Your Favorite Under-rated Game(s)
This question is timely in that I’ve recently been streaming one of the games I had a great time playing back in the day. It didn’t make a huge splash back then and has gone from relative obscurity to being almost completely unknown among modern players. I grabbed it early, played it through and got rid of it and for the longest time couldn’t even remember what it was called. But I’d been wanting to check it out again to see if it was a fun as I remembered or if my fondness was clouded by nostalgia, so I began some web searches and asked around and I finally did find it.
That game is Raze’s Hell.
It is certainly an underrated game, but does it deserve to be? I’ll admit it would never be considered a “classic”, but if nothing else it is most definitely under-appreciated. Raze’s Hell was released for the original XBOX in April of 2005, developed by Artech Digital Entertainment and published by Majesco. It received lukewarm reviews and was disappointing in terms of commercial sales. In fact, as I was looking around for the game to replay and add to the Collection, I couldn’t find one locally at all with any of my regular shops or with our retro gamer group or any online boards. I had to get a copy shipped from out of state. The game wasn’t hard to find because it was rare or coveted by the community, it was hard to find because it didn’t sell well originally and apparently wasn’t popular enough to hold onto since then.
Raze is a witty third-person shooter with solid gameplay and a fun story. I like the graphics and style the game presents and I enjoyed playing it thru as much today as I did back in 2005.
It’s not without its problems, however. The darks are too dark (as a lot of old-gen games seemed to be) and the cave level especially was a pain in the ass to navigate. The controls are a bit clunky by today’s standards, and the story very linear. But for this genre at this time, that was the norm. I shouldn’t judge the game by today’s standards, and I won’t.
And damn, there are some frustrating levels. It took a lot of dying and trying and learning to get through some of them.
Have you played Raze’s Hell? What did you think?
I’ve got a few other titles I’d call “underrated” (like PS2’s Sphinx and the Cursed Mummy, but for now I’d like to hear what you think is one of the most underrated video games. Let me know in the comments below!
Games With Galt 