A good example is Elex. It's got a good world/story, fun factions, it looks pretty good, exploration is interesting and fun. But the combat is horrific. Balancing is terrible. You'll find high level enemies right next to low level ones. The actual gameplay is so bad.

And you'll see it repeated over and over on the reviews on the steam page.

Some people claim it gets better if you stick with it, and I did because I was playing it over a holiday. My experience was they're wrong, it never gets better.

Likewise, interesting and fun mechanics don't necessarily create a fun game.

Take EVE Online. I love the ideas of the game. There are no rules (As long as you're not hacking/cheating) to what players can do. You can scam people. You can kill noobs (Though if you're in high-security space, you'll be instagibbed by CONCORD, essentially the space police). And the fact that losing your ship means its GONE means there's always a demand for crafted goods. Skills are learned over time whether you're playing or not, so you don't need to grind.

But...the actual gameplay is boring as hell [0].

[0] https://youtu.be/4c6jafaiPh8?t=66

(ALWP) I mean, obviously plenty of people do love Eve Online, but the micro-mechanics shown in the video are awful. Compare to Dark Souls (again) where pretty much every combat is interesting (and has better be because you’re gonna redo it a lot until you crack it).

OTOH, I found the mechanics of the recent Spider-Man game kind of fun, but the macro game is just endless repetition. Which feels true of a lot of AAA games these days.

The PS4 Spiderman is a gorgeous game with amazing combat and parkour!

Me and my wife both cringed really hard to the repetitiveness and the blandness of the characters however. Tons of plot inconsistencies!

Grief, yes, I found it ridiculously hard to actually care about the characters. They should have had a plot where the villain was sucking all of the interesting out of people. Just travelling through the city was way more fun.