20 LAZIEST Video Game Re-Releases They Thought You'd Buy

A recent series brought back from the dead via re-releases, Legacy of Kain doesn’t hold much of the good will or name recognition that a lot of the games being remastered and dropped onto new hardware lately. Yet, just two years ago Aspyr served up Legacy of Kain: Soul Reaver 1 & 2 Remastered – overhauled versions of the franchise’s second and third games, from 1996 and 1999 respectively – and this did well enough to justify more.

This year saw the return of Legacy of Kain: Defiance, the 2003 game continuing the epic story of vampire Lord Kain as he travels back in time and into the Land of Nosgoth's past, attempting to save it from an age of desolation. Bundled in a shiny new package for eighth and ninth gen consoles, the remastered game came with improved visuals, a new camera system and accompanying redefined geometry to accommodate this, plus a new Foresight wayfinding ability to bypass the hours of tedium we used to spend figuring out what games of this era wanted us to do.

But it needed more careful tweaking, tinkering and upgrading from developer PlayEveryWare to make it worth the money – most notably in the combat and gameplay. There’s no escaping that it was an old ass game, but it still felt like an old ass game. It was routine, repetitive and rapidly becomes boring, failing to live up to modern standards, and making the whole enterprise seem futile.