What games have really disappointed you?

[Colonel Midnight]

Crusader Kings 2, mainly from the fact that the interface was so... dense and rather cryptic.

It felt like there was a good, possibly great, game in there... somewhere, but it was definitely buried under a plethora of clicks, submenu, and sub-sub menus.

Cheers,
-CM-

 

[Timby]

Man, I've been let down by so many games, it's hard to think of the ones that really left a sour taste in my mouth, but here's a sampling:

The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess: I found the bolted-on Wiimote controls to be little more than a burden, and the gimmick of changing into a wolf got real old, real quick. And Nintendo somehow found a way to make Midna even more annoying than Navi.

The Movies: I don't hate myself too much for getting sucked into the hype on this one, because Peter Molyneux hadn't yet completed his transition into a master of over-promising and under-delivering ... but, hoo boy, this one was a shitshow and a half. Touted as the mother of all open simulation games where you could run your own movie studio, in truth your options in every respect--from actors to scripts to everything in-between--were horribly limited and the game became incredibly repetitive after maybe six or seven hours. That was fifty bucks I will never get back.

Aliens: Colonial Marines: Really, I shouldn't have to explain this one. Randy Pitchford should be drawn and quartered for fraud, considering he redirected quarterly payments from Sega to fund Borderlands 2 and just outsourced development of Colonial Marines. What a piece of shit.

Star Wars: Rebellion: Don't get me wrong, I have an incredible soft spot for this game ... but it's a ridiculously broken, janky game. Touted as a blend of 4X games like Master of Orion and RTS fare like StarCraft, it was more of a Frankenstein's monster. The game is incredibly glitchy (and, as a result, incredibly easy to break; it's hard to lose when you have a dozen Death Stars) and, in many cases, the ruleset makes absolutely no sense. I have poured hundreds of hours into this game, but it was by no means what LucasArts promised.

Star Trek: I'm just going to leave this one open-ended because holy shit, holy holy holy shit, there are a plethora of terrible Star Trek games. The 2013 game based on the Kelvin universe, Shattered Universe, Tactical Assault, Away Team, Starfleet Academy (no, I really did not want a Wing Commander game with a Star Trek skin, fuck you very much, Interplay), The Fallen, Hidden Evil, Borg, Klingon, Invasion ... Christ, I could run out of breath rattling these off.

 

[Gingerbread Demon]

I thought the game based on 2009 Star Trek was totally bug ridden too. I remember seeing a youtube of wacky bugs the game had. Hold a moment I think it's still up there.

Found it and one more

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[BK613]

The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess

I also found that being back on the rails game-play-wise felt so limiting after Wind Waker's free-form island hopping.

 

[Timby]

I also found that being back on the rails game-play-wise felt so limiting after Wind Waker's free-form island hopping.

I'm old and stuck in my ways and still think A Link to the Past is the high point of the series (I'll also be heretical and say that I did not care for Ocarina of Time at all), and while that game still nudged you in a certain direction, you can still sequence break it once you get access to the Dark World, which I like. Every time I replay it, which is maybe every year or two, I tend to do the dungeons in a different pattern.

 

[USS Firefly]

My facial recognition and people reading skills are so bad, I flubbed half the interrogation scenes. But I did finish the game.

I had the same problem, while I had no problem with facial recognition in "Detroit become human"

 

[Timby]

I had the same problem, while I had no problem with facial recognition in "Detroit become human"

LA Noire was a fundamentally broken game. Team Bondi and eventually Sony spent so much money, an unbelievable amount, on the facial capture technology, and the development was such an abomination that Rockstar had to shift two teams from the nearly equally troubled Red Dead Redemption in order to get a viable product out the door. Team Bondi quite literally didn't have enough cash to wrangle their custom engine into playing nice (and I believe Rockstar wound up Frankensteining the LA Noire engine with the RAGE engine they had developed for GTA4). That game's development horrors deserve a novel.

 

[Owain Taggart]

Yeah, it was certainly an ambitious game that I felt was let down by its limitations. I liked the concept, but the interrogation mechanic left a lot to be desired. But if anything, I appreciated the game for not being another run of the mill open-world 3rd-person-shooter. It was more of an open-world point&click style mystery game. And I hope we eventually get a more polished spiritual successor one day. From what I've seen, the VR version improved things considerably.

What shocked me was the sudden change in POV in the narrative, from Cole to the real-estate guy towards the final part of the game. I got the sense that it was originally supposed to be more gradual with his own set of missions before he'd take over completely.

 

[Gingerbread Demon]

Everspace..... Well the trailers looked nice but the game felt a bit repetitive and grindy..

 

[Reverend]

I'm not often disappointed; mostly because 1) I try to do my homework on a game before I hand over money for it. 2) I very rarely buy day of launch (or even month or year of launch) and 3) I'm not terribly susceptible to hype.

I saw 'Anthem' coming a mile away. When the marketing materials positively wreaked of staged "vertical slice" gameplay footage, complete with obviously scripted game chatter, it was clear someone was trying to pull a fast one. That and the fact that nothing about it felt like a Bioware game raised enough red flags for me to steer well clear of the whole thing.

Cyberpunk flopping did surprise me though. Everything prior to launch looked promising, so it was a but of a shock when I started to check out the early post launch footage and see just how underwhelming it all was. Good thing I didn't buy it.

Mass Effect Andromeda is probably the closest I've come in recent memory to being actively disappointed. Not that it's a bad game by any means (and it's held my attention for several hundred hours at this point) but is still fell far too short of it's potential on numerous fronts, and is nowhere near as repayable as the other entries of the series.

I guess the third season of Telltale's Walking Dead counts as despite both the first two being among my favourite gaming experiences, the third just didn't grip me and I never finished it. Not because the game itself was bad, but because the narrative didn't offer much engagement (introducing a new protagonist in the third game and relegating the actual protagonist of the whole series to a bit-player was clearly a mistake.) I should get back to it one day though, as I've had the final season sat there unplayed for over a year at this point...

Going back further: 'Black & White' leaps to mind. I never could really get to grips with the mechanics and didn't make it much past the second or third world and getting there felt like a futile slog. Games shouldn't feel like work.

 

[Owain Taggart]

Everspace..... Well the trailers looked nice but the game felt a bit repetitive and grindy..

Yeah, got that one for free via GOG, but even then, I didn't last long on it. You can sometimes tell when they're giving games away. Thing is, it's a roguelike, and their very core concept is grindy by nature, of repeatedly dying to gain experience to get more powerful in order to progress. I've come to dislike these because they're made purposely made difficult as part of the gameplay loop.

Going back further: 'Black & White' leaps to mind. I never could really get to grips with the mechanics and didn't make it much past the second or third world and getting there felt like a futile slog. Games shouldn't feel like work.

Boy, talk about overpromising. I felt pulled into the hype on that one too. Training creatures to do your bidding was a novel idea, but the UI made it much harder than it needed to be. Ironically, it's this kind of UI that would work well in VR today, so if it hadn't tanked as hard as it did, we'd likely see a VR spiritual successor.

 

[Reverend]

Yeah, got that one for free via GOG, but even then, I didn't last long on it. You can sometimes tell when they're giving games away. Thing is, it's a roguelike, and their very core concept is grindy by nature, of repeatedly dying to gain experience to get more powerful in order to progress. I've come to dislike these because they're made purposely made difficult as part of the gameplay loop.

For me, when I see any game that ties roguelike elements to the core gamplay loop, I basically assume it's going to be a mile wide and in inch deep and just keep moving along to something more bespoke and less generic.
Not that "roguelike" is automatically bad, but over the last decade it's become very much a crutch of certain low-to-mid-budget game developers who use it in lieu of creating actual diverse content.

Boy, talk about overpromising. I felt pulled into the hype on that one too. Training creatures to do your bidding was a novel idea, but the UI made it much harder than it needed to be. Ironically, it's this kind of UI that would work well in VR today, so if it hadn't tanked as hard as it did, we'd likely see a VR spiritual successor.

I guess a large part of the problem was simply that from the AI to the gesture recognition it was so far ahead of it's time. Even so I still feel that at it's root it just wasn't a very interesting game. The core gameplay loop (there's that term again!) is a kind of half-arsed RTS take on Populous, but with a lot of extra faffing about, AND on such a small scale you're at most dealing with two or three settlements which you have to micromanage to a ridiculous extent, for very little reward.

 

[Owain Taggart]

For me, when I see any game that ties roguelike elements to the core gamplay loop, I basically assume it's going to be a mile wide and in inch deep and just keep moving along to something more bespoke and less generic.
Not that "roguelike" is automatically bad, but over the last decade it's become very much a crutch of certain low-to-mid-budget game developers who use it in lieu of creating actual diverse content.

Yes, I know exactly what you mean. Ironically, many of these types of games like to think themselves as deep gameplay when in actuality, they feel the opposite. Some roguelike elements might make for good gameplay as part of a more structurally sound game, but the issue I have with most of them is that they rely it on their entire basis, and that can make for a frustrating game.

Reminds me that awhile back, I bought a game called Kim, based on the Rudyard Kipling story, and it looked great, and could have been great. It's an RPG with roguelike and survival element and actual questing which most roguelikes tend to not have. But I felt the roguelike and survival parts of the game were broken, detracting from the overall experience rather than adding to it. For example, you'd be hungry about every 5 mins, which was super annoying and I couldn't make any headway into the questing.

I guess a large part of the problem was simply that from the AI to the gesture recognition it was so far ahead of it's time. Even so I still feel that at it's root it just wasn't a very interesting game. The core gameplay loop (there's that term again!) is a kind of half-arsed RTS take on Populous, but with a lot of extra faffing about, AND on such a small scale you're at most dealing with two or three settlements which you have to micromanage to a ridiculous extent, for very little reward.

Very true! And ironically, I feel the simplicity of the gesture recognition combined with its UI led to an overly complicated game. Everything that boiled down to the hand meant it had to take twice as much effort as a regular UI would have given us. All because of a fancy hand. I don't feel like giving that one a hand, har har... Sorry, I know bad pun

 

[Gingerbread Demon]

Two Worlds.
https://www.gog.com/game/two_worlds

I played it once when it was brand new it's a fantasy adventure game where brother tries to rescue sister but the sister well let's just say there's issues there, slightly dodgy story issues about the two of them. The only disappointing thing was the cutscenes. The rest of the game looks good just those look so out of place.

 

[Owain Taggart]

I remember that one! Such a clunker of a game. Sadly, I played it all the way to the end They even made a sequel, and while that one was way more polished, it still suffered in terms of weak story. I think the best part was its open world. The original game is remembered more for its bad medieval-like speech, so much so that the sequel even had a quest that made fun of it.

 

[Gingerbread Demon]

I remember that one! Such a clunker of a game. Sadly, I played it all the way to the end They even made a sequel, and while that one was way more polished, it still suffered in terms of weak story. I think the best part was its open world. The original game is remembered more for its bad medieval-like speech, so much so that the sequel even had a quest that made fun of it.

But the whole brother and sister thing was so dodgy.. I got the impression from the first game that they might have even had a fling.

 

[BillJ]

Gotten into Cyberpunk 2077 a little bit over the last few days (Seems a bit more stable than when I tried it earlier in the year). Who knew the Borg were part of that universe, as well?

 

[Gingerbread Demon]

Gotten into Cyberpunk 2077 a little bit over the last few days (Seems a bit more stable than when I tried it earlier in the year). Who knew the Borg were part of that universe, as well?

The what???? How far into the game is the Borg?

 

[thribs]

He’s probably referring to all the augmentation you can do.

 

[Gingerbread Demon]

He’s probably referring to all the augmentation you can do.

Oh ok well that's fair enough it is rather borg like. But hey transhumanism I like it.