Games you think are underrated and potential reasons why?

[Dirty Duck]

Knuckles' Chaotix (1995) is one of the only Sonic games that has never received a rerelease of any kind. Despite being part of the Classic Sonic Canon, the most well-respected era of the franchise, it's definitely something of a black sheep and during my time on the internet it has been pretty widely regarded as a bad game.

Main reason for this is due to the game having a mechanic where your character is connected to another via rings that have a sort of rubber band like quality to them. If you get too far away from your partner you're pulled back towards them. When trying to play the game as if its a normal Sonic game this makes the whole thing feel awkward, clunky, and sluggish-you can't pick up speed, and if you attempt to just spin dash the weight of your partner will quickly kill any momentum you have. However, once you stop trying to play it like a normal Sonic game and actually engage with the rubber band mechanic it adds a whole new type of speed. One button makes your partner stand still, meaning you can use them to build up tension before letting go after which the rubber band will ping you off at high speed. You can also throw your partner at enemies or up to a higher area, this allows for an advanced technique where the force of throwing your partner will pull you up, and then you can grab them as you pass them and throw them again to constantly fly off in the direction you throw them-it's finicky but I figured it out on my own towards the end of my playthrough and it truly dawned on me how fun the system is.

The game also looks great, being a title for the short-lived 32x peripheral for the Mega Drive it makes use of a richer array of colours and pixels than the Mega Drive games. The presentation is very cool and quite out there, which goes hand in hand with some weirder mechanics inspired by the game taking place on a sort of fairground inspired island, including choosing your partner via a crane game (complete with 2 'gag' character you can get by accident who will make your life way harder called 'Heavy' and 'Bomb'), and the next level being decided by hitting a bumper that's cycling through them rapidly.
The soundtrack is awesome, some of the best Sonic has had imo:

It also added a plethora of new playable characters that all have their own gimmicks and they all fit right in-quite a feat given that before now most Sonic entries would add at most a single new playable character. While Chaotix as a game hasn't been seen in the franchise since the 32x many of these characters have (I guess regardless of how well your game does a ninja chameleon and a boombox crocodile are obviously keepers).

The game is not perfect-the level design could have forced engaging with the rubber band mechanic more to make the most of the incredibly fun movement, but as it stands levels are a bit empty and you just sort of go "up and right" and so the more advanced schmoovement is mainly used for speedruns rather than to simply play the game. Thankfully despite its lack of popularity amongst the masses it does still have a small speedrun following:

But overall Chaotix is an incredibly weird and fun little title that doesn't deserve to be treated as the red haired step child of the franchise. Being stuck on a poorly selling add-on to the Mega Drive partnered with the somewhat unintuitive new mechanics I imagine most people who played this game played it once or twice when visiting that one friend who owned the 32x, and didn't get ample time to actually figure out how the game is meant to be played. SEGA really should port it to modern systems, as there are far worse Sonic games that have been ported in recent years while Chaotix is left outside alone. Give the people the weird rubber band Sonic game they crave!

(Following on from the mention of playing round a friends, the game can be played two player as well, which would make it the only Sonic game that isn't exclusively an 'appease the younger sibling' type of multiplayer as you actually have to work together to make the game work, unlike how Tails would just constantly get left behind and then float down from the top of the screen while player 1 just played as if Tails was never even there.)