For Sony, that was the Resistance: Fall of Man franchise (with the Killzone series also taking a shot at the genre crown). Resistance 3Īfter Microsoft rocked the FPS world with Halo, almost every game publisher wanted to produce their own Halo-killer. This game deserves a lot of love and a wider modern release, but, since it’s Konami we’re talking about, it will almost certainly never get either. Even better, it features some truly lovely cel-shaded graphics that really capture the fun and absurd sides of the series while fitting the gameplay like a glove. If you can get past the hurdle of playing a Metal Gear strategy game based around collectible card combat, you’ll find that Metal Gear Acid 2 offers a far more refined version of that basic concept than its predecessor did.
Unfortunately, that game’s struggles and generally strange premise meant that a lot of people never really gave Metal Gear Acid 2 the shot it very much deserved.
Metal Gear Acid was a good game, but the title’s generic visuals and work-in-progress card-based strategy gameplay turned a lot of PSP players off. The gameplay should have been better, but it’s definitely good enough to justify experiencing this game’s amazing story. By exploring the rarely explored world of 1968 New Orleans (New Bordeaux in the game), Mafia 3 was able to offer a different kind of crime game story that balanced the intimate reasons people turn to a life of crime with an elaborate government conspiracy plot. Yet, Mafia 3’s slightly more generic style of gameplay does little to diminish the impact of its amazing characters, setting, and plot.
Mafia 3, however, proved to be pretty divisive, with much of the criticism directed towards the game rightfully reserved for its attempts to utilize a fairly generic style of open-world gameplay. Mafia and Mafia 2 aren’t universally beloved classics, but many still find time to praise those titles for their retro gangster settings and slightly more restricted gameplay that offered a tighter alternative to so many GTA clones. With that out of the way, here are 25 underrated sequels you may have not had the privilege to play.