10 Great Video Games That Didn't Get Good Until Halfway Through

First impressions are a tricky thing. While you know that sometimes your initial reaction isn't always the 'right' one, it can be hard to simply ignore a gut feeling telling you how to act. 

In gaming, these can be killers. 

While you want to give that brand new game you just dropped a tidy sum of money on a chance, the reality is that most titles have precious little time to hook the player in and convince them to stick it out for the long haul. As more and more gamers admit they never finish most of the games they buy, that hook is crucial. 

That's kind of a shame, though, isn't it? Just like movies, there are many games that use a slow start to build into something far greater. If only we'd stick with them for the duration, the sum of those parts easily becomes the real talking point...

When you think of Zelda games, you tend to think of grand adventures, perilous dungeons and larger-than-life bosses. What you don't usually think of, is spending hours completing monotonous daily tasks for every villager that crosses your path.

Yet, that's exactly how Twilight Princess begins.

The first several hours essentially serve as a glorified tutorial that will have most experienced Zelda players tearing their hair out. It's a painful dose of boredom, but it does serve a purpose as these opening moments help to establish a world that is about to be torn apart by cataclysmic events. Without such a slow opener, the unique narrative that unfolds in the latter parts of Twilight Princess would not pack the same emotional punch.