Game Reviews
Forgotten by Time, Still Good: PS3 Games That Fell Out of the Conversation
- Platform
- PS3
Part 3 of the thread The PlayStation shelf
- Eleven games averaging 79 on the review scores in my list. People did play these. Then the world moved on.
- Split/Second and Blur were two of the best arcade racers of the era, and both studios were closed within a year.
- Heavenly Sword never left the PS3, and Asura's Wrath never left its generation. The originals are still the only way in.
- Binary Domain had you giving your squad orders by voice in 2012, and almost nobody remembers it.
The PS3 era was full of a particular kind of game: solid, mid-budget, reviewed somewhere in the high 70s or low 80s, sold well enough, and then evaporated. No remaster. No sequel. Often no studio anymore.
These aren't hidden gems, exactly. People bought them, reviewers liked them, and some of them had big stars attached. They just fell out of the conversation. These are the eleven on my list that fit that description, and their review scores in my list average 79.
The shortlist at a glance
Scores are the review scores I keep next to each game in my list.
| Game | Made by | Score | Where to play it now |
|---|---|---|---|
| Binary Domain (2012) | Sega's Yakuza team | 76 | PS3, Xbox 360, PC |
| Enslaved: Odyssey to the West (2010) | Ninja Theory | 82 | PS3, Xbox 360, PC |
| Heavenly Sword (2007) | Ninja Theory | 79 | PS3 only |
| Asura's Wrath (2012) | CyberConnect2 | 71 | PS3, Xbox 360 |
| Singularity (2010) | Raven Software | 76 | PS3, Xbox 360 |
| Dark Sector (2008) | Digital Extremes | 72 | PS3, Xbox 360, PC |
| Mirror's Edge (2008) | DICE | 79 | PS3, Xbox 360, PC |
| Brütal Legend (2009) | Double Fine | 82 | PS3, Xbox 360, PC |
| Bulletstorm (2011) | People Can Fly and Epic | 84 | Full Clip Edition on PS4, Xbox One, Switch, PC |
| Split/Second (2010) | Black Rock Studio | 84 | PS3, Xbox 360 |
| Blur (2010) | Bizarre Creations | 82 | PS3, Xbox 360 |
The squad shooter and the odyssey
Binary Domain
Made by Toshihiro Nagoshi's team at Sega, the same people behind Yakuza. It's a third-person shooter set in a flooded, near-future Tokyo, fighting robots that come apart piece by piece as you shoot them: blow off a leg and it crawls after you, take the head and it starts shooting its friends.
The clever part was the trust system. Your squadmates remember how you treat them, whether you shoot them by accident, whether you give good orders, whether your answers in conversation are any good, and it changes how they fight and how the story plays out. And you could give those orders by talking into a headset, in 2012. It's clever, ambitious, and forgotten almost immediately after release.
Binary Domain. Screenshot from the PC release's store page.
Enslaved: Odyssey to the West
Ninja Theory's loose retelling of the Chinese classic Journey to the West, moved to an overgrown, post-apocalyptic America. Andy Serkis played Monkey and helped direct the performances, and Alex Garland co-wrote the script. It's more about two people learning to trust each other than it is about the combat, and it's better for it. It's also one of the few games of its era that was genuinely green: a ruined New York swallowed by plants instead of the usual brown and gray.
Enslaved: Odyssey to the West. Screenshot from the PC release's store page.
The rest of the shelf
Heavenly Sword was Ninja Theory's first big game and an early PS3 exclusive, with Andy Serkis again, this time as the villain. It was never remastered or ported, so the PS3 disc is the only way to play it. It did get an animated movie in 2014, which is more than most PS3 exclusives got.
Asura's Wrath is an anime you mostly play through quick-time events, structured like a TV season with episodes and "next time" previews, and deeply proud of how big it gets. At one point you fight something the size of a planet. Its real ending was sold separately as downloadable content, and it never made it past the PS3 and Xbox 360.
Singularity is Raven Software's shooter set on a Soviet island where time has gone wrong, with a glove that ages enemies to dust or restores broken objects. Raven became a Call of Duty support studio not long after, and the PC version was pulled from sale.
Dark Sector is a third-person shooter built around a throwing glaive you can steer in flight. Its studio, Digital Extremes, went on to make Warframe, and the glaive came along with it.
Mirror's Edge is first-person parkour across bright white rooftops, with a look nothing else had in 2008. It got a follow-up, Catalyst, in 2016, and then nothing.
Brütal Legend is Double Fine's heavy-metal action game, starring Jack Black as a roadie dropped into a world made of album covers, with Ozzy Osbourne, Lemmy and Rob Halford in the cast. The open-world action is great. The real-time strategy battles it turns into late on are where people split.
Bulletstorm scores you for creative kills, with points for kicking enemies into cacti and the like. It's the one on this list that did get a second life, with the Full Clip Edition in 2017, and then it went quiet again.
The racers
The PS3 era had a great run of arcade racers, and two of the best came out within a couple of weeks of each other in May 2010, right against each other.
Split/Second turned the track itself into the weapon. You fill a meter by drafting and drifting, then trigger Power Plays: explosions, falling cranes, collapsing buildings, even a whole section of the course changing shape in front of the cars ahead.
Blur put real licensed cars into Mario Kart-style combat, with power-ups like Shunt, Barge and Nitro, and a strong online mode. It came from Bizarre Creations, the Project Gotham Racing team.
| What happened | Split/Second | Blur |
|---|---|---|
| Released | May 2010 | May 2010 |
| Score in my list | 84 | 82 |
| The studio | Black Rock Studio, closed in 2011 | Bizarre Creations, closed in 2011 |
| Sequel | Never | Never |
| PC version | Pulled from sale | Pulled from sale |
Two excellent racers, released head to head, and both of their studios were gone within a year.
Heads up
This is the whole category's problem. Games tied to closed studios and expired car or music licenses are the ones most likely to disappear for good. If one of these matters to you, a physical copy is the safest bet. I wrote about keeping your own copies in preserving your own collection.
Why games like these vanish
The same few patterns show up again and again in this list:
| Pattern | Examples |
|---|---|
| The studio closed or changed jobs | Black Rock and Bizarre Creations closed; Raven moved to supporting Call of Duty |
| The licenses expired | Real cars in Blur, licensed metal in Brütal Legend |
| Stuck on its platform | Heavenly Sword on PS3; Asura's Wrath on PS3 and Xbox 360 |
| The middle disappeared | Almost all of them: the twelve-hour, one-and-done, mid-budget action game mostly stopped being made |
That last one is the big one. Games got bigger, or smaller, and these were in between.
Which is exactly why they're worth playing now. They're a snapshot of a kind of game that doesn't really get made anymore.
The famous side of the PS3 is in the heavy hitters, and the smaller, stranger side in PS3 hidden gems.