10 Awesome Video Games That Should Have Been Terrible

4. Assassin's Creed IV: Black Flag

By the time Black Flag was about to launch, many of us more discerning gamers felt apathetic about the Assassin's Creed series. Revelations did absolutely nothing to improve on the high benchmark set by Brotherhood, and while Assassin's Creed 3 did actually try to shake up the formula, its leap of faith badly missed the hay-pile, so to speak. So those of you who spent a good $100 on what was essentially two years of disappointment probably thought you'd sit this one out, while those of us who backed out when the series was still on a high after Brotherhood barely paid any attention... even if Black Flag did make the tantalising promise of pirates. But piracy and all that it entails - capturing ships, singing shanties, drinking rum and exploring beautiful caribbean islands - was pretty much all it took to make Black Flag arguably the greatest Assassins' Creed game of all time. You weren't even really an assassin in it, just some vagabond who happened to murder one and steal their clothes. While the whole present-day, conspiracy-theory stuff does rear its tinfoil-hatted head, the thrust of the game was to be a damn good pirate, and that was damn good fun. The gameplay didn't improve much upon its predecessors, but the extra gameplay layer of owning your own pirate ship that you could upgrade, decorate, and sail the turquoise caribbean waters with was enough to make it feel completely new. Like its protagonist Edward Kenway, Black Flag felt free-spirited and not caught up in the bloated, suffocating plot and bugginess of other games in the series. It was unexpected and refreshing, but unfortunately the exception in a series that has, either side of it, looked stagnant for years.