Critical Eye

The reasons why a title fails to break into the market and enjoy the consideration it deserves can be countless, and seldom the random factor is among these: the gaming market, like everyone else, follows all its logic, perhaps unallocated but albeit logical.

Actors in the game, or publishers, specialized prints, and the public, are the first to make mistakes, as is normal: there are games that, trivially, did not get the success they deserved because they were published in times of the busy year, and finishes crushed under the weight of giants such as Fifa, Call of Duty, and Uncharted, others who did not have enough publicity, others cautiously underestimated by the critics, unable to capture the qualities, and others that, despite the praise of the press of course, they were still unsettled on the physical and digital shelves, the victim of the “buzz” of the general public.

The list is infinite, and even limiting the analysis only to the last two generations of consoles, the situation looks very varied: Titanfall 2, in the opinion of the writer, has brought in one of the best single player campaigns of recent years, excluding products more bound to the fiction like Metro and Wolfenstein (on which we will return), but has passed almost unnoticed among the great autumn releases, badly placed just behind the big ones.

Mad Max and Dying Light, two of the open world titles that personally I liked the most (especially the latter), have not enjoyed a treatment leading in marketing and advertising push, “contenting” sell well when they could have included in the top rankings of their kind.

A separate case deserves those fiercely “different” titles, which have not bent on market logic and have paid their uniqueness with disappointing sales results: Catherine remains a jewel of fiction and game design that is hardly we will see a sequel as much as Lost Odyssey, recently rewarded by the back-compatibility on Xbox One, a brave promoter of a turn-based combat system in a world that seems to only accept role-playing role-playing games.

And how can we not mention The Last Guardian, an emotional journey in the past available to a few euros a little anywhere (take it, by the way)?

Unanswered questions

The subcategories where the less-appreciated games of the due can be subdivided, however, do not end here: two of the most common are the “victims of the moment” and the “little brothers”, however, those that are more of my heart.

In the first category belong titles that simply came out in the wrong time, far from the paradigms of the year the domains where they are published, and even just for this, added as “inferior”.

Yes, because the average game player, unfortunately, struggles to distinguish between the concept of diversity and the quality of the game, implying a worsening of the gaming experience for those products that come out of the sown: at this time in history, the category that is widening the ranks of the “Victims of the moment” is that of the first person shooter who have not forgotten the single player.

One of the highest moments of last year’s E3, for the undersigned, was the announcement at Metro Exodus during the Microsoft conference: together with the Machinegames youth team’s Wolfenstein series, the work of the Ukrainian 4A Games team remains one of the last single player balloons in the FPS.