The most underrated video games of all time

There are so many gigantic open-world games competing for our attention it’s no surprise a lot of people either missed or completely ignored the 2015 licensed Mad Max game - but that would be a mistake. It did a great job of capturing the bleak tone of the films, and really nailed vehicular combat in the desert, which made it easy to forgive the slightly bland environments. Luckily, this one is seemingly always on sale, and still worth revisiting in 2023.

Rocksteady’s Arkham trilogy is rightly regarded as the gold standard of superhero games, but for some reason, the WB Games Montréal-developed prequel, Batman: Arkham Origins, never gets the same kind of love. While it never quite hits the heights of Rocksteady’s efforts at their best, the combat still feels great, the story is compelling and the Christmas Eve setting makes for a memorable Gotham City to explore.

Released into the world at a time when shameless GTA clones were everywhere, it’s no surprise an open-world Scarface game was dismissed as just another one of those. But it’s better than that. For a start, the premise is great. The game picks up right at the end of the events of the film, but in this narrative remix, Tony Montana manages to escape the climatic assault on his mansion, and it’s up to the player to help rebuild his criminal empire. The soundtrack was on point, and while everything you were doing in this virtual Miami was undeniably GTA-like (and arguably even more violent), Scarface: The World is Yours had enough personality to stand on its own.

The California-based developer Insomniac Games has several big-hitting franchises to its name, such as Ratchet & Clank and more recently the Marvel’s Spider-Man games. But the latter owes a lot to one of the studio’s more overlooked titles, the still-exclusive-to-Microsoft Sunset Overdrive. Released when so many games were striving for drab realism, Sunset Overdrive’s vibrantly colourful urban playground, daft humour and kinetic combat made it a left field breath of fresh air on a struggling console. Then the series just kind of vanished. Shame.

Widely dismissed as a Breath of the Wild ripoff at launch (the terrible name didn’t help either), Ubisoft’s colourful open world adventure might not have been particularly original. But it was actually pretty successful as a more humorous take on the well-worn Assassin’s Creed formula. Set on a large island inspired by Greek mythology, you fight deadly monsters, hang out with gods and explore puzzle-filled dungeons. All in all, a really good time.

Psychonauts is an endlessly imaginative PS2-era platformer, in which you play as a boy with psychic abilities who can hop into the minds of others. It was well received by reviewers, but was also possibly a bit too off-kilter for the mainstream, as it didn’t sell well at the time. Psychonauts fans never stopped singing its praises, though, and in 2021 the game finally got a sequel, which addressed the original’s sometimes wonky platforming and served up even more creative level design. Play Psychonauts 2 if you haven’t, but don’t overlook the charmingly weird first entry, even today.

A 2022 hidden gem that didn’t get nearly enough attention, Tinykin is both a supremely polished and delightful love letter to platformers of the N64 era. It's also a smart riff on Nintendo’s Pikmin series that sees you recruiting an army of little alien creatures to help you solve puzzles in large open levels. That it entirely avoids combat of any kind is refreshing in today’s gaming landscape, and the controls are perfect. Absolutely worth six or seven hours of your time.

The early noughties was an important era for the FPS genre. To make a mark you really had to stand out from the crowd. Sometimes, though, even that wasn’t enough. As a shooter that looked like a comic book come to life, cult classic XIII had a style all of its own, but never did big numbers. It placed you in the cel-shaded shoes of an amnesic man trying to rediscover his identity. He ends up embroiled in a conspiracy involving a ploy to overthrow the government. XIII wasn’t the best shooter ever made, but it had plenty of memorable moments, and still holds up visually now.

This PS4 exclusive was undoubtedly a graphical showcase for the then still relatively new hardware that hosted it, but critics at the time weren’t all that taken by The Order: 1886. Some of that can be attributed to the game’s short length, but generic gameplay was also a recurring theme. While both of those criticisms have some merit, The Order: 1886’s 19th Century London setting and stunning production values made up for the fairly run-of-the-mill action, and these days many gamers would consider a brief campaign to be a selling point.

One of two Double Fine games featured in this list (the other being Psychonauts), Brütal Legend was a singular game that should have been a bigger hit. An action-adventure/real-time strategy mashup with a heavy metal guitarist voiced by a fully committed Jack Black (when is he anything else?) as the memorable lead, it’s still like nothing else out there, but the game's colliding genres made for a slightly awkward game to play on console. Still, more people should have tried.