*Your* Top 10 Most Disappointing Games Of All Time?

[Starbird]

Not bad games necessarily. Just ones that let you down immensely.

For me (in descending order):

10. Diablo 3. It's still a good game and finally, after an expansion and a billion changes and patches is finally approaching excellent. However when this was released it was a frustrating, imbalanced, borderline pay to win let down, with a mediocre story and all of the grit and grimness of the original boiled out of it and replaced with standard fantasy crap.

9. Oblivion. Loved Morrowind to death and was jumping up and down to get my hands on it. Looked beautiful, but the rubberbanded leveling enemies, general grind and repetition and emptiness of the massive world was meh.

8. Resident Evil 5. A good game, definitely not as bad as a lot of people make it out to be but it felt more like a RE4 expansion back with added horrible ai companions and way shorter.

7. Soul Calibur 4. Love the series. Loved the Quest mode in 3 and the similar modes in previous games. 4 replaced this with a horrible, gimmicky Tower mode and focused way too much on the online combat.

6. Serious Sam 2. Sigh...why did they turn a gritty, tongue in cheek shooter into a surreal monstrosity full of poop jokes, racism and cigar smoking dinosaurs?

5. Neverwinter Nights 2. Story was good, if buggy - but ugly graphics and a kick to the bollocks regarding the accessible and powerful editor from the original made me a very sad bird.

4. Half Life 2. Gasp! Well, it was an excellent game in it's own right, but took away so many of the things I loved in the original. Gone were the awesome boss and miniboss monsters. Gone were the funky, creative weapons. Gone was the totally insane final levels and boss fight. Oh it was a good game but...it wasn't what I hoped for out of a sequel to Half Life I guess.

3. Lost Planet 2. The original game was one of my 'obscure but absolutely adored' titles that I have played through a ton of times and still love. The sequel was...meh. Too shootery. Too bland.

2. Command And Conquer: Tiberium Sun. I got into gaming fairly late due to a technophobic father and us being somewhat poor. Red Alert was one of my first major games that I owned rather than played at friends' houses and I loved it to bits. The screenshots for TS were just so amazing and everything sounded almost perfect. And..the game sucked. It was basically Red Alert with a worse campaign, worse story, worse units and worse everything. The first major letdown I experienced as a gamer.

1. Hellgate: London. This looked like the best game ever. It sounded like the best game ever. Awesome designers. Awesome concept. Great looking graphics. Cool mechanics. And...what we got was an interesting shooter/ARPG converted into a bad MMO at the last second. Buggy, broken and unfun to the extreme. Sigh.

 

[TheVampwizimp_v1legacy]

Not bad games necessarily. Just ones that let you down immensely.

---

7. Soul Calibur 4. Love the series. Loved the Quest mode in 3 and the similar modes in previous games. 4 replaced this with a horrible, gimmicky Tower mode and focused way too much on the online combat.

That's funny, because my most disappointing game ever was Soul Calibur 5. 4 doesn't live up to 3, like at all, but I still had fun with the Tower mode and all its gimmicky situations. Since I always spent more time playing against my friends in person, neither the single player nor the online stuff ever bothered me too much.

But SC5 is a flat-out betrayal of everything Soul Calibur is. The addition of the Street Fighter-esque special meter and tying it to the guard impact system was fucking bullshit. It hogties the unique combat system they had and just makes it all about who can build their special meter faster. And the "story mode?" Motherfucking total bullshit. You can't play each character's story, you only get one canned storyline that forces you to play the characters the game tells you to play, and all in service of a particularly dumb and unbelievable sequence of events with no consequence or reason to care.

God, I forgot how much I hated that game. It's really the only huge disappointment I've ever suffered. Game-wise, I mean.

EDIT: Captcha says "labour of love." Yeah, fuck no, Soul Calibur 5 was not about love, it was about fucking bullshit.

 

[Mutant1988]

Does it have to be 10? I have a difficult time trying to think of that many. I can think of one off the top of my head.

Far Cry 2.

Let me elaborate on the gameplay flow:

Drive, get smashed into by a hyper speed technical, jump out, shoot technical driver and gunner, repair your car, drive - Repeat ad nauseum for about 30+ hours.

Sometimes it's a boat instead of a car. Like... Once or twice.

Congratulations, you have just played Far Cry 2.

Well, I suppose there was a little bit more to it. Like how your guns fell to bits after having fired 3-4 magazines worth of bullets, forcing you to replace it with terrible guns (That also fall apart) once you reach your destination on the other side of Africa. Which contain 1 or 2 zebras total, that run straight into your car when they see you.

Or how about having to interrupt the game to drive ALL THE WAY across the map to get malaria medicine because you have malaria and GAAAAAAAAAHHHHH!

Screw that game.

 

[Casual Shinji]

I don't know if I can make it to 10.

Metal Gear Solid 4 certainly was a big steaming cow pie right in the face. Not that it was a complete surprise seeing as the quality of MGS seems to leap frog, but that still didn't make the whole experience any less sour.

Uncharted 3 was just a retread of Uncharted 2, but with zero cohesion. With Naughty Dog admitting they just came up with set pieces first and then tried to crowbar them into the narrative, with no regard for the plot. Also the whole thing with Sully raising Drake... just, ugh.

inFAMOUS: Second Son was just a launch game, and oh boy did it feel like one.

And Oddworld: Munch's Oddysee was the first fully 3 dimensional Oddworld game, which at the time got me super fucking hyped, but I ultimately should've known better.

 

[Recusant]

In no exact order, but with generally increasing nastiness:

1. Starsiege: Tribes. This was an excellent game, and proof that you can completely abandon not just a series' gameplay genre, but even throw out most of its setting, and still do okay if the game's good enough. Six gameplay modes (a far cry from the 'Deathmatch or CTF only' we had for so long), 128-player matches, and what are to this day the biggest maps I've ever seen in a first-person shooter. Jetpacks, viable (once you learned to use them) indirect fire weapons, deployable equipment packs (the only thing more fun than littering the landscape with radar-blocking packs is putting one at the base of the enemy radar station, then sniping from afar as they wonder why they can't see you). And all this in 1998- long before Halo and Counterstrike, and only three weeks after Half-Life. So what's the problem? Skiing. Someone discovered that, when you were descending a hill, if you timed presses of the jump button just right, you could glide down the hill as if you were skiing, moving much faster than mere walking or hopping would allow. This turned the game from a team-oriented, be-fast-but-be-careful-or-you're-dead tactical shooter to a crazed adrenaline junkie's nightmare of rushing and speed. Anyone familiar with the series probably knows this, but what most don't realize is that this change was far from instant- for quite a while, skiing was regarded as an exploit- and a bannable one at that! But times changed, and the only consolation I got was the occasional satisfaction of head-shooting a skier zooming into our base with a laser rifle at 20X zoom- very difficult to pull off, but oh-so-satisfying when you did.

2. XCOM. This is a toughie, because this game was the dead opposite of a cynical cash-in; it was very obviously a dedicated homage, a love letter to the original that I truly believe to be absolutely heartfelt. But the compromises made to bring it in line with modern gaming's expectations simply went too far. Rather than simply give the game the interface upgrade it needed to truly shine, it was... I don't want to say "dumbed down", because I can see and understand the rationale behind every decision made (well, almost every decision- the inability to shoot and then move is just stupid), so let's go with "oversimplified". Also, I don't recall ever being given an official explanation for why they dropped the hyphen. That grates on me.

3. I'll second Half-Life 2. It felt more like a physics engine demo than a game, and the mute hero and total lack of given exposition felt exceedingly forced. Ravenholm was fun, and controlling the ant lions was a neat idea; it did have a few neat moments. But other than that, it all felt pretty lackluster, especially in comparison to the first. Serviceable, but not in the least exciting.

4. Civilization 5. From a gameplay perspective, the Civilization series peaked with 4. From a writing perspective, it peaked with Alpha Centauri (interestingly, the lead designers of both games would go on to work for Zynga, because the universe is a horrible place that delights in making me cry). Civilization 5 tried to radically change things by limiting you to one unit per tile- then crippled the ability to build the infrastructure you'd need to support this by making roads cost money. Side note- the reason for the road change was that they didn't like the way the map looked when it filled with roads. But altering fundamental gameplay principles is apparently more palatable than changing the art direction (more on this in a later entry). The reason for the 1-unit-per-tile rule was that, supposedly, people were taking advantage of gameplay mechanics and creating "stacks of doom"; throwing all of their units onto one space, making it virtually impossible to destroy. I say "supposedly", since I learned not to do this in the very first Civilization game, wherein a defeated stack lost all its units- so the solution was not only obvious, but had been implemented in a prior game in the very same series you're making an installment in. I don't begrudge Firaxis the experiment, I very well do begrudge them not noticing that major changes to the core game (smaller maps! horrific AI that can't manage its forces with a hill of beans!) have to be made to accommodate an overreaching solution to a problem that didn't actually exist.

5. Now we go from well-meaning incompetence and decisions that're bad only in retrospect to something more malicious, with Fallout 3. Aside from taking place in a post-nuclear waste land and not making my cd drive burst into flames (more on this later, too), it's hard to think of anything this game did right. Everything they tried to bring in from the prior series just ended up dragging the game down; they'd've been far better off sticking with something new; though, to be fair, even the new stuff they made up wasn't very good.

6. Duke Nukem Forever. I watched Duke Nukem rise from a humble gritty Commander Keen ripoff to achieve a character and personality of his own in his first three games. Putting the absurd delays aside (not an easy thing to do, in this game's case), what we got was a watered-down, sanitized , politically correct version; fortunate, in a way; he might otherwise have actually been interesting, and we might have been distracted from the fact that the game itself sucks.

7. Tribes: Vengeance. The Tribes series didn't go into decline so much as it did run off a cliff. Two changed a lot, some for better, some for worse. This third installment removed essentially every positive element the series had; it gave us a longed-for single player mode, replete with bad writing, a decent but poorly-told story, and characters so unappealing that I actually found myself enjoying dying, if only to watch their jetpacks spiral out of control and slam their heads into ceilings. But that was at least playable. The multiplayer was what killed it. Tiny maps, no deployables, nothing but jetpacks (and thus a third plane of movement) to remind you that this was, in fact, a Tribes game. Oh, and the skiing function was now not only expected, but reduced to a single held button press, removing the last bit of skill it required.

8. Spore. If you've played Spore, I don't need to say anything more. If you haven't... don't. All you need to know is that the team that made it had not only Will Wright, but Soren Johson, the lead designer of Civilization 4, and still managed to create a game so miserably awful that it stands as a symbol of all that's wrong with the industry (or did in 2008, anyway; we have since found many new awful things). Such is the power of EA.

9. Deus Ex: Invisible War. So many interesting ideas! So many horrific implementations! So many obnoxious technical limitations that the first game didn't have!

10. Master of Orion 3. How awful does a game have to be to not only kill the series that defined it, but cripple the genre itself so badly that it's nearly a decade before anything remotely close to the glory of its predecessors will be seen again? "As bad as Wing Commander: Prophecy", say those of you were born before 1990. But that game wasn't actually bad, just poorly timed. Master of Orion 3 was bad. It was awful. MOO 2 remains the best the 4X TBS genre has given us- hell, the first game in the series was what gave us the term "4X"! MOO 3 had an ideological split amongst the dev team fairly early on, between those who wanted to make a game similar to the prior ones (mostly the coders and gameplay theorists) and those who wanted to shake up the formula, and create something more realistic; like what running a galactic empire would actually be like (primarily, the art department). While I acknowledge that people have diverse skill sets, and a fresh perspective can provide a needed jolt to force people out of ruts, game design should be mostly left in the hands of game designers; handing things over to the artists is kind of like handing them over to the plumber who works in the office building: you might get lucky, but it's asking for trouble. I could go on for hours about this game, but this post is already long enough, so I will close with this: the game's DRM was such that (most of the time) it would refuse to run off any CD drive that had burning capability. That is, if the disk drive could burn CDs, the game wouldn't run. I didn't have that problem. The DRM actually fried mine- completely bricked it. I wasn't the only person this happened to, either. At the time, I was outraged, but now, looking back, I'm actually grateful to my CD drive, which chose to sacrifice itself to save me the horrors of having to play MOO 3.

 

[Chester Rabbit]

1. Mortal Kombat Armageddon - So much hype, so many lies, so little follow through. The game broke my heart and cracked my fandom.

2. Fable 2 - A stripped down buggy lesser in all areas version of the previous game. I loved you Fable...

3. Syphon Filter 3 - I don't hate this game but, this is not how you conclude a fucking trilogy! The entire game is all of our heroes in a god damn court room reminiscing while we are playing through the flash backs. There was no tension no sense of progression because you are just playing through events that already happened. The only part of the game that matters is the very last mission. Again, that is not how you conclude a trilogy!

4. Mortal Kombat vs DC - I'm not even talking about the game here. The game was pretty okay with some pretty awesome solid fighting in it.
What I'm talking about is the fact that this was the follow up to the flaccid middle finger of laziness that was Armageddon. Again they over hyped what this game would be and then completely dropped everything they said and went "hey guys, so forget that game we were saying we were making for a year! Our game now has Batman fighting Scorpion! Awesome huh?"
No Mr. Boon. Not awesome...

5. Resident Evil 5 - I like the game for all of it's camp and when I look at it as the conclusive third act to the entire series. With all that said though, that doesn't mean I'm still not disappointing in the direction Capcom went with this game. In one fowl swoop they destroyed two things I loved about this series. The horror elements and Wesker.

6. Spyro The Dragon: Year of the Dragon - I don't dislike this game but out of the 6th gen trilogy I feel this one is the weakest and to this day still take issues with some of the things they did in it.

For one the primary enemies of the game were no Gnorc's. They were just the same Rhino enemy through the game in stupid silly thematic costumes. The Gnorc's had different skin colors, armors, some had teeth some had none some made frog like noises some didn't Some were brutes some were wimps. Some were green some were blue. The Rhynocs had none of this and it made them really boring to me.

The worlds weren't as interesting as the first and second one and the music was lacking that Copland/Spyro sound. Then there are the trends of the time side quest mini games. Skate boarding....why...

7. Crash Bandicoot: Warped - Once again I like the game but I feel it's the weakest of the trilogy and it all comes down to those frustrating none platforming levels. God damn it fuck those driving and flying levels.

8. Tenchu Z - So, I like this game. As a stealth game where I get to be a ninja, I like this game. This game features the best stealth gameplay of the Tenchu series. However when I was younger and was imagining what Tenchu would look like on 7th gen consoles, this is not what I had in mind. Mouths don't move in in-game engine cutscenes.
Something that hasn't been acceptable since the 6th gen.
levels are re-used again and again and character models are recolored and given new names and played off as entirely new characters.(waves at the 90's Mortal Kombats)
The plot is paper thin and doesn't even tread on the same ground of the Tenchu series. Where is all the supernatural elements? The extravagant villains? Where are the characters I actually want to be playing as!

Time has past and I have grown to really enjoy this game. But it still stings when I think about what should have been.

9. Sonic Boom - I haven't played this game. I'm just disappointing at what it has done to Sonic again. It has set him right back to Sonic 06. Once again Sonic is looked at as a diseased franchise that needs to be put down when its last 3 games have been SOLID fantastic games. God damn it SEGA.

10. Resident Evil 0 - This game had an Opera singing androgynous leach man and zombie monkeys. Scrapping the bottom of the barrel doesn't begin to describe this game. I still wonder why people wanted Resident Evil to go back to zombies when clearly they were all out of ideas.

 

[Mutant1988]

9. Deus Ex: Invisible War. So many interesting ideas! So many horrific implementations! So many obnoxious technical limitations that the first game didn't have!

There was a single thing that completely ruined that game for me. The Universal Ammunition. Such a horrible concept. Run out of bullets for a gun? Congratulations, you now have no bullets whatsoever.

...

Gee, thanks. I guess I'll just punch this security robot to death then?

8. Tenchu Z - So, I like this game. As a stealth game where I get to be a ninja, I like this game. This game features the best stealth gameplay of the Tenchu series. However when I was younger and was imagining what Tenchu would look like on 7th gen consoles, this is not what I had in mind. Mouths don't move in in-game engine cutscenes.
Something that hasn't been acceptable since the 6th gen.
levels are re-used again and again and character models are recolored and given new names and played off as entirely new characters.(waves at the 90's Mortal Kombats)
The plot is paper thin and doesn't even tread on the same ground of the Tenchu series. Where is all the supernatural elements? The extravagant villains? Where are the characters I actually want to be playing as!

I quite liked Tenchu Z. But I didn't pay full price for it, so that factors into it. What I really enjoyed was the ability customization system it had, that gave you an amount of experience to allocate to Strength, Toughness and Speed. Each their own immediate effect, but they also influenced what skills you could use (ie minimum requirement of the stats). There were quite a lot of interesting and cool abilities to play around with.

I'm a bit sad that FROM haven't made a sequel that builds on that. I'd love to be able to customize my own ninja again.

If you want to find something similar to Tenchu though I recommend checking out Shinobido: Way of the Ninja. The PS2 version wasn't released in the states though. A cool feature it had was the ability to build your own little fortress that would be raided by various factions and a non-linear story progression. Only two characters though.

The PSP version (Path of the Ninja IIRC), which I believe was released in the states, is basically a streamlined linear remix of the game. It's also quite good and has unlockable characters as a selling point over the PS2 version (I think the PS2 version had a cheat, but it was just a reskin). Pretty much all the characters in the game can be unlocked and played as and all have unique abilities.

 

[Recusant]

9. Deus Ex: Invisible War. So many interesting ideas! So many horrific implementations! So many obnoxious technical limitations that the first game didn't have!

There was a single thing that completely ruined that game for me. The Universal Ammunition. Such a horrible concept. Run out of bullets for a gun? Congratulations, you now have no bullets whatsoever.

...

Gee, thanks. I guess I'll just punch this security robot to death then?

Well, yes, I didn't point out the bad decisions that were poorly implemented; the game didn't lack for those, either. Like how the weapon suppression fields that remotely disabled your guns' ability to fire somehow also disabled your clubs.

 

[Mutant1988]

Well, yes, I didn't point out the bad decisions that were poorly implemented; the game didn't lack for those, either. Like how the weapon suppression fields that remotely disabled your guns' ability to fire somehow also disabled your clubs.

I played it on... *Loading* the original Xbox as well so I had to... *Loading* suffer very frequent and... *Loading* long loading times.

Thief 3 had the same issue. So much loading!

I did finish it however and I do like the various endings, even if it was a tedious slog to get to them.

I agree with you on Fallout 3 too by the way. Massively disappointed by that game. Level scaling, awful models, worse animations, poor writing and just boring to play.

 

[Thebazilly]

Can I take up all ten slots with Dishonored?

 

[Chester Rabbit]

9. Deus Ex: Invisible War. So many interesting ideas! So many horrific implementations! So many obnoxious technical limitations that the first game didn't have!

There was a single thing that completely ruined that game for me. The Universal Ammunition. Such a horrible concept. Run out of bullets for a gun? Congratulations, you now have no bullets whatsoever.

...

Gee, thanks. I guess I'll just punch this security robot to death then?

8. Tenchu Z - So, I like this game. As a stealth game where I get to be a ninja, I like this game. This game features the best stealth gameplay of the Tenchu series. However when I was younger and was imagining what Tenchu would look like on 7th gen consoles, this is not what I had in mind. Mouths don't move in in-game engine cutscenes.
Something that hasn't been acceptable since the 6th gen.
levels are re-used again and again and character models are recolored and given new names and played off as entirely new characters.(waves at the 90's Mortal Kombats)
The plot is paper thin and doesn't even tread on the same ground of the Tenchu series. Where is all the supernatural elements? The extravagant villains? Where are the characters I actually want to be playing as!

I quite liked Tenchu Z. But I didn't pay full price for it, so that factors into it. What I really enjoyed was the ability customization system it had, that gave you an amount of experience to allocate to Strength, Toughness and Speed. Each their own immediate effect, but they also influenced what skills you could use (ie minimum requirement of the stats). There were quite a lot of interesting and cool abilities to play around with.

I'm a bit sad that FROM haven't made a sequel that builds on that. I'd love to be able to customize my own ninja again.

If you want to find something similar to Tenchu though I recommend checking out Shinobido: Way of the Ninja. The PS2 version wasn't released in the states though. A cool feature it had was the ability to build your own little fortress that would be raided by various factions and a non-linear story progression. Only two characters though.

The PSP version (Path of the Ninja IIRC), which I believe was released in the states, is basically a streamlined linear remix of the game. It's also quite good and has unlockable characters as a selling point over the PS2 version (I think the PS2 version had a cheat, but it was just a reskin). Pretty much all the characters in the game can be unlocked and played as and all have unique abilities.

One other thing that did and still pisses me off to this day about Tenchu Z is how it penalizes you for being stealthy. If I sneak my entire way through a level and only take out my mark I get the thug ranking.

I heard about Shinobido, which was actually made by the guys behind the original Tenchu heh. But yeah can't find that anywhere. Thank you thoug, for making that game sound even more awesome >.<!!

 

[Atmos Duality]

Wow...that is a stunning amount of overlap between the OP and my own list.

1. Hellgate: London. This looked like the best game ever. It sounded like the best game ever. Awesome designers. Awesome concept. Great looking graphics. Cool mechanics. And...what we got was an interesting shooter/ARPG converted into a bad MMO at the last second. Buggy, broken and unfun to the extreme. Sigh.

Oh dear God, THIS.
Hellgate: London was the last time I gave EA my money, and it was only after the fact that I learned that EA had slashed almost a solid year off of the development time, and pushed for a brutally early Halloween 07' release to try and recoup costs.

The developers admitted they overreached their capabilities (especially the MMO thing; that was a horrible idea), but I still think that the game could have been improved greatly with a bit more time and effort, because what they released wasn't completely unplayable or a bad idea.

Hellgate wasn't some Daikatana-esque horrorshow of bad tech, terrible marketing and completely asinine game design resulting from Development Hell. There is a legitimately good game in Hellgate (as Borderlands would go on to prove), but it needed more time in development to appear.

And EA simply did not want to give them any more time: yes, they funded the game with their money and I know it's their risk, but I think them utter cowards. EA could have easily afforded the risk (dropping the ridiculous "half-MMO" model would have helped a lot).

But alas, EA cannot change its nature, and once again invoked that same response that aborts games and kills the reputation (and motivation) of talented developers.

MY OTHER GAMES (in no particular order):

-Oblivion, Fallout 3-

These games just don't measure up to their predecessors in any way short of tech.
Yet, I hesistate to claim even that, since the tech in question is that delightfully unstable and buggy Gamebryo Engine.
Seriously, that engine has been the source of more frustration and woe for me than damn near any other game engine to date.

Sorry, if your game doesn't work as advertised on "supported hardware" without hard-crashing EVERY 30 FUCKING MINUTES, it's a shitty game, no matter how "immersive" or "big" it might otherwise be.

I could rant about the other qualities (or lack thereof) that were given of these "Game of the Year" recipients, but the degree of console-favoritism (specifically, the 360) and lazy coding clinches my ire well before those became a factor.

-Chrono Cross-

The plot is a convoluted mess of the highest order; the main villain's motivations and actions make NO SENSE AT ALL, and there's zero reason for the protagonist to be doing what he's doing after roughly a quarter into the game.

The character roster is highly creative, but so huge that virtually nobody gets any real development (like a Roland Emmerich film). It wants to be a sequel to a great story about time-travel, but that is folly from a design perspective because the original had an incredibly satisfying conclusion.

(Chrono Trigger wasn't open to sequels due to its final continuity > sequel continuity by the game's very premise.
The developers were obviously aware of this issue, since they made Chrono Cross about going "sideways" in time to alternate concurrent realities instead of forward/backward. However, this flies in the face of the issue that all the major problems in Chrono Trigger were pretty much solved, so the "new" problems they created were...ridiculous and convoluted to say the least.)

I still love this game for what it accomplished in spite of its disappointments, but it's just never going to hold up to the original.

-Diablo 3-

Hey guys! Lets make a sequel to Diablo 2 that files off everything but the grind, make it always-online, and base it around an online auction house (for Blizzard to tax)!

It's like Blizzard went out of their way to eliminate everything I liked about Diablo 2 (character building, tone, All modal gameplay: Offline, LAN, Open-Online, Closed-Online) and filled it in with everything I hate about modern gaming (always-online, massive MMO-esque grindwalls, player-based item economy...)

Just to rub salt in the wound, they took it a step further and released a console version that had NONE OF THOSE PROBLEMS all the while still refusing to provide an offline mode for PC (because treating PC gamers like criminals is just standard business practices now, right?)

-Final Fantasy Tactics Advance-

There's just something about this game that makes it feel like it's just a pale imitation of its classic predecessor.
Strictly speaking, it's a decent turn-based tactics game, and NOT a bad one. But that's what defines "disappointing" here; not bad, just not as good as I was hoping for.

And the hilarious thing is: It's not just any one glaring problem (soundtrack aside) that makes it disappointing. Nearly everything from the original is present in concept, only it's just watered down.

Jobs only need to learn a few abilities to open other jobs, but the jobs are either "bleh" or "overpowered as hell". (The one plus over FFT is that archers are actually useful now; very useful, in fact.)

There are special NPCs with unique skillsets...but there's only like 3 of them in the entire game (that aren't just unique sprites/names) and only one of them is notably interesting.

Random encounter levels are less "volatile" than FFT, but since enemy equipment is fixed based on the encounter type, many battles become trivial as time goes on (and tedious as hell since you need to defend territory)

The only things I can call truly bad are the soundtrack and story.
The story is strangely written and fairly hypocritical (the post-game followup missions are nonsensical and contradict the plot entirely) while the sound-track is just plain bad.

 

[putowtin]

Fable 2 and 3... they will forever take all the places on my top ten list of worst pieces of sh!t ever!

 

[Vendor-Lazarus]

Not a complete list by any means but..:
Star Citizen - Not Freelancer 2.
Space Empires V - Too clunky compared to IV.
The Witcher - Bad choice for camera & combat.
Starpoint Gemini 2 - Had great potential but feels repetitive and empty.
Darkstar One - Too much on rails.

Obvious ones:
Fallout 3
Diablo III
Deus Ex - Invisible War
Dungeon Siege III
Sword of the stars 2

 

[BloatedGuppy]

I'm not in the habit of being disappointed by games, but I guess I could probably think of a view.

SPORE - Do I even need to elaborate?

MASS EFFECT 3 - Huge let down to what had been rapidly becoming my favorite series of all time. The game had its high points, but they were ultimately obscured by its many calamities.

WILDSTAR - Had high hopes it would be The Next Big Thing in MMOs. It was not.

GUILD WARS 2 - Actually a very fun game, but I ALSO had high hopes this would be the Next Big Thing in MMOs. It was not.

ULTIMA ONLINE - Probably a strong contestant for my top 10 games of all time, but you need to understand A) what a massive Ultima fan I was, and B) what ludicrously outsized expectations I had for the concept of the MMO. I imagined a living fantasy world in which everyone from the baker to the shopkeep to the city guard was played by a human being, roleplaying to the best of their ability. In reality, it was an ambitious/mechanically broken game in which 23 games all named Satan crowded the bank making it impossible to move and gleefully teabagged you after PKing you outside the city gates. The gulf between expectation and reality would've made this the most disappointing title of all time, if not for...

ULTIMA IX - Watch Spoony's retrospective, I don't want to get into it. It's too depressing.

 

[Tuesday Night Fever]

In no particular order...

1.) Deus Ex: Invisible War

I'd say that finding things that the game did right would be easier than typing up all the things that it did wrong, but I honestly can't even think of anything it did right. It was buggy as fuck on the PC, frequently freezing and crashing. Its graphics, animations, and UI were all a complete mess thanks to the requirement that it be multi-platform with the original X-Box. The environments are tiny, require frequent load times, and are mostly desolate thanks, again, to the requirement that it be on the X-Box. Because the environments are so small and empty the multiple approaches to objectives that the first game did so well have been more or less eliminated. The skill and augmentation systems from the first game were merged for a set of console-friendly passive boring-as-fuck buffs. The weapons, across the board, lack any real punch - and good luck if you feel like using anything other than the basic pistol, because the Universal Ammo system means you'll be stuck hitting people with a glorified stick (which you can't hit people with when inside zones that disable guns because... reasons?) because running out with one gun means running out with all guns. The game's story feels rushed and mediocre at best compared to the first, and actually turns JC Denton and Paul Denton into characters that would have been seen as clichéd super villains if they were inserted into pretty much any other IP. This is one of the few gaming disappointments that I actually genuinely think is irredeemable trash.

2.) Diablo III

Let's take all of the stuff that Diablo fans loved about D2, scrap it, and replace it with all the crap that Diablo fans likely had no interest in from World of WarCraft! Always online? You got it! Auction house that renders almost all dropped gear worthless? You got it! Simplified ability system and automatic skill point allocation that holds your hand and ensures that you'll never be capable of fucking up your build (or building anything unique)? Damn straight!

Not to mention that the game was mostly a retread of D2. Seriously. First act of both games focuses on the cathedral. Both games follow that up with desert. Both games follow up the desert with a bit of jungle. D3 makes the bold move of switching D2's order of Hell and then mountains with some mountain environments followed by some Hell environments. The only new thing it added were the Heaven environments for, yay, the last hour or so of the game. The story isn't even all that great. The only way you could have possibly failed to see what was going to happen with Commander Leah Shepard practically from the start of the game would be if you were actually asleep at your keyboard. Everything is crazy telegraphed, and none of it interesting.

It's a game that I don't regret playing, but I'm no rush to ever play again regardless to the loot changes... unlike D2, which I still play from time to time.

3.) Every Command & Conquer Released Since Red Alert 2

Yet I keep buying them. What the hell is wrong with me?

4.) Oblivion / Skyrim

For how much hype and build-up these games got, I found them to be cripplingly boring. Lots of samey-NPCs with samey-dialogue about an uninteresting story (that you have to spend more time reading books than actually playing the games to get full understanding) with zero urgency due to all of the samey dungeons along the way to get you some new hideous looking gear that you can put on your hilariously ugly character model, but more likely you'll end up lugging it back to a vendor to sell instead only to find that the vendor doesn't want the item or doesn't have enough money to buy it. Ugh.

The dragon fights in Skyrim were pretty cool at first I'll admit... until it became obvious that they had little variety and highly predictable behavior.

Modding made the games a bit more bearable, but even then, I've still never bothered to finish either one of them. Every so often I get the urge to give it another shot... only to realize about 10 hours in all of the reasons I gave up so many times before, get bored, and quit yet again. They aren't bad games, they just aren't right for me.

5.) Dead Island

Go watch the trailer with the vacationing family besieged by zombies in their hotel room. Freaking awesome, right? Nothing like that exists in the final game. Instead you get a Borderlands-esque zombie shooter where your best weapon, regardless of which class you choose, is your foot. Kick the zombie until it falls down (each kick stunning it for a moment so it can't attack you), then stomp on its head for an instant kill. Screw using weapons which get lost, break from durability loss, don't stun enemies, and run out of ammunition (unless you're in the first act where there really isn't any ammo - sorry Purna players!). Oh, and while your health pool gets larger as you level up, enemy damage scales... so your effective health pool never actually changes - but healing items don't scale, so as the game goes on you need to scavenge significantly more healing items to heal up each time you get wounded (which is especially "fun" when you're playing Co-Op and everyone needs healing). The story is non-existent. In fact, the game gets so bored with its own story that about half-way through the game you completely ditch the survivors that you were helping out and they never get mentioned again.

6.) Aliens: Colonial Marines

Screw you, Randy Pitchford, ya lyin' prick.

7.) S.T.A.L.K.E.R. Franchise

These games have some great ideas, but abysmal execution. The gameplay is at best merely functional and at worst a complete bug-ridden mess. I really wanted to enjoy these, but just couldn't. I'll probably hunt down some fan patches to fix the many bugs and glitches at some point and give them another go... but in their launch and official patch state, they were a pretty big let-down.

8.) Witcher Franchise

I bought these during a Steam sale because of all the hype surrounding them and fanfare for the third game. I found the first two games to both be fairly unplayable. Ugly, unlikeable main character, unmemorable supporting cast, ridiculously bad gameplay (particularly in the first game). I found them to be almost the complete opposite of what everyone was building them up to be. Clearly, like Oblivion/Skyrim, these just aren't games meant for me.

9.) Bioshock

I actually thought this game was pretty good... but I went into it expecting System Shock 3, and was severely disappointed when it didn't even come remotely close to System Shock territory. You could definitely see the System Shock influence in the game's mechanics, but almost all of it was very heavily watered down and simplified to the point where the game actively refused to ever let you fail at anything. It took all challenge out of it (I beat the game for the first time on its highest difficulty setting using nothing but an unmodified wrench after noticing how ridiculously easy everything was). I was going to buy its sequels during a Steam sale, but instead I bought a digital copy of System Shock 2 from GoG to replace my aging physical copy and had a ton of fun with no regrets.

10.) Champions Online

I really wanted this game to be an uber version of City of Heroes. Initially it looked like it might have been one, too. The beta was a lot of fun, the character creator was kinda wonky at times but still just as fun to mess around with as the CoH one, and the game had a bunch of really nifty ideas. But then the game launched and the developer constantly nerfed every single useful ability due to PvP balancing with zero regard for PvE consequences, resulting in super heroes that felt less powerful than random street thugs. Patch after patch the game got less and less fun, resulting in me and the rest of my friends just going back to City of Heroes. Total shame.

 

[Mutant1988]

7.) S.T.A.L.K.E.R. Franchise

These games have some great ideas, but abysmal execution. The gameplay is at best merely functional and at worst a complete bug-ridden mess. I really wanted to enjoy these, but just couldn't. I'll probably hunt down some fan patches to fix the many bugs and glitches at some point and give them another go... but in their launch and official patch state, they were a pretty big let-down.

You most definitely should give them another go. At least Shadow of Chernobyl (The first) and Call of Pripyat (The third).
COP is playable with just official patches and so is SoC, but it's much more enjoyable with patches that add weapon and armor repairing.

I think the patch I used on my last replay of it was named Stalker Complete. Highly recommended, adds the aforementioned and also fixes up the lighting quite well. The original game had way too bright nights. Better to have it pitch black, so there's actually a reason to use that flash light (Which mutants and human hostiles can see).

Going hunting in the village is an unforgettable and absolutely terrifying experience.

 

[baddude1337]

7.) S.T.A.L.K.E.R. Franchise
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The Misery mod looks really really good, especially The Armed Zone gun mod for it. I have yet to get any Stalker game to work though, something about my card not meeting the requirements, which is complete crap.

I can't really think of many games i was disappointed by, especially not a top 10. I suppose GTA 4 for being really boring compared to the PS2 era games. I'll probably think of more later.

 

[Westaway]

Brink and Modern Warfare 2 come to mind. At least one of them was fun for a few hours before you realized it was entirely broken.

 

[Sleepy Sol]

Most games don't really disappoint me immensely, and I get plenty of fun out of most games I play, but I can think of a few.

Golden Sun: Dark Dawn comes to mind. I'm not sure if it was my nostalgia goggles clouding my vision or what, but that game just felt completely inferior to the previous two. Good game, yeah, but certainly not up to previous standards.

I enjoyed the hell out of Mass Effect 3. Then the ending happened.

There are many games that I've bought which received critical acclaim that I just didn't bother playing for more than a few hours because they didn't hook me, but I wouldn't say they disappointed me in that case. Sort of.