Most disapointing game of 2013

[Blacklight28]

Tomb Raider.

I went in expecting an action game with solid characters and an intriguing story like FarCry 3, but I was sorely disappointed.

The shooting was awfully subpar and the platforming tedious with little payoff. I'm struggling to actually remember what they survival elements were because they never seemed to come into play.

There was really nothing captivating about the story, maybe because I just came to really despise Lara as a character. She really just seemed like the devs were just throwing her into as many painful situations as possible while mindlessly babbling "look at how strong our female protagonist is!". Those moments are too frequent to remain shocking, and her scream becomes grating in my ears as I find myself thinking "yeah yeah, now get back up so we can get on with this shit".

And I wont even bother mentioning the quick-time-events.

Glad I only paid $10 for this thing.

 

[Windcaler]

Im going to have to go with the controversy surrounding DMC (and to a lesser extent the game itself). Im a really big Devil may cry fan but Ninja theory took the games I loved and tore away everything that was interesting about them. They got rid of the absurd Dante in favor for the angry teenager Dante, the ruined the combat system by making it easy to get high ranks, and their worst offense of all was outright trolling the DMC fans that made constructive arguments about their game but got "its about the hair" as a response.

If this had been called something else I would be kinder to it but they relied on the DMC liscence to make their game and hope for sales from people like me. They failed in my eyes. I probably just would have passed on the game as is but when Ninja theory trolled us they earned an eternal boycott from me. I will not buy another one of their games because of their immature responses to legitimate consumer concerns. Screw them and their attitude

 

[InfinityX]

any MMO fans out there?
I found Final Fantasy XIV: A realm reborn to be the biggest disappointment. The amount of work they put into their world, and the beauty that the world is (the best looking MMO out there IMO), completely destroyed by SE's greed.

(pre-latest patch)
-A Endgame that revolved on repeating the same one dungeon 12-15 times a week for 3 weeks
-Unacceptable server lag
-Incredibly small world
-A elemental system that doesn't even serve a purpose (but could of)
-Has a cross-class skill system that would be cool, if wasn't so restricted
-story that was good at first, but then became garbage
-Terrible customer service
-Huge Botting troubles
-no respect for the players

(Latest patch)
-Guild housing prices so outrageous that its just a scheme for SE to milk it's players
-They hyped up this beautiful looking raid called "the crystal tower" to be in this patch...except SE didn't let the players inside of it, its just the area before it, and now players got to wait 6 months for it to be opened.
-added vanity items, but no vanity slots

Its really a shame, the game could EASILY be one of the best MMOs out there, but SE F'd up their game just to milk their players. They're worse then EA right now.

 

[Right E O]

Lots of Bioshock Infinite? Well all right. To each his own I guess.

Throw me in for Fire Emblem: Awakening. What do get when you suck all the good level design out of a strategy game? Apparently more shipping fodder and anime boys than you can shake a stick at. I didnt hate this game, but expectations were high and a mediocre game that throws out the old school challenge? Not what I was looking for.

 

[cubikill]

The Last of Us.
I haven't ever been so disappointed in a game ever. Aftere hearing about how the story is the best story ever told in a game. Or how ellie is the most likable character ever voiced. Or the rest of the hype. Needless to say I played it, and didn't agree. It wasn't any of the myriad of issues that I had with inconsistency in tone, rules or character. Rather it committed the cardinal sin of gaming, it was boring as fuck. I just didn't care about anything. I kept waiting for the game to be more, I kept waiting for it to make an original move. I wanted it to make an original story arch or anything original. Instead it was a boring generic romp with characters I didn't care about. In the end I cannot say I hated the game, seeing as I just can't muster enought feeling about it.

 

[DazBurger]

Half Life 3.
Short and forgettable singleplayer, unplayable multiplayer and terrible graphics.
What a nightmare -_-

And then I woke up...

 

[Kashe]

Disappointed this year?

I didn't buy any games (released in 2013) that I was disappointed in. Bioshock was kinda interesting, but I haven't played many of the games in this list, nor did I really look forward to them.

So meh.

 

[Yopaz]

I think I'll go with Shadowrun Returns here. I am one of the few people who actually liked it, but I was too psyched about it for it to live up to expectations. I was hoping for so much more than what I got. I enjoyed it so I'm not complaining about how the game turned out, but I can understand how some people who are more into Shadowrun feel like they were let down.

That said I have played very few 2013 games this year. Now if you'll excuse me I'm going to play Professor Layton to make sure I at least play it before 2014.

 

[RJ 17]

Huh, somehow forgot that A:CM came out this year. I guess that's how heavily I buried the memory of that game.

Well now that I remember that it did come out this year, I'd really have to pick that as my biggest disappointment seeing as how I'm such a big Aliens fan and had very high hopes for that crusty piece of crap.

For something new (that's likely already been brought up elsewhere in this topic ) and what I had originally intended on mentioning when I came to this topic: Arkham Origins. I absolute loved Asylum, I loved City even more, and I was dead-certain that I was going to love Origins as much as the previous two. I kept telling myself "As long as they don't fuck up the combat then that's all that matters...the game will be great!" And from all the gameplay videos I saw, it certainly looked like the combat was kept intact from the previous games.

Then comes release day. I actually stayed up for a midnight release due to being so eager to get my hands on this game. And guess what? They fucked up the combat. The one thing they had to maintain in order to make the game as enjoyable as the others (at least to play) and the shat all over it. Batman's targeting priority is all fucked up, the enemies are obscenely over-aggressive which forces you to not fight so much as just keep hitting the counter attack button like you're playing Assassin's Creed...this is particularly bad considering the fact that sometimes the counter button just doesn't feel like working, and most of the fights have Batman taking on 15 thugs in an area the size of an apartment's bathroom. God damnit it pisses me off how much they fucked up the combat in that game. What's sad is that I actually kinda did enjoy the story...though it was disappointing that once again Joker turns out to be the main badguy, offering very credible evidence to all the arguments of "They're only going Prequel so they can have Mr. J back in the story again." Look, Joker's my favorite Batman villain too, but I was really hoping that someone else could have the spotlight this time. Still, it wasn't a horrible story. Not the greatest, but not horrible.

I can still somewhat enjoy the game, but it's not nearly as enjoyable as I had hoped.

P.S. Why the fuck give a fast-travel system if towards the end of the game all the Bat-Drop Points are all being watched over by fucking snipers?

 

[sagitel]

.... the vigors were completely out of place ....

well i hear that quite often and there is a simple explanation for it. (this is my theory it may or may not be true.) there is a note from lutece saying that she found vigors in rapture on of the worlds. now you might ask why there is no adam? why no one uses it? why people are not going mad like in rapture? you see i thought that whenever Columbia exists rapture cannot exist the same way that booker and comstock shouldn't exist in the same universe. so lutece goes to rapture. finds a plasmid. uses it in columbia only to fuck the city up and make it another rapture. so she changes the substance a bit and goes to another columbia. where people are driven mad. this happens many times until the vigors are as stable as possible. as we see them in infinite. and why people dont use it? well you dont see them getting promoted and there isnt huge marketing for them. people in columbia are so paraoid against foreign things and change that it will take time for them to use this new technology.

OT: mine goes to splinter cell: blacklist. i had never played any of the splinter cells before. but i had heard many good things about them from my friends. so i borrowed black list from my friend. it was all fine and dandy. i had problems with the plot as i saw the "terrorists" to be the good guys but i managed to not care about the it in the missions. yes some problems were there that made ubisoft look REALLY lazy (a guy standing in the sunlight and saying: "it looks like a calm night" in farsi and all the guys who spoke farsi were voiced by two people ) then they introduced the snipers. the little pieces of shit knew where i was hiding and held their god damn laser lights on my hiding place for a good 5 minutes. then i got to the mission in Tehran. you see its really important for me that movies and games make a correct portrayal. (i didn't watch argo for that.) the old US embassy is 15 minutes away from home and i see it every day. so the fact that they didn't even use some fucking pictures to recreate how it has changed made me angry. (example: you can never find any portrayal of death in Iran with that sickle and there we have statues with the sickle in the game) then the voicing. oh my god. for the first time i was sad that i understood what they were saying. it was so much on my nerves. the gameplay had become too shitty to forget these issues. and i wont talk about the plot holes. it was a game with good start that was fucked so much it couldn't stand up

 

[soren7550]

I by no means dislike any of these, they just didn't live up to the expectations I had of them:

Pokemon Y
- Not a whole lot of new Pokemon. When they say "there's so many Pokemon, you need three Pokedexs!", you'd think that there'd be more than 70 new 'mons.
- The Fairy type Pokemon were predictably cutesy, girly, and pink. Only three of the Fairy types don't fall into any one of those.
- The gym leaders and Elite Four aren't memorable.
- There's about zero endgame content. There's the Looker missions, that'll take up maybe an hour of your time to finish all of them, and the Battle Mansion. Woopie. Maybe I'm spoiled by G/S/C and HG/SS, but quite frankly, I expect more.
Oh yeah, there's looking for Mega Stones. How riveting.
- The Pokemon riding is underwhelming as well as disappointing. You can only do it in a handful of select areas, and only with the Pokemon that are there for that express purpose. Have your own Gogoat on hand, and/or always dreamed on riding on your Arcanine? Too bad for you, you can't ride them.
- The Mega evolutions for the most part aren't worth the effort. Sure, some of them look cool, and you get a bit of a stat boost/change. But, you do it once or twice, and you're done with it.
- Character customization. To me, customizing the female character felt lacking since most of the clothing options for girls is very girly, so I ended up sticking to the default appearance.

Saints Row IV
- Doesn't feel much like a Saint's Row game. Where's the gangs? Why the superpowers? Aliens?
- Cars are made useless by super sprint & jump.
- No Widowmaker.
- Buggy. Audio files playing for no reason, tattoos appearing and disappearing, getting stuck in/under the environment, missions becoming unbeatable, and so on.

BioShock Infinite
- Not as good as BioShock.
- Enemy types don't vary often.
- Not much variety in guns.
- Often doesn't feel like you're on a city in the sky.
- Skylines don't get featured as much as they should.
- Story gets really confusing.

Diablo III
- Uninteresting story.
- Piss easy.

 

[BloatedGuppy]

Joint for me.

1) SimCity. Between the launch woes, always-online and early problems with things like traffic, and IMO the worst of all - city size being limited to painfully small, they made such a disappointing game of what could have been amazing. I mean, I still play it from time to time, and it's so close to being good which makes it all the more disappointing.

2) Rome 2 Total War. One of my favourite game series of all time. The sequel to my favourite one of the series. And it was broken. Utterly broken. The patches are getting there a bit, but there are still major issues. Sieges, family trees, IG seasons have all taken colossal steps backwards from the first Rome (which came out almost a decade ago.) I played it for a while but it just didnt grip me like Rome 1 or Shogun 2 did. And I so, so wanted to love it. But I don't, yet. Hopefully it gets better with patches and mods but at the moment it is massively disappointing to me.

Perfect post, sums up the issues of both games just right. This would be my vote as well, placed in that order.

 

[someonehairy-ish]

I think possibly Outlast for me. All the reviews I saw of it said it was amazing, but I couldn't get it into it. The enemies act like cliche stereotypes of crazy people, which would probably have been ok if they weren't all made to be obviously evil and monstrous looking. I've always thought the most terrifying thing about psychopaths is that they seem perfectly ordinary until you find their human eyebrow collection. None of that here.

Plus the big obvious set pieces quickly become absurd if you look at them for very long. I think the fact that nobody reacts to you in those bits is supposed to be creepy, but for me it just made it less threatening and kinda silly instead. It would have been fucking terrifying if the crazy guy just standing there banging his head on the wall suddenly turned round and attacked, or stared at you or something. But again, nope. It feels too fake. Kinda like when you see a picture of the actor playing the villain in a film, being all smiley and having a laugh with the other actors. It makes it much more difficult to take them seriously.

Basically, horror monsters either work when they're completely incomprehensible, like Alien the first film, Lovecraftian creatures, Slenderman, and so on. Or when they're completely believable, like real serial killers. When you're somewhere between the two, you risk losing both the fear of the believable threat, and the fear of the unknown. And that's what Outlast did.

 

[sabercrusader]

Right now, I'm going to say Ni No Kuni. I got it for free a few weeks ago, and don't get me wrong, there's a certain charm to it that really makes me want to like it. But the story is just meh, despite how much I enjoy the considerably dark circumstance for Oliver's character motivation, it's just too slow going, and it's not giving me a good reason to keep going. That, and the combat is simply horrible, absolutely horrible. I hate it. Can't stand it. I want to like the game, it's really charming, Drippy is legitimately funny, but I just can't bring myself to play it.


There's nothing I hate more than getting a game and not even getting close to finishing it, but it looks like that's what is going to happen with this game. A shame really, considering all the praise I've heard for it.

 

[Bashfluff]

5. Saints Row IV.

After hearing so much hype about the game and how fun and creative it was, I picked up the game and gave it a spin. They were right about the creativity of the game, but what they missed was how sparse it was compared to the tedium of the gameplay.

4. Ni No Kuni

The hybrid combat system is a killer. It's not fun to play, even if there are certain draws.

3. Early Access games.

Screw you guys, I can put this here. This is a marketplace that has burned me too many times, full of scams and lazy developers where even reviews won't fully protect you. I can't blame them too much; why would you create an amazing game when you can sell gamers on an idea and stop development right there? The lack of consumer protection and a set of standards kills this entire market. There are no less than ten games I bought this year that I would consider scams. Stay away from Early Access. Far, far away.


2. Aliens.

This is a game that has impact for me even if I didn't play it by way of its dishonest marketing. Everyone has already tackled all the issues with it. My big concerns are how it affects us as an industry.

1. Bioshock Infinite.

Overly pretentious story told in the least intuitive way possible. The gunplay is atrocious, the way you're railroaded from plot point to plot is lazy design. The story seems like they're making it up as they go, and the repetition of the game takes its toll far before the game even starts to get into the thick of it. The reason I hate it so much is that people are praising it so much. It's a bad game, even terrible. Yet because it's Bioshock, it not only gets a pass, but it gets people putting it on a pedestal. We can do better than this, and we should pressure developers to do better than this. This isn't worth more than a 7 out of 10 at best.

 

[Vedrenne]

Diablo III
- Uninteresting story.
- Piss easy.

The story was pretty bad (Lets have Deckard Cain get killed by a character that does sweet f.a. after the beginning of the Second Act).

But how the heck was Diablo 3 easy? Unless you mean post nerf, in which case I agree wholeheartedly, but before the nerfs came in Diablo 3 was nails, especially when using a Witch Doctor.

But this is entirely moot as D3 came out in 2012, not 2013.

 

[blackrave]

Half-Life 3
When it wasn't released I was sooo disappointed
C'mon Valve you can be great again, stop fucking up so much by not releasing games, dammit!

P.S. To be honest HL3 is my most disappointing game of the year since HL2:EP2
P.P.S. Also it shares position with System Shock 3 and Battlezone 3

 

[Danial]

GTA5/Online: it should have been the best game, it was a fantastic game, but playing it made me feel Greasy and uncomfortable. There are anti heroes and then there is playing as he equivalent of a holocaust denier ticked me off, not only that, the heists, by far the best part of the game, show up for like 20 mins and only really make you feel sad that there are not more of them.

Its a good game.. but it was am 8/10 that should have been a 10/10.

 

[teamcharlie]

Bioshock: Infinite. The story.

I basically expected the combat to work about like I saw. Corridors, neat guns, maybe a little more environmental interaction but it worked well enough.

But I wanted a romance. Hero saves princess, they meet-cute or whatever you call it, they bone. And that's largely what the trailers suggested. But apparently if the box doesn't advertise in big bright shiny letters 'ROMANCE!', you aint getting one. Instead, everybody's a monster for reasons that are rarely explained well and everything's awful.

There's some hand-wavey 'But that's the point!' going on, but I don't believe it. Everybody's up in arms about princesses and love stories now, so we can't have them anymore. We can have strippers in DNF, we can have brofists, and we can have heroes. But we cannot have the kind of love that would imply an emotional attachment and heterosexual sex unless that is half the selling point of the game (the ME series, for example). That bums me out.