8 Amazing Video Games With TERRIBLE Marketing
5. Onrush
Onrush is one of the best and most unique racing games of the past decade, yet it came and went with so little fanfare - despite solid reviews - that you'd barely know it.
The game's fascinating hook is that success isn't measured by crossing the finish line first - instead the various game modes are team-based where victory is secured by metrics like boosting and destroying the other team's cars.
Despite this, publisher Deep Silver largely just marketed Onrush as a totally generic, by-the-numbers racing game, perhaps for fear that revealing its true nature might turn some genre fans off.
Yet that specialness was the game's biggest asset and could've actually helped it break out with a wider player-base, if only people actually knew about any of it.
Instead, for most people Onrush faded into the periphery as just another racing game.
As a result Onrush sold poorly, leading to layoffs at developer Codemasters, before the game's online servers were shut down in 2022 and a planned PC release was cancelled.
It's a crying shame, as to this very day Onrush still has a passionate legion of fans decrying how it wasn't even given a chance to succeed.