What games have really disappointed you?

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-

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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.

 

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

 

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.

 

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.

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.

 

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.

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.

 

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.

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

 

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.

 

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.

 

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?

 

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.