Games that really let you down

[Kae]

For me it was WoW because it wasn't WarCraft III and WarCraft III because instead of WarCraft III the box contained WoW, all I have to say about that is fuck you Gamestop for opening the box and putting the wrong fucking disks inside it at the moment of the sale.
Also Baldur's Gate II because after 10 years of waiting to play it the disk was scratched and it didn't work, so frustrating.

 

[Skops]

I recently finished the first Saw game and I really enjoyed it. Sure the combat was terrible but the atmosphere, puzzles and the simple feeling of dread and foreboding was great throughout the game, this matched with some truly gruesome death traps made a brilliant game...

Until the endings...

To spare those who have not completed the game yet I will not disclose any details but the endings were...well...shit to be quite honest. Terrible endings to a brilliant game where what really let the game down for me.

What games have you played that have let you down in one way or another?

Wait you actually bought the saw game ? i always wondered how that game was , it's good you say ? like worth a buy or rent , sorry im curious i'd like to hear more about this game from a actual customer.

I actually second kidd's opinion. It's actually not a bad game, definitely worth a rent. It's about 75% puzzles though, and not like puzzles that you've seen in the movies.. Puzzles, puzzles. Fuse boxes, steampipes, gear paths, lock picking... those 4 alone will mostly what you'll be seeing. But the end-level puzzles, and other puzzles with enemies are actually really entertaining.

EDIT: Be clear, I'm talking about the first SAW game. There is a sequel, SAW II: Flesh & Blood.. Stay away from that game.. Like, don't even look at it. SAW is solid and surprisingly not horrible, then Flesh & Blood comes out and it's exactly what you're first thoughts of what a SAW game would be like. QE's.. ALL QE's and stupid pre-school puzzles like "what was the color of the walls in the room with the doll in the chair?" I'm not joking...

 

[Abedeus]

Deus Ex and Half Life 2.
Spend months upon months of people wanking them off as the best things ever, and I get two fairly boring games that I didn't like. Yay.

Maybe you just forgot that neither of the games supports DirectX 16 and requires Pentium i0.5 with 12 cores. Or there was too much talking in Deus Ex, also forgivable. Old games without telepathic story-telling, pfft.

OT: Shin Megami Tensei Imagine. I'm a HUGE Shin Megami Tensei fan (Persona, Digital Devil, and DS games) and while the game appeared to be fun (talking to demons to make a contract, summoning them, fighting alongside them and controlling their abilities in real time, defeating other demons...), it soon turned out to be a massive time sink - character walks slowly, fights are slow and clunkly (you have to press a button to ready an ability, then click to use it again, and you can't command your demon to heal you or buff without Tabbing into it), you can control only 1 demon, leveling is extremely slow after 11-12 compared to early levels, the game tells you NOTHING about skills, how to level them, gain new ones, the interface is horrible...

I basically sat down to download it, played 15 minutes and thought to myself "Hmm, I can either keep going at turtle speed, or I can turn on Digital Devil Saga and try to defeat Beelzebub... WHAT AM I STILL DOING HERE?".

Also Neverwinter Nights 2 and Quake Wars. The first one was a massive let-down, the other was pretty cool but the patches ended after 1.4. No new content, and both games are now out-played by their PREQUELS in multiplayer - about twice as many servers in NwN 1 and Enemy Territory as in the sequels.

 

[mrvenom]

The last Alien vs Predator. It SUUUUUCKED. I started off as a small lad with part 2, which in my eyes is still one of the most scary games of all time. (the motion tracker scared the spine out of me)

The last one had collectibles (only the audio logs were good) and horrible level design (5 or 6 different levels which every campaign visited in a random order. And multiplayer was unbalanced.

I will stop now. Tired of ranting.

 

[Idocreating]

I'm sorry guys, but I have to say the first Mass Effect. I absolutely loathed the Mako, all those repetitive, cheaply made side-missions and the combat.

I bought Mass Effect 2 first because i'd finally gotten a sweet PC and wanted something current to stress test it and remembered Yahtzee's review. Really got into ME2, loved the story and gameplay particuarly, although the backstory your lumped with in a fresh file is pretty grim, so I bought ME1 to setup a backstory properly.

Holy mother of chickenlivers I did not transition well to ME1. The story is still there but I slapped the game on Casual difficulty and skipped half the side missions, the controls, the lack of a decent cover system, it all felt like a chore to play. Just so I could get my Shepard's story right.

On topic though, I did buy Duke Nukem Forever and it has some sections that really needed to be chucked out, I can't be arsed to finish the campaign and I doubt it'll be worth it. Over a decade of on/off interest in it and it's a massive let down. An expected letdown, but a letdown nonetheless.

I think how Nintendo handled Zant in Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess was pretty naff too, especially as he's done quite well and comes off as a legitimate threat (And a really creepy one to boot) right up until the end of the game.

I was on the Alpha in July on Battlefield 3, so I know firsthand that I want to buy it, but I feel horrifically letdown by the developers and publishers for continually giving me reasons not to, almost as if their goading me. "GO ON, TRY NOT TO BUY IT. WE KNOW YOU LOVE IT *****!"

 

[Wardi Boi]

Wow, I got pretty excited there too because I also bought the special edition so we're pretty much on the same boat

Still finished though, I'm that determined but if you want to get back into it, I highly recommend Old World Blues; very funny DLC and quite long too with lots of new weapons and stuff

 

[Raika]

Marvel: Ultimate Alliance 2 was a purchase I made after playing its predecessor for hundreds of hours. However, this sequel was watered down, poorly made, and glitchy as hell. Also, you can make any game worse by adding Gambit to it. I don't want to see that walking Popeyes advertisement ever again.

After the stellar 3rd Strike, I had high hopes for Street Fighter IV. What I got was an incredibly lazy, pedestrian snore-fest that exists only to make fighting games marketable to that special subdivision of the casual gaming crowd that sees its casual nature as a mark of shame. There's nothing wrong with a game that does half the playing for you and rewards you for losing, as Street Fighter IV does, as do other games such as more recent installments of the Call of Duty series. As a very devoted fighting game fan, however, I expected a deeper game, and what I got was a game where the best strategy at all times is to hold crouching guard and throw fireballs if you have them.

Wrath of the Lich King was the brass ring for World of Warcraft. The game was at its very peak after the decent "vanilla WoW" and the godawful clusterfuck that was The Burning Crusade. Being a decent raider in Wrath of the Lich King, it was inevitable that World of Warcraft: Cataclysm would excite me. The decisions to phase the quest areas(making group play all but impossible), water down the talent trees(making most classes play exactly the bloody same), and make an absolute mess out of the already dodgy story(Tauren paladins, because... why the hell not?) caused me to lose interest quite rapidly. I canceled my subscription a month after the release of the expansion, and I now play Final Fantasy XIV. Yes, I think that's better than Cataclysm. While we're at it, it's also much better than Rift.

After hearing the obscenely negative backlash, I expected Duke Nukem Forever to be unplayable ass. I was disappointed. The game is really quite average.

 

[kickyourass]

This is probably more me then the game but Resident Evil 4, I'm sure it is a wonderful game, but the aiming, good lord in heaven, the aiming. I'm sure it's fine once you get used to it, when one has chainsaw wielding zombies blocking their path in a very confined space, they do not have time to get used to a control scheme that is almost completely different to everything they've ever played.

But a game where the game actually had the problem, Dead Rising. Between the unreadable small text, insane difficulty, save points that flat out refused to work and weapons degradation (Which I think should be a floggable offence) it was barely playable.

Yeah, I was lucky enough to get the Wii version, which completely fixes all those problems

Which Wii version? Both games have one.

 

[GrimGrimoire]

Farcry 2.
Don't get me wrong, It is one of my favorite singleplayer fpss (pural of fps) and I enjoyed it quite a lot.
But the ending, after doing all the last quests the ending is summed up in a few sentences:
You kill the faction leaders.
You (might) kill your friends.
You shoot yourself or blow yourself up.
The end.

It does not even make sence, you meet the main enemy, he tells you to kill some guys and then kill yourself.
And by the laws of game logic you do as the scary armsdealer gone saint says.

 

[Fiz_The_Toaster]

Brutal Legend, Yeah it was kinda funny and the soundtrack is amazing, other than that?

Stupid condensed RTS structure, lame stage battles, and an ending that was retarded.

Brutal Legends. Pretty much for the reasons that Yahtzee covered pretty well in the reviews.

It was literally a ninja RTS posing as a quirky semi funny rock themed action game starring Jack Black. I was also ridiculously confused as to how little instruction they gave me.

*me* Oh...I see these red dragon things everywhere. What the hell am I supposed to do with them?
*swings axe around* *tries to it it with lightning* *rams a car into it* *tries playing guitar*
Well...I guess it's just there for decorative purposes. :3

*Days later I got stuck at one part and looked up a guide for it.*
*Sees a description of Dragon Statues (or something like that)*
Oh, I wonder what that is. They're just decorative right?
Explanation: Whenever you see one of these Dragons you must free its spirit by using the flame attack with the guitar by holding the X button.

*facepalm* How the hell was I supposed to figure that shit out... >.>

Wait.....that's how you free them???

......goddammit. Seriously, could they have explained that any less in the game?

As I've said a million times... No. Brutal Legend was not, and never will be, an 'RTS in disguise' - unless you specifically play it like one. Is Halo a Beat-Em-Up disguised as a FPS, simply because you can both punch and shoot in it? No, it isn't. Is Brutal Legend a Hack-And-Slash disguised as an RTS, simply because you can both attack stuff on your own and tell troops to attack stuff? Again, no it isn't.

No, what it is is an action game in the framework of an RTS, in which you can direct troops but also attack stuff yourself, and not only that but take direct control of any one of the troops you build - drive any car you make, or ride any beast - and personally use a more powerful form of its attack that's better than anything either of you could do alone. What the game tries to do is teach these elements one by one - a pure combat mission, then a troop directing mission, then a driving mission, then a Double Team mission. Then a stage battle that puts it all together.

However, if you instead didn't put it all together, and rather treated the stage battles like some sort of separate 'RTS sections' where you're supposed to ignore everything you've learned and try to win purely by directing troops and micromanaging and a load of other stuff you do in Starcraft that you're never told to do ever in Brutal Legend, then yeah, it becomes pretty shitty. Just like any game does when you ignore all of its mechanics except one and try to support it on that alone.

But you're right, the game is really, really bad at explaining stuff, so it's kind of its own fault that so many people did this.

I've played Brutal Legend the way it was telling me how to play and I didn't like it after awhile. I've never liked RTS games and I was hoping that this game would be different but it hasn't changed my mind about it. Stage battles I thought were interesting at first but towards the end of the game they were annoying, the last stage battle in particular was a pain in the ass.

The game explained well enough what you had to do and it was up to the player if they wanted to do that. Towards the end I felt like I had to create a big enough army before I could do anything that I wanted to do which was to go after the other stage. I can appreciate what was going on in the game and what it was trying to do, but it wasn't enough for me to really really like it. It was ok, but not enough for me to play it again.

 

[Tallim]

Devil May Cry 2 - Ugh what a shambles, I barely acknowledge its existence now, horrendous sequel to an awesome game. Good thing 3 was so amazing....

 

[slavec]

Fable II. I played the original Fable six or seven times before I got bored of it, and I still think it's a really good and fun game. It was funny, the art style was great and the combat system was pretty good (but unbalanced). Years later when my computer decided to die on me I bought an Xbox360 and Fable II. I had heard of the criticism, but I thought that I could handle it.

I couldn't. Fable II is perhaps the most annoying game I have ever played. To me it felt like the original Fable done badly. The voice acting was bad as well as the writing. This is the ONLY game that I play with my tv muted because the voices are that bad. The controls pissed me of too, but that can be blamed on the fact that I played it on a console instead of a computer. The story is atrocious if you played Fable before, because it's exactly the same story as the first one, minus the likable characters, fun locations and the interesting villain. It's boring all the way through.

Oh, and I tried playing as a girl, and the way the handle a woman becoming tougher and gaining muscles simply hurts the eyes. Because after physical upgrade 2 or 3, you're basically a man with breasts. They didn't even bother to make it feminine.

 

[GonzoGamer]

The moment I saw this thread title I immediately thought Child of Eden, Rez ranks as one of my all time favourites that I can still play through from start to finish and love every minute of it so on finding there was a pseudo-sequel I was pretty excited. I doubted it would live up to the original but as long as it was decent that would be fine particularly as on rail shooters are a very rare breed now. I've tried and tried to like Child of Eden but I just find it dull and boring making it a real drag to play through, nothing like Rez at all. I can't think of any other game I feel so badly let down by

John

I've been looking forward to that one. Maybe I'll just rent it first even if it is a cheap one. I've never played a game by Q that disappointed me.

The biggest disappointment of the past few years for me was Fallout New Vegas. If the game had actually worked, it would've only been as disappointing as GTA4 or Burnout Paradise(and that's a close second): in that it's far inferior to a previous release. However, that game was so incredibly broken. It's too bad because it was obviously built for multiple playthroughs but after my first, I was so done with it. And I was expecting it to be buggy...just not that much.

 

[hazabaza1]

Deus Ex and Half Life 2.
Spend months upon months of people wanking them off as the best things ever, and I get two fairly boring games that I didn't like. Yay.

Maybe you just forgot that neither of the games supports DirectX 16 and requires Pentium i0.5 with 12 cores. Or there was too much talking in Deus Ex, also forgivable. Old games without telepathic story-telling, pfft.

Or maybe it's because they were both shit.
Gameplay was standard and boring, voice acting and characters annoyed me in both, and neither of them had any gripping story.
Also, I'm not even a major PC gamer so your whole parody on me thinking the graphics are shit or whatever falls flat.
Oh, and that whole thing about there being too much talking? Yeah, say that to the guy playing through Persona 3+4 again. Talking doesn't bother me. Talking with terrible voice acting does.

So hey, any other arguments with no basis you want to bring in to protect your precious games from somebody else's dreaded opinion?

 

[CrashBang]

God Of War 3 was just awful! The gameplay was great, as always, and the bosses were all awesome but the story and atmosphere were bleh! Kratos had no motivation left, he completely destroyed the world for no good reason at the end purely because he was more rage-fueled than a Red Lantern and I'd forgotten why by that point! What a massive disappointment. I still play it because the gameplay saves it, to a degree, but it's still not a good game.

 

[Abedeus]

Deus Ex and Half Life 2.
Spend months upon months of people wanking them off as the best things ever, and I get two fairly boring games that I didn't like. Yay.

Maybe you just forgot that neither of the games supports DirectX 16 and requires Pentium i0.5 with 12 cores. Or there was too much talking in Deus Ex, also forgivable. Old games without telepathic story-telling, pfft.

Or maybe it's because they were both shit.
Gameplay was standard and boring, voice acting and characters annoyed me in both, and neither of them had any gripping story.
Also, I'm not even a major PC gamer so your whole parody on me thinking the graphics are shit or whatever falls flat.
Oh, and that whole thing about there being too much talking? Yeah, say that to the guy playing through Persona 3+4 again. Talking doesn't bother me. Talking with terrible voice acting does.

So hey, any other arguments with no basis you want to bring in to protect your precious games from somebody else's dreaded opinion?

Considering Persona 3 and 4 are on PS2, and Deus Ex came out a year after GPU was created, that's a poor argument.

Neither of those games I like that much. Frankly, Deus Ex bored me as well. But you really expected thrills from 11 and 7 year old games? And one of them was a sequel, of course the story isn't amazing if you are not interested in it from the first game...

You are entitled to opinion. However, what I got from your post is "I bought two old games for $5 or less each and I didn't like them, boring.", no argument, no explanation, no nothing.

 

[hazabaza1]

Considering Persona 3 and 4 are on PS2, and Deus Ex came out a year after GPU was created, that's a poor argument.

...Amount of talking=graphics?

Neither of those games I like that much. Frankly, Deus Ex bored me as well. But you really expected thrills from 11 and 7 year old games? And one of them was a sequel, of course the story isn't amazing if you are not interested in it from the first game...

You are entitled to opinion. However, what I got from your post is "I bought two old games for $5 or less each and I didn't like them, boring.", no argument, no explanation, no nothing.

Well, people always said that Deus Ex is dar bestest thing evar and that whole "somebody reinstalls it" whatchamajigger.
And on the Half-Life 2 front, pretty much everyone said that you don't need to play the first one to get into the story of the second.
And fair enough. Sorry if I came off hostile, past experiences show me that when you comment on Deus Ex not being very good, the first reply you get will be from some raging fanboy angry that you spat on his bible.

 

[ikyda1]

mass effect!!! all bark no bite!!! i think am the only person world that thinks the game is boring and uninteresting and its only popular coz of the fox news coverage about the make out scenes