5 Critically Reviled Games That Actually Deserve Remakes

1 Lair for the PS3

What went wrong: 

Panzer Dragoon is one of Sega's greatest series, one Sony Never had much of an answer to. The series drew its power from its Arcade-y on-rails action that players get to experience while riding a goddamn dragon.

Panzer Dragoon absolutely owned back in its time, so an expert dev team working on an early PS3 title, Lair, thought “hey, let's do this but give players complete freedom. No way the new and mostly unknown hardware of the PS3 will be a problem!". It did turn out to be a problem, especially because the developers claim Sony forced them to make the PS3's wacky Sixaxis motion controls the only way to control our dragon. Lair has a good story and lore, and if we look at screenshots, we can say that they look amazing even for a game that's only 5 years away from being legally able to drink away its sorrows.

If we look at its gameplay, however, it looks like an ok beta, at best.

because that's pretty much what it is. This could've been one hell of a starting hit for the PS3, but it turned out such a mess bad that it didn't even get a sequel.

how to fix it:

More time to develop, and just using a regular goddamn controller to move the dragon. Not all new tech is going to revolutionize the way we play games (the Sixaxis motion controller was abandoned at the end of the PS3 era.) Oh, and we'd probably need to find a dev team capable of resurrecting failed projects that would be interested in a medieval epic about dragons because Factor 5 totally went under after Lair flopped.

2 Tomb Raider: The Angel Of Darkness

what went wrong:

Tomb Raider: The Angel Of Darkness marked Lara Croft's laggiest-ever jump, the one that took her from the PS1 to the PS2. AOD was meant to be just another Tomb Raider game by the Lara factory at Core Design but they ended up unleashing something so vile that Core's parent company forbade them from ever touching the IP again. Angel Of Darkness's biggest problem was the fact that making a game for the PS2 was surprisingly nightmarish, causing the small team to make a game that was nearly unplayable, but the company also made many glaring mistakes of their own along the way. They added Travis (Trevor? Trey?), a male co-protagonist with absolutely no charisma, RPG elements so despicable that they made Travis look great in comparison, and they removed most of the tomb and raiding segments the series was kind of known for. 

how to fix it:

Well, we've gone so hard on this game that we make it look like there's nothing worth salvaging there, but there is. The game had all the elements fans loved, but most of them were locked away inside a Tomb made out of solid crap. Luckily, this is a great time to raid it. AOD actually featured a cool story, one that went unresolved because of the game's failure, and the series is currently kind of stuck after the disappointing end of the reboot trilogy. Whether or not fans like the new Tomb Raider games featuring a younger Lara, most want to see her grow up into the pro Tomb Raider she's supposed to be, so why not have young Lara get entangled with an alternate take on Lara's darkest (and most unresolved) tale?

And if Lara's new owners don't want to give us that, it's ok, because fan Julian Guba is working mostly on his own to give us his vision of an Angel Of Darkness remake.

3 Jurassic Park: Trespasser

what went wrong: 

For the Internet, Jurassic Park: Trespasser is but a joke. A good one, otherwise we wouldn't have written countless articles making fun of how it uses boobs to display the character's help meter, but there's a crazy good game hidden in this wilderness. Trespasser got a lot of crap because much like its source material, it was dealing with unknown technology. Instead of dinosaurs, however, the devs were working with physics-based mechanics. 

The mechanics were pretty revolutionary, actually, with the developers of Half-Life 2 citing it as the main inspiration for its awesome puzzles, but it seems as if the makers of Trespasser spent too much time working on the physics because the rest of the game is pretty bland. Aside from a few dinosaurs that we have to try to shoot via an aiming system that consists of the main character's arm just randomly flailing all over the screen, Trespasser is a mostly lonely experience. The most fun time anyone can have here is actually flying over the entirety of the game (yes, bugs find a way).

how to fix it:

We probably should've said this when they had the time to make a tie in for Jurassic World: Dominion, but ditch all wonky shooting elements and focus on making it a very stressful survival horror game where players have to escape some sort of crisis caused by dinos solely by virtue of using their brains on all sorts of clever puzzles (it's totally fair to go play Half-Life 2 for inspiration, they kind of owe it to Trespasser)

While we're unlikely to ever get an official Trespasser remake, players can totally play it in VR now.

4 Mass Effect 3

what went wrong: 

The belief that pushing out Drew Karpyshyn, the series' main writer two-thirds into the trilogy wouldn't have a mass catastrophic effect on the final game in the series. Yeah, while most people only ever complain about that game's ending, the truth of the matter is that the entire story sucks because it deviates from everything it had been building up to. Instead of a bunch of cool twists and turns that never materialized, we find out that the seemingly unstoppable threat we'd been dealing with for the past two games was actually totally stoppable by a MacGuffin that had just been calmly floating in space the entire time. How EAnteresting.

how to fix it:

The game rocks on a technical level, so just throw away the entire plot and go with the original vision. We don't even know many details on what that was supposed to be, but we trust the guy who did Mass Effect and Mass Effect 2, so give us that.

5 The Last Of  Us Part 2

what went wrong:

Uh oh, this one is hard because TLOU Part II isn't bad and didn't get bad reviews, but it has problems that most didn't notice because all legitimate criticism got drowned in a sea of weird misogynistic rants. While Gamers ™ were too busy dealing with the fact that not all women have to look like Lara Croft, most of the game's actual problems got to fly under the radar. Even the people who like Part 2 think the story is at least told in an awkward and confusing manner and agree that this could use some sort of director's cut. Also, the devs shun players for their violent behavior, a pretty cheeky move considering the game doesn't give players any alternative.

how to fix it:

Either give players the ability to make choices that will influence the outcome of the game or at least don't get all preachy on players when they're mourning the death of a character who probably should have died in a more meaningful way (or not at all, goddammit).

Top Image: Sector 5