10 Hidden Gaming Gems That You Totally Missed Out On

5. Rise To Honor

Never since Jackie Chan's Stuntmaster has an eastern action-star been given such a great game to do their on-screen antics justice. Remember that? For those not in the know, everyone's favourite slapstick ladder-swinging bone-breaker turned up in a great tale of smashed chairs and flying kicks back in 2000. Although the 3rd person brawler genre has essentially completely died since God Hand took it as far as it could, Rise To Honor was a great entry to the genre. Utilising Blade 2's '360 degree combat system' (mapping directional attacks to the right analogue stick), Rise let you embody a fully-voiced and fully motion-captured Jet Li to great effect across three distinct gameplay styles. First up was the chopsocky palm-to-face destruction of the fighting sections. Featuring some great animation in the form of an idle Jet Li striking various ready-poses, and the ability to pick up different items around you for use in the fight, it was a pretty solid system. Although its achilles heel turned out to be the classic fighting game kiss of death i.e. animation priority, meaning enemies could interrupt your combos yet you could not theirs. On the whole it's a pretty unique take on the brawler genre, with one of the best recreations of Hong Kong action-cinema this side of Sleeping Dogs. Of course, the less said about the other sections of the game where you were thwacking trash-cans off hapless guards in by-the-numbers stealth sections, and taking part in some extremely boring gunplay, the better.