Your 5 most disappointing games, 2008-2012

[crazyrabbits]

Should have done this in my earlier post. I'll try to stick to short-form reasons why I was disappointed/hated them.

Uncharted 3: Played out Drake and Elena's entire marriage and divorce off-screen. A ridiculous amount of flab and filler levels. An antagonist who was boring (both from a character and plot standpoint), trying to push an agenda that made so little sense it was laughable. Tons of QTE's. Ridiculously cheap deaths. Felt like it was trying to one-up the previous game for no reason. Bizarrely linear and lacking the openness of the prior games. No dual-character puzzle solving. Lots of lame 'running-from-death' sequences. I'd be happy if they never made another installment, honestly.

RAGE: Basically, a poor-man's Borderlands. Uninspired and monotonous gameplay, an aesthetic blatantly copied from other, better works, little to do besides racing, and one of the most anticlimactic endings I've seen in quite some time from a major publisher. Aside from the graphics, it's a complete waste of time.

Metroid: Other M: This [http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/lb_i.php?lb_id=13373815860B43920100&i_id=13373815860I43921400&p=1] is a thorough blog of why the game failed so miserably, but I'll sum it up. Idiotic voice acting. A plot that tried to hard to be like Super Metroid. Utterly ruined most of the backstory and prior characterization of both Samus and Adam Malkovich. Treats the protagonist as a helpless woman who needs to be rescued by others. Upgrades are uninspired and gimped. The story makes Samus a submissive fool who actively puts herself in danger to adhere to one man's code of conduct. Was a complete waste of time from a narrative perspective.

Mass Effect 3: Took a shit all over the prior games' lore and developments. Rehashed multiplayer content for single-player missions. Day-one DLC. Snarky responses from developers in response to the fanbase. Woefully gimped decision/War Asset system that had no bearing on anything. One of the dumbest endings in video game history (pre-EC). No heavy weapons. Pre-order bonuses/DLC on-disc. Plot holes and inconsistencies up the yin-yang. I hope they put this franchise out to die and bury it six feet under.

Force Unleashed 2: Took what was the most enjoyable SW game in years and reduced to a linear slog that had little to do with the first game, and even less to do with the universe or mythology itself. A bog-standard "clone is a good guy" plot. Lame boss battles. Pointless cameos. Boring combat (with dual lightsabers, no less). DLC that relished in killing off main characters. A contrived, sappy ending with no relation to anything beforehand. Just a complete waste of time and resources.

Duke Nukem Forever: It's what Angry Joe once said - it's like waiting 14 years for fireworks. Even if they turn out to be a dud, you still want to see how it turns out. Silly gameplay mechanics (feces-throwing, writing using a gamepad?), painfully unfunny pop-culture references, Duke doing puzzles, weird driving stages where you have to get gas, tasteless levels (The Hive), stupid NPC encounters, restricted two-weapon limit, terrible ending and tacky 90's-meets-2010's gameplay. It should have stayed dead.

 

[StupidNincompoop]

I've played quite a few dissapointing or just plain bad games over the last few years:

APB: All Points Bulletin.

Was promised to be a game which would be like grand theft auto but in a multiplayer environment.

Turned out to be a buggy, laggy mess with many hackers early on, balancing issues, poor driving controls, very little content in terms of gameplay (there were 3 mission types, a "defend" mission, a "escort" mission and a "get item and drop item off" mission. That was about it, there were also 2 minigames, a ram raid minigame where you destroy shop fronts and steal the goods and a chop shop mission, both of which got boring after about half an hour).

It also suffered from issues on windows 7, it wasn't supported at all for 32 bit users and would crash constantly for them.

I spent something like £25-30 on this game.

The servers for the game went offline just 3 months after the game was released. Since it was a multiplayer only game, you couldn't play it at all when the servers were taken offline.

I played it for about 3 hours in total.

Minecraft

Expecting to get lots of hate for this one.

But really, minecraft is about as much of a game as dear ester is. I'd say minecraft is an art program, not a game.

Minecraft is only popular because of the building elements to it. It really might as well have just had the building elements there and never added anything else to the game, because the "gameplay" feels like it was sloppily thrown together in a vauge attempt of making it a proper game.

The AI is (or at least was, haven't played it in a while) too simple and boring. It's missing animations (mostly attack animations, which would tell you when you actually need to block which would have made the blocking feature actually useful). The combat is boring and simple.
There's very little enemy variety.
The art style is inconsistent to say the least (some objects will appear to be quite detailed while others will be simply just a square).
Finding new biomes is pointless because for the most part there's no reason to find them, because there won't be anything new in one biome that you can't find in another. (apart from snow, but snow isn't useful anyway).

And not to mention that minecraft won an award for "innovation". It didn't have any innovation to it because the main point of the game (building) had already been done before years ago. Blockland, Return to blockland, Roblox, Infiminer and Lego and the few lego games that had been made before minecraft.. all of which included building years before minecraft.


I could go on, but i'll stop here.


The walking dead (game)

I actually liked the first 2 episodes of this game, and it looked like it was going to be a game worth the money. Then the 3rd episode came out and was a complete dissapointment.

The walking dead was advertised as being a game where your choices mattered. And as the game had about as much gameplay as heavy rain did, it really needed to fulfil the part where your choices mattered, or at least have a moving storyline with great characters.

The part where "your choices matter" and how "all of your choices have a big impact on the game" was advertised so much it was pretty much the main selling point of the game.

However, by the 3rd episode the game might as well say "lol jk not really". A game such as resident evil 3 basically had choices which impact the game more than the choices did here.
It was basically very linear throughout the entire 3rd episode and in the shooting segments the game would barely even let you miss.

It also had a very cliche storyline and i could see what would end up happening with the storyline an hour before it even happened- and then it felt like the game was trying way too hard to make you emotional. It felt like the game was saying "oh no something bad happened, wasn't that unexpected? NOW CRY."

That and the game was split into 5 different episodes that were supposed to be released monthly and ended up with release dates that were "whenever we feel like it" (2 or 3 months between some of the episodes), episode 3 was released with quite a large amount of glitches (some of which were game breaking and corrupted your save file), and the PS3 version was delayed, and ended up being possibly the glitchiest out of every platform it was released for..


Left 4 dead.

I'm not too dissapointed by this (or the last game on my list either), it was an okay game and i don't regret buying it. But it had the potential to be so much better than it was.

When i started following this game in 2006 or 2007, the information that was released at the time made it sound like it would be a survival horror game, where you'd really struggle to get to the end of each level, and it would be a great horror experience. This was the time when it was under development by turtle rock studios.
If any of you have played resident evil outbreak file #1 or #2, i thought it would be like that (those game really needs to have a remake but unfortunately capcom seem to have other ideas now)

Then valve took over development of it and i still thought that it wouldn't change it too much.

It ended up however being totally different to how it originally looked. It ended up being yet another zombie action game that was seldom scary. And it made zombies more of a joke or just like loads of fodder to shoot through.

And the graphics ended up being totally different too, they had more of a realistic, dark-ish look to them, but the final product had characters that looked like copies of stretch armstrong dolls and cartoony graphics.

Left 4 dead 2 was also even worse, the characters were forgettable and the

Skyrim.

Not a terrible game, just very dull. I bought it thinking it would be an improvement over oblivion, but the final product had repetitive gameplay that got boring quickly.
It felt to me like most of the game time was spent just walking from one place to another. The world in skyrim is huge, but most of it is full of basically empty space.

I played skyrim for around 40-50 hours and i still felt like my attacks were pathetically weak against everything. And apparently about halfway through the game, from what other people told me, you suddenly start being able to easily kill most enemies.

Eventually i just got bored of facing off against the same enemies over and over again and being able to do hardly any damage against them at all. That and having to walk everywhere on foot, with barely anything happening inbetween, to discover locations.



__________________________________________
That's my top 5 dissapointing games, i also have a few other games to mention but in no particular order:

Borderlands 1 (I played this for just under an hour before getting bored of singleplayer, and as none of my friends have it, i couldn't really play multiplayer either... the game just doesn't interest me, and i hate the cell shaded art style, just my personal preference though)

Saints row 3 (took the over-the-top gameplay from the first and second games, and then over-intensified it to the point where the game is just too silly to play)

The resident evil series, starting from 4 but especially 5 and 6, and operation: raccoon city.
I think this one is obvious. Capcom took a great series and then decided to change it completely, and ruin the next few games by making them action-oriented. Operation: raccoon city sounded like it would be similar to resident evil outbreak, but it ended up being more of the same action gameplay, but instead remaking resident evil 2 and 3 to make them actiony.

Diabo 3. For me, the game suffered from gameplay that was stretched out by boring tasks and an uninteresting storyline, and a strange difficulty curve (for like the first 2 or 3 hours of the game you don't need a single health potion and then you suddenly need them every minute)

Battlefield 3. The server browser is annoying and it still has tons of issues on even starting a game (more than half the time when i join a game it won't actually connect), and the special effects are very annoying, especially the lens flare.

Dead island was also slightly dissapointing for obvious reasons..

Dead rising was again a good game but i felt like it was a bit too comedic too often.

Sims 3. Ugh. It's like it tried to be realistic, but got rid of most of the realistic elements that sims 2 had that made it fun. And it still has the same loading issues that sims 2 has.
And the world adventures expansion was actually a good idea, it's just a shame that sims 3 plays so badly.

Oh, and fallout: new vegas to a point. I bought this but i'd already seen someone play through it before on youtube, so i ended up not having any interest in playing it through even though i'd only seen one possible ending. The game is just kind of not too interesting to begin with, though.


Some games that i thought were surprisingly good, to end this post on a good note:

1. Tiny bang story.
Though it's problematic to play for colour blind people, i thought it was actually a good, atmospheric game.

2. Terraria.

I thought it would be an okay game, but it ended up being a REALLY good game. Not the best game, but i still liked almost everything about terraria in the end.

 

[Iwata]

In no order:

Brink- So all I get are bot matches and a crappy running system? Okay then.

The Force Unleashed 2- Shorter than most DLC's. Can't believe I bought it for full price!

Mass Effect- In theory this game has it all for me to love it. But I just can't summon the patience for it.

Any Resident Evil game of the last few years- What the hell happened to this series?!

Starcraft II- Waited years for this game, bought the Collector's Edition, and yet... I can't seem to have fun with it.

And a very special mention to Braid. Talk about pretentious!

 

[Rack]

Xcom Enemy Unknown. My favourite part of the original was the Geoscape. It was a featuer I was really looking forward to seeing streamlined and improved to involve more interesting decisions. Instead it was just removed entirely.

Zelda: Skyward Sword. I was still holding out hope for this to be a return to form, especially as I was buoyed on the back of the sublime Mario Galaxy. Instead it was the most fillerific Zelda yet.

Apollo Justice: Ace Attorney. The Phoenix Wright games were so good I couldn't see how they could mess this up. They didn't exactly but with only 4 cases, one being a tutorial and 2 of the others being solved by Deus Ex Machina it ended up feeling very slight.

Guild Wars 2. My fault, I believed the design manifesto and bought into this a bit hard. Still a great game but it ended up being way way more traditional than the previews led me to think.

That's it, I don't generally get hyped easy so I'm struggling to think of any other times I was expecting enough to be really disappointed. That's certainly what saved Dragon Age 2 and Mass Effect 3 from this list.