Some mentioned MGS2 as well which I think is directly the best one in the saga. One of my favourite games of all times.
Another game I think is seriously underrated is Super Mario 3D World. In my opinion one of the best 3D Mario games out there.
I know people complained about "shoehorned" multiplayer at the time, But ME3 showed how good non traditional MP could be. The progression felt good an i never felt like MT was needed, and the core gamplay loop was good. On a similar topic, Batman Arkham Origins asynchronous asymmetric MP was a really interesting concept i wish we saw more of. I really miss these old odd MP modes, like the Assassins creed stealth blending MP.
Its still going on today. Doom Eternal and Resident Evil 3 Remake just came out with asymmetric multiplayer. They're as shoehorned as they come. For every Mass Effect 3 we get five asymmetric multiplayer modes that just don't work and/or aren't popular. Shame.
Mass Effect 3 multiplayer is really special, because it came out at a time when games were just shoving crappy MP modes into their games to have them and/or attach an online pass (remember that?). EA was a particularly bad offender. So when ME3 MP came out, and it worked great, was really replayable, and was really well-designed... I guess it had to work out once.
The thing is that Unity was patched and ran great (on PC) like a month after it came out. It became a meme because of some funny screenshots. Obviously the game shouldn't have launched with the bugs it had, and the criticism was warranted, but it was not Aliens Colonial Marine or something.
Far Cry 2 - I really can't stand any of the Far Cry titles after this one. I love the feeling. It came out at around the same time that I saw a little film called Blood Diamond and to me it allowed me to step onto those sunbaked plains and sunscorched forests myself. I thought the oppressive atmosphere and pacing was pitch perfect, the maps were technically impressive and varied, the story was just a light touch and gave you plenty of time for exploration, yeah I just liked it. The forced cinematic nature of later titles just totally failed to register with me.
I'm gonna go the other way and say that Far Cry is my favourite in the series. If you play it on the harder difficulties it kinda turns into a horror shooter, because the trigens are so lethal.
Operation Flashpoint - vs. the ARMA games, I still think OpFlash was the best of the bunch. It was bare bones and pretty indy, but at the time the graphics were pretty artful (with some decent lighting and draw distance making up for bad models and textures) and it was one of the only titles in the entire pantheon of games (including Dragon Rising) that had not one, but three, coherent and stable, scripted campaigns to enjoy. Get your hands on the demo, play the 'Assault' mission on hard, and yeah tell me it doesn't have a little je ne sais quois to it.
Operation Flashpoint definitely has the best campaign out of all these games, I had a lot of fun with it. The ARMA games are pure multiplayer games in my book, so I think of them differently.
Sonic Heroes was the best 3D sonic game from a gameplay standpoint. If they just stuck with that formula and improved upon it then Sonic wouldn't be trash right now.
Literally all they had to do was:
- remove forced 3 characters, let you play through the game with only 1
- revamp the enemies/level design with new paths to allow only 1 character to traverse them
- add a Multiplayer mode where you can use 2/3 characters and essentially play the game like Heroes 1
Bam, classical Sonic game design transferred to 3D complete with multiplayer.
100% this. While problematic for sure; the whole "we have to attach multiplayer to everything" season of gaming brought with it some of the most creative Multiplayer fun. Assassins Creed stealthy MP was awesome.
Will also throw my hat in for DoW3. I created the GAF OT and was pretty put off by Relic when they abandoned the game without any real effort. Even after all that, I still find myself coming back to the game, even now, to hone my skills against bots and catch custom lobbies when I can.
I sympathize with how Relic put off 40k fans with their disregard of the lore and DoW fans by abandoning co-op and the gameplay they had been building on. But it's still the best looking RTS, the macro and micro were solid, and the momentum mechanics brought the genre into modern strategy gaming. I've been checking out Starcraft II and lamenting that that community never moved over, since DoW3 is such a better modern RTS.