10 Well-Reviewed Video Games We TURNED ON After Launch

While reviews certainly aren't an objective indication of a game's quality, they are generally a solid rule of thumb. If a game lands over 80 on Metacritic, for instance, it's usually pretty good.

But it's also fair to say that there's sometimes a gulf between the opinion of critics and players en masse, enough that once the honeymoon period of a game's release window has passed, paying customers might start to admit they just don't like it very much.

And that's absolutely the case with these 10 video games, each of which received great-to-rave reviews from the assembled gaming press, but within a few weeks or months of them coming out, the general player reception had soured considerably.

Perhaps the developers added something nasty to the game post-launch which seriously compromised the experience, or it's simply that folks forking over cash to play games have somewhat high expectations than those reviewing them.

Either way, there's a clear disconnect between the sky-high Metascores of these games and how they ended up being dogpiled by players at large once the launch period was out of the way...

Bayonetta 3's Metascore of 86 placed it just a few points below its predecessors - which rock a 90 and 91 respectively - but seemingly confirmed it to be a worthy sequel.

And yet, few acclaimed recent video games have fallen off as hard as this. While Bayo 3 certainly isn't hated, in the months following its release the utter indifference about its existence crept in, with the game damn-near vanishing from the cultural conversation entirely.

Primary criticism was levelled against its lackluster story, being forced to play missions as Jeanne, and its technical performance, with many feeling that the game was held back from building on its predecessors by the Switch's ageing hardware.

While critics and fans alike generally agree that the third game is the worst of the trilogy, fans have taken a far harder line in that regard, indicating a much larger gulf of quality between it and what came before.

Though even polarising games tend to invite passionate debate among fans, the saddest thing about Bayonetta 3 is that it's largely fallen off the face of the Earth since releasing barely a year ago.