Mass Effect 2. The first Mass Effect is probably one of my favourite games of all time, if only for the sheer scope of the world building. It took itself seriously. It didn't play fast and loose with its own rules and tailored the story and events to them, not the other way around. Sure the shooting was clunky, levelling up was a chore and the graphics, not the aesthetics, were kinda janky. For me Mass Effect 2 had some serious big shoes to fill. And what did it do? It pissed in them. All that world building that happened in the first game, gone. Internal consistency, gone. Subtlety was exchanged for bombast. The Reapers went from ancient, unknowable machine gods to mustachio twirling Saturday morning cartoon villains. Paragon and Renegade options went from being fairly subtle and able to switch between the two and still have a pretty consistent character, to space Christ and passive aggressive to downright psychotic. The world is essentially a series of corridors as opposed to the sprawling open levels of the original. Side missions end up being a series of minigames and shooting galleries with no sense of what you were do or why, and often end with artificial and contrived binary morality choices that don't mean anything. I'm also confused why Cerberus is now a big deal when you only encountered them in maybe three side missions in the original. There really was no reason for them to be a big deal. In fact, it would have made more sense if Shepard stayed with the Alliance in the second game than to be killed off and brought back to life by Cerberus. You can keep the Collectors in, as pointless as they were, and have Shepard investigate missing colonies for the Alliance, as dumb as that plot was. Actually, that nicely sums up my thoughts on the game: just kinda dumb. That being said it wasn't a bad game. The combat was tightened up significantly and the classes felt pretty distinct.
I would also say Halo 4, but to be disappointed would mean that I wasn't expecting it to be an obvious cash-in.
