7 Games With An Amazing Mechanic That You Have To Experience

Taking a sprint away from all your Elden Rings, Red Dead Redemption 2s, and The Witcher 3: Wild Hunts, I strongly believe certain games don’t get enough credit sometimes for everything that they bring to the table. Of course, I can’t be ignorant of the overall quality of a title, because that’s what determines its subsequent rating and reception.

Still, on some occasions, underrated or negatively rated games pull off that one thing so perfectly, that no other game can imagine replicating it. The feature at hand, therefore, is a celebration of all these underrated aspects of particular games, may those be a story element, gameplay, world-building, level design, or entirely something else, that stands out incredibly well. 

If Nothing Else, These Games Got This One Feature Just Right 

In case I miss out on a gem that you’d like to see included here, make sure to talk about it in the comments section, since the forthcoming entries are all something that I talk about from personal experience.  

1. The Just Cause Titles With Their Grappling Hook And Traversal 

While the Just Cause franchise by Avalanche Studios can’t be in the same category as other mega-hit action-adventure third-person shooters, I know why I find myself returning to these games, preferably Just Cause 3, time and time again—all because of its spectacular traversal.

The series deserves much recognition for the way it handles the grappling hook mechanic, arming Rico with not just a tool to get around everywhere faster, but to propel his foes against each other and wreak unmitigated environmental destruction. You’ve got to play it to believe it, and my recommendation to you for getting started with the franchise is Just Cause 2. Can’t go wrong with that one.

2. Portal With Its … Well … Portals

The common consensus around the development of the Portal series is that coding and designing portals is relatively easy — all things considered — but intertwining them in levels where they just make perfect sense is a whole different story on its own. And evidently, Valve nailed it on the head with the Portal games, making a duo of puzzle platformers that stay relevant even to this day. 

Oh, and Portal 2 happens to have one of the most mind-boggling endings in gaming history. It’s nothing to sleep on. 

3. Days Gone With Its Implementation Of Zombie Hordes

While Bend Studio’s very first project focusing on an open-world setting wasn’t as much of a big hit among fans and critics as the developer had wanted it to be, Days Gone sure knows how to make hordes of zombies chase after you. The first time that happens is absolutely gut-wrenching, and when you happen to take an entire wave down, the feeling is super energizing.

4. Anthem And Its Remarkable Flight System 

Have a glimpse of the video I embedded above and watch the rest of it unfold yourself. Anthem gets a lot of things wrong with the execution of its open-world setting, but you won’t — not even in a million years — be able to call the game out for its flight mechanic. Thoroughly satisfying, well-built, and seamlessly transitional from flying to shooting, this BioWare effort is worth trying out, even in 2024.   

5. The Order: 1886’s Cinematic Emphasis

Ready at Dawn genuinely put out something tremendously high-quality in the name of The Order: 1886 back in 2015 for the PlayStation 4. It’s a game that manages to hold its own graphically even in 2024, and the reason I decided to include it in this list is because of the third-person shooter’s emphasis on cinematography and the way it presented the concept of its world. 

I always took the game for what it was and enjoyed amusement in it afterward. Yes, the game is quite short for a single-player experience, averaging a 7-hour play length, but The Order: 1886 will always have my respect for doing something no other game did back in the day. 

6. Red Faction: Guerilla’s No-Holds-Barred Destruction

When I got my hands on this bad boy back in the day, I couldn’t care less about following the inscribed story missions or side quests. All I needed was my trusty hammer, the open-world environment of Red Faction: Guerilla, and I was golden. The way this one allows you to knock down buildings, devastate environments, and just mess everything up like a dream playground. 

Do yourself a favor and check out this gameplay video of the third-person shooter to gain an understanding of what it lets you do. Certainly one of the best sleeper hits of my childhood, and an underrated gem that handles physics better than games coming out a decade after it. 

7: Ghost Of Tsushima’s Pristine Navigation

Sucker Punch Productions getting denied the Game of the Year award for this game at TGA 2020 is one of the biggest injustices in gaming history, but oh well, you know what they say: It is what it is. Being an outright perfect action-adventure in multiple aspects, one totally unique feature of Ghost of Tsushima is its way of guiding the player on horseback in the direction of their selected quest. 

Swiping up on the touchpad of the DualShock 4 or the DualSense produces a gust of visible wind — officially called the Guiding Wind — that steers you toward the right path without breaking your immersion. There are no map markers when you’re playing, and instead, you get that, which is nothing but pure genius.