Everyone wants to be first to the punch. Whether it’s inventing a whole new genre, or merely riding a trend, most video game developers strive to do something new before anyone else—or at least not miss out on something. Sometimes this kind of behavior leads to herding, which can be bad for sales and fans alike, but this is also the drive behind a lot of the greatest games of all time. Particularly when talking about the less objective qualities of a game, the difference between “innovative” and “derivative” can be a year or two.

Occasionally, though, it goes beyond mere ingenuity or successful trendspotting. Sometimes, a legitimately great game, or a great idea within an otherwise less great game, happens to pop up later than it should’ve. This isn’t the same as saying a complete clone should’ve come out before its progenitor; we’re talking about those games that really should’ve gotten more attention than they did, whether justified or not, but were too late to get it.

While even a few weeks might have made the difference for a few of the titles in this list, all of them would have done something great, if only they were released a decade ago... give or take a year or two. Maybe they’re still great now and would’ve just been better, or maybe they aren’t relevant at all now, but either case, the timing is everything!

If you prefer to hear about games that are not great at all, we’ve also got a list of Awful Games That Actually Got Funded Through Kickstarter.

15 Yooka Laylee

Yooka Laylee
Via: Engadget
Yooka Laylee

At first glance, there’s little to complain about in Yooka Laylee. Made by Playtonic Games, alumni from Banjo-Kazooie developer Rare, the game has a great sense of style that is faithful to its spiritual predecessor while remaining distinct, and it was even crowdfunded, giving the developers license to make it as they intended it.

Yet, as the reviews rolled in, something became clear: Yooka Laylee was good, but not great. Many were quick to liken it to Banjo, often positively, but this also betrayed a disconnect in time. Rare had already taken undertaken a similar endeavor ten years after the original Banjo-Kazooie with Nuts & Bolts; nearly another ten years later, Yooka Laylee was seen as doing much the same thing in a genre, and for an audience, that had already moved on. Had such a retooling occurred shortly after Nuts & Bolts, Yooka Laylee might have been the new set of skin that Rare’s brand of collect-a-thon needed. In 2017, though, it’s a bit past its prime.

14 Kill The Bad Guy

Kill The Bad Guy
Via: Gamespot
Kill The Bad Guy

Many gamers have become accustomed to the prevalence of indie games over the last decade. Mainly due to Steam Greenlight (now Direct) and other platforms designed with the little developers in mind, the preponderance of indie titles has yielded gems of all kinds—from those indistinguishable from AAA titles to those that would be better placed in Newgrounds or Kongregate.

Kill The Bad Guy walks a nebulous line between the two; on one hand, the mechanics are surprisingly deep for such a minimalist veneer, yet the simplicity of its design makes comparison (or confusion) with flash games inevitable. Years ago, Kill The Bad Guy might not just be a fun title, but a revolutionary one, whose presentation bucks expectations on both sides of the spectrum. It’s still enjoyable in 2017 despite competition with titles of similar stylistic persuasion, but one can’t help but wonder whether it’s worth the price tag.

13 Lords Of The Fallen

Lords of the Fallen
Via: Escapist
Lords of the Fallen

In my list of critically dubious games still worth trying, I made the argument that Necropolis, addictive and beautiful, fell victim to the now-passé practice of comparison with Dark Souls. Recently, it seems any game with even a passing similarity to Soulsborne titles, particularly if they’re difficult, will inexorably be subject to the same line of criticism.

Lords of the Fallen proves this groupthink isn’t a new proposition. While it is impossible to ignore the Souls influence, the innovations Lords of the Fallen presents, such as mechanics that explicitly reward taking risks with gained experience, were deafened by critical reductionism. While the game is too indebted to the Souls series to say it even could have been released ten years ago, as Demon’s Souls was a 2009 release, had it been released at any time earlier in the timeline of Dark Souls hysteria, it very well could have shined much brighter than it did in 2014.

12 Resident Evil 7: Biohazard

Resident Evil 7
Via: VG247
Resident Evil 7

As lazy franchises go, Resident Evil was, for a long time, one of the worst offenders After a trifecta of exceptional titles, rounded off by the classic Resident Evil 4, there were already signs that Capcom would be milking this cash cow; namely, a remake of the original and a few terrible offshoots. Still, the main series had, for years, maintained a reputation for critical acclaim, until Resident Evil 5. Resident Evil, as with Silent Hill and many other monolithic survival horror franchises, arbitrarily decided that the genre was dead, ushering in a decade of action-adventure shooters that were middling at best, and downright embarrassing at worst.

Then, Resident Evil 7: Biohazard happened. This was, of course, brought on by a number of more daring survival horror games that took risk when Capcom wouldn’t. But what if they had? What might the survival horror landscape look like if Resident Evil 7—by all means a technically and conceptually excellent game—had come out as Resident Evil 5?

11 République

Republique
Via: Gaming Trend
Republique

Unlike a lot of the rest of the entries on this list, République seemingly utilized all the conventions of the modern generation of video games to its advantage. One of the few story-driven, critically acclaimed iOS games (so much so that it expanded to a console release), République took the dive into episodic content long before it would be confirmed as a viable means of packaging content. Even its concept seemed timely, mixing the stealth genre, which had made a comeback with games like Dishonored, with various hacking-related mechanics.

Unfortunately, as the decade wore on—and the episodes were released—the story increasingly became the point of contention among an otherwise satisfied critical audience. The story of a strong young woman, “Hope” in this case, fending off a totalitarian state with her friends may not be a popular conceit in video games, but it became more and more common within media at large. The reviews reacted accordingly, dropping with time, until ultimately there was very little talked about at all.

10 Neverwinter

Neverwinter MMO
Via: GameCrate
Neverwinter

It’s exceptionally difficult to break into the high fantasy MMO genre in a meaningful capacity. The blame can be placed partly on World of Warcraft, as I have argued, but regardless of who or whatever lies at the heart of this difficulty, the fact remains that it is self-evidential; even Bethesda had trouble getting The Elder Scrolls Online off the ground, and they had just come off the incredible success of Skyrim.

Neverwinter released to little fanfare, despite beating ESO to the punch and using a free-to-play model. The reviews were good, and even if the backstory and general concept weren’t new—building off Dungeons & Dragons’ “Forgotten Realms”—the focus on well-crafted stories and quests was well-received. It’s hard to deny, then, that the timing had a lot to do with it: WOW crowded the market with its monolithic success, while ESO stole whatever thunder Neverwinter might have made through word-of-mouth thereafter. All of this could have been achieved years ago, though, which is the real tragedy.

9 Narcosis

Narcosis
Via: IGN
Narcosis

Like Neverwinter, Narcosis received mixed-to-positive reviews on release. Being a relatively recent game—it came out in March of this year—many expected this underwater survival horror game to take off. But it never did, failing to gather even 200 reviews on Steam, even if those reviews were exceptionally positive. Why?

Unfortunately, despite the completely different approach, Narcosis was subjected to a litany of comparisons, almost exclusively to critically acclaimed titles. SOMA, the atmospheric underwater sleeper hit, presents an eerily similar vibe to Narcosis. Likewise, the darker depths of Subnautica are perhaps even more comparable, due to similar oceanic mechanics. And of course, the “stalking around in a creepy underwater environment” trope was mastered by BioShock long ago. Out of these games, Narcosis came last in the order, but it’s hardly derivative, being the most realistic experience. If it came out just a few years earlier, it might have been better received, much less as a much darker juxtaposition with BioShock. But who knows? It’s still in the year of its release, and will hopefully get some well-deserved attention.

8 Dead Rising 4

Dead Rising 4
Via: Gameranx
Dead Rising 4

Different people like different things about the original Dead Rising. If you were in it for the more hardcore elements—the constant timer, possibility of losing the game from a single missed opportunity, etc.—then it’s not surprising that Dead Rising 4 probably isn’t your thing, nor would it ever be. That being said, the original was as much about the humor as it was a serious zombie-killing experience. I mean really, how can’t that be the case when you’re slashing open mall zombies in a Mega Man outfit?

So, since Dead Rising 2 was changing things massively anyway, why didn’t they go all the way like 4 did? The new, humorless protagonist, on a mission to save his daughter, was a drastic change, and one that ultimately many found ill-fitting. Doubling down on a self-serious plot while your character wears a banana hammock really wasn’t the best move, and by the time they corrected this with this year’s latest rendition, many of those original fans were already turned off.

7 Thief

Thief 2014
Via: Gamespot
Thief 2014

Rebooting a franchise so influential that its own competition had already taken notes from it is no small feat. Still, it’s hard to say that exactly why Thief inspired so much ire. Some people claimed the linearity was a problem, while others found no issue with the level design. The same was the case with a lot of the game’s elements, particularly the new voice actor for the famed protagonist, Garrett.

But there’s something to be said about the timing, coming from two fronts; that it was released in a time where (quasi-)open worlds and/or branching paths are often deemed obligatory, particularly coming off the release of the original Thief-inspired hit Dishonored, likely contributed to the frustration many had with this new iteration. This difference from the original series might also have been better received if it were released following Deadly Shadows, considering that it also played with convention, delving at points toward survival horror.

6 Call Of Duty: Advanced Warfare

Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare
Via: Hardcore Gamer
Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare

It’s hard to pick which Call of Duty game is the best—though we have a list for that!—as there are some major distinctions between them, despite the trope that all of the entries are essentially rehashes. Most can be categorized into one of a few time periods and places: WWII, Vietnam, modern conflicts in the Middle East, or future conflicts with some evil force, be it nonhuman entities or mega-corporations. But here’s a different question: would COD be remembered in this way if they just changed up the order of release?

Pluck Advanced Warfare, the best of the “future” trilogy, and place it anywhere in the timeline. Suddenly, it’s a lot harder to call it a rehash. Ironically, this idea of Call of Duty was spawned as a result of two different studios making their own COD-brand games about the future concurrently, meaning that there could have been some level of diversification very easily.

5 Contrast

Contrast
Via: Playstation
Contrast

Contrast is one of those games where critics and fans clash. It received a measly 62 on Metacritic, but a 90% on Steam. And why might that be? Once again, timing strikes. By the time Contrast released, numerous highly stylized platformers had been released to greater or lesser fanfare, the darling among them being LIMBO. LIMBO is, of course, a game that plays with shadows, even if in an entirely unrelated, and arguably entirely aesthetic way.

LIMBO wasn’t the first hyper-stylized platformer, nor Contrast the first to work from the new framework LIMBO initiated, but unfortunately the latter was unfortunately seen as less novel. While credit must certainly be given to the former for having done it first, Contrast’s mix of 2D and 3D dynamics, along with the way shadows are worked into the game mechanically, make it a distinct enough to stand on its own. Still, a few years earlier, and it would’ve likely been viewed as a much more memorable endeavor.

4 Evolve

Evolve
Via: Idigital Times
Evolve

It’s hard not to see Evolve and at least have an inkling of remembrance for Aliens: Colonial Marines; both were big, high-budget asymmetrical shooters made by studios who had success in the past with other titles, and both ended up being massive failures. Evolve, at least, failed more on the monetary front than the critical one, perhaps due to Turtle Rock’s familiarity with the genre.

It’s unsurprising then that the reason it failed was not fully to blame on the actual mechanics of the game. While there certainly was some trouble in balancing modes, monsters, and the game’s design in general, a number of poor decisions regarding the game’s marketing ultimately led to its doom. The massive amount of DLC that came out of Evolve’s multistage strategy continued to enrage fans, from the early onset to the season pass and finally the poorly conceived free-to-play model.

3 Dying Light

Dying Light
Via: Instant Gaming
Dying Light

By the time Dying Light came out, a formula had been figured out by publishers for extracting the most amount of money from a given project. First, have zombies. Then, have weapons. Finally, have some quality you can claim as unique. Whether it's the dozens of voxel-art zombie shooters, survival zombie shooters, squad zombie shooters, or the somewhat less common zombie hack-and-slash, by 2015, the model had run itself through the ringer.

So when Dying Light came along with an original concept by implementing parkour, even in a genre absolutely jam-packed with competitors, it easily became one of the most unique and fleshed-out worlds of its kind. All the pieces for Dying Light were there nearly a decade ago, with the 2000s having already given us a ton of zombie-killing bonanzas and proven parkour in of itself can be a viable genre via Mirror’s Edge. Sadly, it took too long for it all to come together.

2 Mad Max

Mad Max
Via: Playstation
Mad Max

Just as Thief suffered from the expectation of non-linearity, Mad Max too suffered from open world expectations. Unlike Thief, the latter was not as much a matter of inclusion as it was craftsmanship; Mad Max was variously lauded for its reliably dynamic environments and derided for perceived stereotypical or uninspired locales.

What often was not discussed in this meta-discourse, though, is the nature of open world games themselves. That Mad Max is itself as much about the desolate wastes and environmental effects as it is the combat (vehicular or otherwise)—and therefore, liable to become “samey”—was secondary to the expectations associated with an open world game by that time: diversity and visual appeal.

Likewise, the juxtaposition with the largely visually fulfilling Fury Road puts it immediately at odds with a medium whose concerns are different; both are visual, but while that is the chief domain of film, interactivity is the mark of distinction for video games. Taken together, it’s hard to imagine this game doing poorly at a time in which vehicular combat games like Twisted Metal were making a turn for the worse.

1 Battleborn

Battleborn
Via: Battleborn Wiki
Battleborn

Everything about Battleborn would have been better served earlier in time. It’s as though the farther you go back in time, the more likely the game would be to succeed: had they only released before Overwatch—or, you know, just not taunted them pointlessly—they might not have been crowded out of the self-proclaimed “hero shooter” genre.

Had they come a little sooner than that, the harsh comparisons to better, more pure MOBAs wouldn’t have been as prevalent. Even earlier than that, and the over-the-top humor, “wacky” dialogue, cluttered UI, and bombastic color scheme would’ve been more in line with the times. It’s impossible to tell what exactly a Battleborn circa 2009 would’ve looked like, but at the very least, it would probably have not been subject to the a commercial devastation it experienced post-Overwatch.